People grow best where they continuously experience an ingenious blend of support and challenge; the rest is commentary.
– Robert Kegan, In Over Our Heads
Collected works on design, maths, software, systems, and epistemology from a ‘98-born Brit.
Please send any comments to tom@tmewett.com, I really enjoy reading them!
Blogroll: Sasha Chapin · Neurotic Gradient Descent · Walking the World
Techroll: Dan Luu · Ted Kaminski
You can also find me on Twitter · GitHub · Goodreads
📌 What Numberphile and Vsauce got wrong about infinity
The strange nature of the real numbers
11 January 2022
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📌 A conceptual foundation for programming languages and self-compilation
31 January 2021
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What holds communities, and connection, back?
On benches, politics, houses, and PR
21 November 2023
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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
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Conformity is a fractal cyclone of BS
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
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Real reactivity has never been tried (FRP vs observables) ⚡
Most reactive systems in use today lack important abstractions, making it easy to write inconsistent code
30 July 2023
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React is more than UI—it's a side-effect framework 🧱
It's well-known that state management in programs can lead to a lot of problems. Spaghetti machines of far too many transitions, orchestrated by widely-visible variables, lead to hard-to-debug, hard-to-change code. [...]
24 June 2023
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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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CRUD is fake; or, what should a data mapper look like?
23 February 2023
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Everything I wish I knew when learning C
18 November 2022
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My take on meditation; why, how, resources
You've probably been told that it will relax and de-stress you. It's more about awareness collapse
12 November 2022
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Dark matter may be wrong, but it isn't unscientific 🌌
6 September 2022
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We couldn't deal with Earth-sized software, let alone galaxy-sized 🪐
How big are the largest projects today? What if they were 100x bigger?
15 June 2022
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Why write Bash when we could compile to it?
Ideas for a language targeting shell scripts
1 May 2022
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An overview of polymorphism: generics, overloading, subtyping, variance
20 March 2022
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Escaping false realities 👁
Dreams, butterflies, and finding true worlds
5 March 2022
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Is self-esteem a useful concept?
14 February 2022
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Interpreted vs compiled is a false distinction
6 February 2022
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How do we really know what's true? 🔍
An overview of how knowledge is created, and its limits
22 October 2021
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The balancing act of effective change
30 May 2021
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Hunter x Hunter: Who is on the Black Whale?
7 November 2020
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Running code at an average rate with a 'stretchy sleep'
16 October 2020
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Tips for using Git effectively
3 October 2020
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Writing things down - offload work from your brain
19 September 2020
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Making a Mac Application Bundle manually
17 August 2020
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Fixed-point and number representations
12 July 2020
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What's the sign of C's remainder operator "%"?
12 July 2020
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Managing software installs on Linux
23 June 2020
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Bootstrapping and self-hosting
19 June 2020
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C for scripters: the essential differences
21 July 2019
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Sets, structure and maps: unifying with model theory
15 April 2019
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Monte Carlo integration and importance sampling
2 April 2019
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Raymarching signed distance fields for creative coding
10 March 2019
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Heuristic text generation with predictors/Markov chains
23 February 2019
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