Nullius in verba
"Take no one's word for it"

People grow best where they continuously experience an ingenious blend of support and challenge; the rest is commentary.
– Robert Kegan, In Over Our Heads

Hi, I’m Tom and I write about design, software, introspection, and rationality.

Contact (please send comments, questions, or feedback): tom@tmewett.com · leave an anonymous message
Favourite blogs: Sasha Chapin · Neurotic Gradient Descent · Numb at the Lodge · Sympathetic Opposition
Favourite tech blogs: Dan Luu · Ted Kaminski
Other websites: X/Twitter · GitHub · Bluesky
Referrals and recommendations: WorkFlowy

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Latest

How to check if a Git repo is fully synced with a remote
2 July 2025
What is an object / linker / toolchain / ...? (Glossary of compilation terms)
26 April 2025

All recent changes

Best

Against self-discipline
I used to believe self-discipline was unquestionably good and that more = better, but not any more. Here's why... · 26 September 2023
What holds communities, and connection, back?
On benches, houses, and community managers · 21 November 2023

Software »

How I review pull requests in 5 questions 📝
16 December 2024
Everything I wish I knew when learning C
18 November 2022
Homemade incremental programming, part 1: how and why to abolish update code, and what React has to do with anything
This is a series about a research rabbit hole I've been going down over the last year or so, about a kind of incremental programming approach for games, UIs, and more [...] · 30 September 2024

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From Mars »

Genderless men
As a younger man, I never felt very well-connected with my gender. Being male seemed somewhat arbitrary to me, like a random coincidence, and sometimes it was a category I was uncomfortable with [...] · 29 August 2024
I feel misled about male mental health
Pretty much all of the emotional suppression I've absorbed hasn't come from traditional masculinity or patriarchy at all · 11 June 2023

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Self

Locating authenticity
I've been thinking recently about authenticity, in the sense of being authentic to oneself. I've always heard authenticity talked about as if it meant "a lack of influence from others", but this never... · 12 April 2025
Internal Family Systems help sheet
3 May 2024

Misc

Other

Mathematics
The strange nature of the real numbers · 11 January 2022
2 April 2019
15 April 2019
Self, introspection, & rationality
If there was ever one thing worth understanding deeply, it would be happiness. [...] Should I be so surprised when I'm unhappy, if I unconsciously believe it's impossible, or boring, or unfair to be happy? · 13 April 2024
Somewhere in the last 2 years I discovered Internal Family Systems, and it's been one of the most impactful things I've learned. [...] Parts work is path to seeing the mind as more than a dumb machine of suffering [...] · 21 December 2023
[...] The problem is I subconsciously don't recognise the incomplete thought as valid, so I don't hold onto it. [...] · 17 January 2024
14 February 2022
Dreams, butterflies, and finding true worlds · 5 March 2022
6 September 2022
You've probably been told that it will relax and de-stress you. It's more about awareness collapse · 12 November 2022
An overview of how knowledge is created, and its limits · 22 October 2021
Software
Raymarching signed distance fields for creative coding·Running code at an average rate with a 'stretchy sleep'·Managing software installs on Linux·CRUD is fake; or, what should a data mapper look like?·What's the sign of C's remainder operator "%"?
Miscellaneous
30 January 2024
Any child who has to spend a lot of effort learning how to fit in eventually learns that it's an endless game of losing. [...] · 29 August 2023
I guess I'm afraid of everything falling apart. I'm afraid of needless pain and suffering. War that starts on nothing more than a misunderstanding. [...] · 3 March 2024
19 September 2020
7 November 2020