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@simon_brooke@mastodon.scot
2026-04-02 09:56:11
Content warning: Madness

As I emerge uncertainly from another sustained period of #madness, I realise (again) that I largely use the #PostScarcitySoftware project as self-prescribed anti-suicide therapy. It's sufficiently hard that it has my foggy brain working at full stretch, and sufficiently huge that there&…

Mad software
I was listening to Eric Normand's podcast this morning, as I was making breakfast and tidying my room; he was talking about semantics and data. It started a train of thought which I shall try to unroll.I have blogged a lot in the past about madness and about software, but I don't think I've ever blogged about madness and software in the same essay. But the reasons I'm mad and the reasons I'm (sometimes) very good at software are related; both have their roots in autism and dyslexia, or, to put …

@simon_brooke@mastodon.scot
2026-03-28 11:08:37

OK, folks, I've written yet another incomprehensible essay on the intricacies of implementing a software environment for the hardware of the deep future.
Read this only if you're incurably geeky, and, ideally, interested in #Lisp.
#PostScarcitySoftware

Nodes, threads, locks and links
Up to now, I've been building a single threaded Lisp. I haven't had to worry about who is mutating memory while I'm trying to read it. The idea that this is a mostly immutable Lisp has encouraged me to be blasé about this. But actually, it isn't entirely immutable, and that matters.

@simon_brooke@mastodon.scot
2026-03-20 13:10:45

I've written another essay about my mad #PostScarcitySoftware #Lisp system.
"We don't need to know, or have known, these people to build on their work. We don't have to, and cannot in detail, fully understand their work. There is simply too much of it, its complexity wou…

Don't know, don't care
Modern computing systems are extremely complex. It is impossible for someone to be expert on every component of the system. To produce excellent work, it is necessary to specialise, to avoid being distracted by the necessary intricacies of the things on which your work depends, or of the (not yet conceived) intricacies of the work of other people which will ultimately depend on yours. It is necessary to trust