ant.computer

8bitdo micro

2026-04-27T12:26:00Z

got one of these a while ago and i like it!

i first saw people using these as macropads for things like anki or digital art programs or ereaders. i think it works best as a macropad, too. i don’t like using it for most games because i find that the buttons require more pressure, which is satisfying for keyboard shortcuts but tiring and hand-hurty when constantly pressing buttons

i’d been nervous about getting one because at first it didn’t seem to do anything i couldn’t already do with my existing gamepads or keyboard and mouse. i had underestimated how nice it was to interact with technology through a small set of dedicated buttons!!

i like how it stops me from mindlessly going ctrl+t [some bullshit] because i don’t have easy access to ctrl+t. and the buttons also have a satisfying resistance that give me a nice alternative to stimming by clicking and scrolling around aimlessly

the micro has a little switch on the button to change between three modes: S (Switch), D (gamepaD? D-input? anDroid?), and K (Keyboard). and you can use a USB-C cable for a wired controller connection

you can use their software to remap the buttons for keyboard mode. this is useful for mapping page turn buttons for my ereader

unfortunately it’s not available for linux, and on the computer I like to change the mappings more frequently (for different programs/websites) so i’ve been using antimicrox to remap the buttons for D-mode and it works great with a few caveats:

it shows a bunch of buttons that don’t exist on the micro. pressing a button makes the relevant field flash blue so you know you’re editing the right thing
key combinations (e.g. ctrl-w) are kinda unreliable. i think they work better when the button is held for a little while?
in D-mode it looks like it’s not possible to map the star button. luckily different profiles/sets mean losing a button matters less
it works in Wayland except for automatic profile switching. it’s possible to make a workaround given there’s CLI options to switch profiles, but i haven’t (yet?)
profiles aren’t automatically saved. i kept making changes and forgetting to save them 😿 and then needing to recreate the changes next time i opened the app

now, update 27 Apr 2026

2026-04-27T12:25:00Z

i’ve been trying to go on walks more. it was working really well at the beginning of the year, but i fell off a bit. i even went on a couple of walks independently! i enjoyed watching the birds — the ones that left after winter, the ones that came back for spring, the ones which have the cute little babies

i tried (and sort of failed) to make another pair of socks — the pattern was a little too complex to sustain when knitting was mostly a thing i was doing to stim/self-soothe. so i started a different pair of socks with a simpler pattern and that’s nearly done!

i tried out a bit of needle felting. it was really fun! i like stabbing the needles through the wool. i made a feathers mcgraw

i hate ai and centrists and ai centrists

2026-04-19T14:18:10Z

okay so here’s a rant about an opinion on ai i saw the other day and got mad at

the take was basically: the correct, centrist^[1], unbiased view on AI requires actually using AI, because a first hand experience is more worthwhile than seeing a bunch of second-hand accounts warped through the lens of social media

different kinds of source

firstly, no! a first-hand account isn’t necessarily better! it gives a different kind of experience and there’s a time and place for all kinds of sources. i really don’t think my layperson fumbling about is necessarily a more correct/centrist/unbiased than, say, the account of an expert who deeply understands how the technology works or has run scientific studies

i will not take up a smoking or gambling habit so that i have a personal account of what it’s like. i am happy to defer to what i’ve seen, and grateful i don’t have to wade through that

engage with the concerns

it’s so classic “unbiased centrist” to have carefully moved two sets of goalposts and plonked themselves in the middle. AI concerns are so much broader than just whether or not you can personally prompt it into giving good enough output.

if you really care about getting your “unbiased” first-hand experience of AI, then go experience the poisoned air near hastily installed gas generators for grok ai! go live near a data center with the sort of noise pollution that causes nausea. be a woman, or maybe even a child, and have your photos fed into the machine by men who don’t care about your consent. develop an eating disorder, and find that a helpline was replaced by an ai chatbot that recommends the exact things known to make your condition worse. go work as someone who categorises the input data, paid pennies, and develop PTSD from the material you’ve had to see. go have a problem with a product or service and find that all support has been replaced with a chatbot that is not only unhelpful but actively denies you are experiencing issues. go get air striked in the middle east after being chosen by an ai system. go run a science fiction magazine and need to close submissions because you’re getting flooded with slop

there are SO many critiques of AI beyond “is the output good?”. i probably have forgotten a bunch of them. others, i didn’t quite know how to put into this format because some of the worst problems are gradual, systemic loss that we need to be able to recognise without needing a poster child victim

footnotes

i should have backed out immediately after seeing them use “centrist” positively ↩︎

untitled

2026-04-01T19:51:34Z

my partner can’t have caffeine when he’s had his adhd medication that day (side effects), so the days we remember to and we want coffee, we’ll have a decaf.

sometimes i’ll still want some caffeine, and it’s too much work in the morning to make two separate cups of coffee instead of one double batch. what a conundrum!

then i remembered hong kong 鴛鴦 (yeun-yeung). it’s a combination of coffee and milk tea, and it’s called that after mandarin ducks that symbolise love^[1]. it tasted very nostalgic even though i made it with oat milk and sugar instead of condensed milk

it’s great fun to get a british person to try certain kinds of hong kong food and drink so that they, too, can experience what it’s like for their cuisine to get shaped by the tastes of the local people. it’s kind of fun to realise that like, macaroni is just a noodle and you can put it in a savoury noodle soup

it still feels strange to be reconnecting with these nostalgic, cultural things when i’m currently no-contact with most of my family. it feels wrong to be doing it without them, even though i know that if i were with them, they’d react badly to my interest. their loss — i’ve got the internet now, baby!

footnotes

through childhood misunderstanding i thought it was translated “yin-yang” because it was similar enough in sound and concept ↩︎ ↩︎

#post hog #food and drink

interlock bind-off

2025-09-30T15:24:10Z

i saw this article by jeny on the interlock bind-off and i wanted to really understand how it worked so here’s my own notes

structure

regular knitting

the bind-off

the structure is a regular knitted row, except every stitch is interlocked with the ones on either side

sewing knit/purl stitches

traditionally, stitches are made by pulling a loop through the stitch on the row below. it’s a knit stitch if pulled from back-to-front, and a purl if pulled from front-to-back

we’re sewing in the same direction as we knit, which is traditionally right-to-left (and the rest of the notes assume this)

each stitch requires two movements, an in and an out.

for the knit stitch:

going in means moving the sewing needle from back-to-front (b2f), which is the same direction as if you were about to purl (p)
going out means moving the sewing needle from front-to-back (f2b), which is the same direction as if you were about to knit (k)

for the purl stitch, it’s the opposite:

going in means moving the sewing needle from front-to-back (f2b), which is the same direction as if you were about to knit (k)
going out means moving the sewing needle from back-to-front (b2f), which is the same direction as if you were about to purl (p)

a mnemonic that needs workshopping:

in with inverse, out the same

a knit stitch goes in purlwise (inverse) and out knitwise (same)
a purl stitch goes in knitwise (inverse) and out purlwise (same)

joining

in, join, out

joining happens in between the in and out steps and is when we thread through the previous stitch on the same row

the join will make the thread cross over at two points: the crown (top) and the leg (bottom). if the stitch goes under at the legs, it must go over at the crown, and vice versa. this poses a problem if we are binding off in-pattern and have a knit and a purl next to each other. we would want the purl to always be behind the knit, but here we have to pick either the crown or the legs

the original by jeny follows the leg pattern, and i think this generally looks better too since you get a continuous pattern upwards and then a “half” stitch of the cast-off

	crown	leg
knit	b2f, purl	f2b, knit
purl	f2b, knit	b2f, purl

full stitch

in, join, out

	general	knit	purl
1. in	inverse	b2f, purl	f2b, knit
2. join (leg)	same	f2b, knit	b2f, purl
3. out	same	f2b, knit	b2f, purl

first and last stitch in the round

here i join the first and last stitches. this means skipping the join step for the first stitch (only doing in and out), and adding a join for the last stitch (in, join previous, join first, out). then sew in ends

speeding it up

pulling the needle all the way through takes time! we can speed it up by threading the needle a few steps before pulling all the way through. we have to be careful when we do this, though, since this pulls quite tight, and we want to be careful that e.g. the we don’t lose the loop from the previous stitch we are about to join to

jeny’s instructions combine the out and in stitches specifically for the 1×1 ribbing pattern

i’ve found you can generalise this and also add in a join:

out, in, join

thread out (same) for the previous stitch
push the previous stitch off the needle
thread in (inverse) for this stitch
join (leg: same) through the loop of the new stitch
- you can do this without orienting the loop by pointing the needle the correct way and then wrapping the yarn coming off the needle around the needle
pull through
inspect the tension of the new stitch and adjust if necessary
repeat

bonus

as mentioned in the original article, this structure is similar to the long-tail cast-on, which is the same as the backwards loop cast-on with one row of knitting. the backwards loop cast-on is making just the twisted-together loops, and in the long-tail cast-on it’s the crossing over of the loops that creates the twisted join. structural equivalence!!

also, like, it’s not at all necessary to cast on in pattern, and the same is true for binding off. you can still make a lovely looking bind off like this by just using the knit (or purl) pattern the whole way along. especially since the edge rows have different tension (due to not having stitches on all sides) and will always look a bit different anyway

untitled

2025-09-01T20:35:25Z

“average person has too many opinions” factoid actualy just statistical error. average person has 0 opinions per year. Opinions Georg, who lives in cave & tweets over 10,000 each day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted

untitled

2025-08-29T11:39:58Z

big endian little endian welcome to our hash dump

inbox zero…?

2025-08-20T16:45:05Z

i emptied out my email inbox!

inflows and outflows

one way to think about getting rid of emails is like a bathtub, where the inbox is the bath, the emails are the water, and you’ve got an inflow (the tap) and an outflow (the drain)^[1]

inflows are the emails that come in. you can reduce these by doing things like unsubscribing to emails (search “unsubscribe”), making filters, or properly marking emails as spam

outflows are how you get rid of emails. this is either deleting them, or moving them to another folder/tag^[2]. sometimes you’ll need to take an action first, like replying to the email. you can make this faster by bulk deleting (e.g. everything from a certain sender or everything with “your order”), or learning keyboard shortcuts

avoidance

i could technically achieve inbox zero by like, making a filter that sends all the emails to the trash and deleting every existing email. this would be easy but defeats the point, which was to practise (a) acting on emails instead of ignoring them and (b) looking emails dead in the eye and deleting them without regret

i know i’ve been avoiding these emails. they weren’t piling up because i didn’t think they were worth the effort, which would have been a rational deliberate decision, but because i’d avoided even trying to make that judgement. they probably weren’t that important, but i hadn’t even looked and consciously decided that was the case, and instead had the decision made for me by avoidance. it is not fun to realise that not making decisions is making a decision

also, the emails probably not being important is crucial. it struck a good balance between being safe while also being a challenge^[3]

the challenge being to encounter something emotionally disregulating, then regulate myself enough that i could make a rational decision. one where i’m as present as i can be, that’s congruent with who i am and who i want to be. and the regulation has to involve real processing of the emotion eventually (even if slightly delayed to a more appropriate time)

in the end, a lot of the emails were nothing! marketing emails that were easy to go, “nah, not interested” and unsubscribe and mass delete. but there were a few that reminded me why this was a challenge: emails from people no longer in my life, marketing for a person i used to be (and can’t go back to), missed opportunities, mistakes, problems that got bigger when ignored

but i did it :)

what’s next

i don’t know whether i’ll keep my inbox at zero, because it wasn’t about the number. i wanted to know that i could do it if i wanted to. and if i didn’t it was because i chose not to for reasons that felt grounded at the time

more broadly, i want to keep working at emotional regulation^[4]. it is incredible(-y frustrating) to think about the ways this has affected my life^[5]. but hey. i’ve now chipped away at one thing. i can chip away at a few more (at a rate which is frustratingly safe and sustainable with room for failure and the ability to change my mind at any time)

footnotes

this analogy is from the book Thinking in Systems, a book that was recommended to me as helpful for a certain kind of autistic struggle with the world. i’d say that if you already have an understanding of big systems from a different angle (e.g. systemic racism), then it won’t blow your mind and might be occasionally too liberal. but it is fun to be presented with the shape of a system and be like “oh! it’s like this and that, and i hadn’t thought about those things being the same shape before!” ↩︎
which pedants might say is technically equal to deleting from one place and creating in another ↩︎
i’ve tried to do some other things to confront avoidance, and it turns out that going too hard and fast about it can create more problems than it solves ↩︎
it’s funny to have what’s basically my first therapy goal after quitting therapy. (as in one to one therapy with a talk therapist). which i don’t want to rule out for the future, but i want to be careful to not fall into a “you’re the expert and i’m broken” **cough** thing again. which is likely contributed to not having well defined therapy goals, which contributed to the whole process not being as effective as it could have been ↩︎
e.g. reading! it’s not an uncommon problem but i haven’t heard anyone else describe their specific problem with not being able to read as reading a bit, then getting so overwhelmed with thoughts and feelings that they’re unable to continue ↩︎

untitled

2025-08-11T09:53:39Z

i’m discovering that perhaps i might have lacked the Vitamin. and i think i underestimated the parts of the vitamin fantasy where (a) the deficiency is found because someone else looks after you and (b) people acknowledge your prior suffering

sorta hits different when you have to do those parts yourself. oh well. at least there’s still the part where (c) the issue is relatively^[1] easily fixable and available

footnotes

if you can handle the lack of regulation, the woo-woo advertising, misinformation, and figuring the dose/form you need ↩︎

untitled

2025-08-09T20:48:41Z

can someone lead me to water? i promise i’ll drink 🥺