ant.computer

rain!

2026-08-20T17:12:42Z

in celebration of finally getting some rain around here, check out this series on clouds and weather i got recommended the other day! i’m only partway but so far it’s very good. plus there’s a cat

untitled

2026-08-19T14:59:59Z

one thing that took me by surprise i started trying to be more present in my body is how many weird sensory problems i would keep discovering. i was expecting to learn emotional awareness (and i am getting a bit of that) but the bulk of it is just like oooh did you know that cars are loud? that water is wet and cold? that being too warm makes me want to cry? that if i’m too sticky in the morning then i won’t be able to concentrate watching tv later?

#digging through drafts #from about a year ago

untitled

2026-08-12T13:58:53Z

played around with picoCAD2

thoughts

i liked the limitations. i’ve played around with blender but always got too intimidated to go and make my own things beyond tutorial objects. i do miss the convenience of able to scale a face, but the trade-off was that i stopped worrying about whether or not there was a better way of achieving what i wanted and just did something. four whole somethings in fact!!

feelings about reading

2026-07-13T17:57:56Z

i have been slowly figuring out how to read again and although it’s been wonderful and something i recommend, there’s an uncomfortable knot of feelings inside of me about all the things that books can’t (and maybe shouldn’t?) be

a world already gone

recently i came across the poem Please Use AI by Shawn Smucker. it starts:

Be sure to use AI when making
your next, I don’t know, meal plan,
for example. Definitely do not call
your friend who loves to cook and ask her
for her favorite recipes or tips or ways
to save time making meals,
because you will end
up talking for longer than you had hoped,
hearing, perhaps, about her father’s cancer
diagnosis or how lonely she’s been or even
what she’s planted in her spring
garden and then lost with the early frost.

and while i do hate ai in specific (and the rest of the poem touches on those), there is a critique in this section that goes beyond ai, and into other technologies, including the internet, social media, and even books

i read the start of that poem and it describes a world that had already come for me. if i were struggling with meal planning, it wouldn’t cross my mind to go call someone up to talk, i’d go to the internet and maybe pick up a book suggestion

i don’t think i’m the only one. and something that sits with me uncomfortably is that i don’t know if i’m ready to reach out to people like that. some of it will be my own personal issues, and some will be those big structural things that will take more than just me to break down. for example, like how lack of time to socialise (among other factors) means that we feel pressure to not “waste” it by being vulnerable and sharing the darker parts of life

safety nets

i also came across the blog post Weeds tend not to grow where they can’t take root by Ali Alkatib. it got me thinking about these technologies as safety nets, there to inexactly plug holes that maybe shouldn’t exist

don’t get me wrong, there are orders of magnitude difference between recorded media and a weird statistical simulacrum. in a perfect world, we’d still value recorded media, if only because we all have finite time on this earth and it would otherwise be impossible to have that breadth of connection with all these people across the expanse of time and space. in that same perfect world, i would be much less sure about the value of a compressed approximation that sands down the edges into sludge

but! there are gaps plugged by books that i don’t think should only be plugged by books or other recorded media. art/stories/knowledge for/about the marginalised/oppressed are necessary and yet not sufficient. it is so crucial to find support in books, but why have we built the sort of world where significant support must be found through books and not the people/society around us? this sucks!

it can’t (and shouldn’t) do everything

i’m in the uk, and they’re trying to ban parts of the internet for younger people (and in doing so require ids from the rest of us). plenty of adults have responded with “well maybe they’ll read now!”. and, well, i don’t think the existence of books really makes up for losing the good things about the internet, nor does it seriously grapple with what is terrible

even if we put that aside for a second, and only think about the role books play in learning and education, it’s still just part of many. in paulo freire’s pedagogy of the oppressed in 1967, amongst other things, he talks about the “banking model of education” (a one-way deposit of knowledge from the teacher into the empty vessel of the student), and the importance of dialogue. looking at books through this lens, i can see that books alone can only cover part of the the process. a book can only relate its information one-way. it can’t respond to your questions (although sometimes it does feel like that when you go in for a reread). there’s some follow-up that needs to be done, to do something in the world, see what happens, and react to that

when when i think about what’s missing from my learning i am privileged enough to say that it’s not access to books or basic literacy or the means to improve my literacy beyond that. it’s things like access to mentors and community who care and have the time and resources to act

who was saying it was everything though?

i don’t think many people were saying that reading was going to be a panacea. often, it’s a bit more like in You Must Read At Least One Book To Ride by Nikhil Suresh. this particular iteration is geared a bit more towards the career software engineer, but touches on other things like learning to draw, playing the piano, and video games. the idea is that most people do not have knowledge, and learning the equivalent of One Good Book on a subject can go a long way. sure, a lot of it will be in the application of the knowledge, but getting in a good chunk of knowledge can still be a useful place to start. i forget that most of the “people should read!” takes are targeted towards (or perhaps just about?) people who don’t read and weren’t considering it…

morality and care

…rather than someone like me, who felt like a moral failure for struggling with reading, despite enjoying it and wanting to do it. it’s not the only thing i struggle with in this way. for those other things, i liked KC Davis’ How to Keep House While Drowning. it’s a book that is about “care tasks”, things like keeping the house clean and doing laundry, but i think parts can be applied more widely, including to reading. care tasks are functional moves me away from abstract ideas of good and bad (which can easily cause me to spiral) and towards a more grounded, embodied sense of why i want to do this. sometimes that still sucks, especially when you throw disabilities into the mix, because now i’ve got real, concrete things that i can lose when i’m not able to do it. but it’s way better than abstracted shame, because now i’m able to do things like find a different way to get there or come to terms with the loss

and seeing reading through the lens of it being a care task helps me understand why i find it so easy to slip into a guilt/shame spiral about it. reading can be a way of caring for myself and others; so if i don’t do it i won’t be caring (which is bad™)! except, well, it’s also not caring to be berating and shaming myself for struggling. guilt and shame can be useful and prosocial feelings when used to spark change, but when it starts preventing me from doing that, it’s no longer serving its purpose

individual and systemic

that’s not to say that it was just my misinterpretation that made me consider struggle as a moral failing. there’s loads of external and societal factors i could list here, as well as many other things that i don’t even know about that nevertheless shaped my world

i think one throughline in all of the things i’ve mentioned is my struggle between individual and systemic issues and solutions. while an individual action has a limited effect, you cannot create a systemic effect without the the actions of individuals. but also individually acting is very hard without some systemic support!

that’s not a new insight to me, at least in theory. the annoying part about learning is that you can “know” something theoretically, but to really understand i have to work through many different individual examples before i’ve really integrated it. which i suppose is kinda the same thing — i can’t build an big abstract understanding until i’ve understood a bunch of little pieces of it, but how much can i say that i understand the big abstract thing until i’ve understood all the little pieces?

doing it anyway

just now, Good habits spoiled by bad motivations by Kyle Labriola popped up in my RSS feed.

These days I’m starting to believe that it’s imperative that you do not tell yourself that starting a good habit in this vein is going to change the world.

And yet, you should still do the thing. Because it’s the right thing to do.

getting back into reading has been a big thing for me and yet it’s not so big that it can do all of — gestures vaguely — that. same with a lot of other things! and like a lot of things, i think both worth doing and also keeping in mind the limitations

okie byeee

now, update 13 Jul 2026

2026-07-13T17:00:34Z

i am not enjoying the heatwaves. we need to kill [redacted]

it seems like every time i make an update it’s like “hey i tried doing arts n crafts in another medium” and this time i’m dabbling in drawing and painting again. i have a bunch of half-used supplies bought through the last decade and it’s been fun picking them up again, hopefully this time with a slightly more chill and playful attitude

i still don’t think my mental health is at “could hold a job without imploding” level, but the downs are definitely getting more understandable (as opposed to seemingly out of nowhere) and more bearable. that’s something

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

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