Some things I am amused, interested, or horrified by

• Eigenvectors
• Professional pigeon racing
• AI research reinventing the dream
• The Harmonica
• Laird John Napier
• "Rules of behaviour and courtesies in the House of Commons"
• Juggalos^

Some reasonably coherent opinions I have^

• Sarcasm is good for your immune system
• Physicalism is probably right but it doesn't solve phenomenology
• What I would build if there were no planning permission laws in the UK
• Optimising goes wrong really fast, even if you're dynamically optimising a strategy
• I'm an ethical anti-realist - I think moral claims are true in the same way aesthetic ones are, and doing good fundamentally requires good epistemics

Some things I have done (and some takeaways)

• Wrote and directed a few plays, a musical, and a short film
• Coded up a dating app for a few thousand people
• Travelled around a bit without carrying much^
• Thought real hard about causality in AIs
• When I was 15 I made games with my friends - they're all lost except this one
• Here's a nicely formatted web edition of Pride and Prejudice, with the original images

Some things I have enjoyed^

• Blogs and internet writing
• Music
• Various objects

"But Raymond, what happened to your old site?"

I nuked it. I wanted something more like an evolving document and less like one-off posts, and also I wanted to be able to dig around in the guts of the site.

This has led me to the infamously terrible decision of rebuilding my whole site from scratch, which is why none of the links work and all the pictures are gone. Such is life. You'll find more details here.

Welcome to the new weblog^, and thanks for checking in.