Notes are observations, responses to recent events, explorations of half-formed ideas, and work that’s actively evolving. They’re less polished than Articles and more immediate. A a response to a news story, a technical note I’m working through, something that happened on the way to the bakers one morning, or an idea that hasn’t yet solidified enough for deeper treatment.
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Anthropic publishes its constitution ↗ along with research about where the constitution works and where it does not. The current version is an ethical treatise addressing Claude discussing safety, ethics, Anthropic’s guidelines, and helpfulness, in that order when they conflict. Anthropic favours cultivating good values and judgment over strict rules. In 2026, Anthropic’s operational judgment failed twice in the same way, leading to the leak of the Claude Code source code ↗ . The constitution asks Claude to imagine how a “thoughtful senior Anthropic employee would react”, but what happens when the organisation’s structure fails? ...
I am using my personal Perseverance engine as I help develop the code, and I’m watching carefully to see how useful it is for developing analysis, review and writing. Evidence so far is mixed, but improving fast. I feel in control as I do with any other work tool, which I certainly do not when using a typical error-prone AI text interface. One of the reasons I feel in control is because there are more controls in place, that is the point of the Artificial Organisations concept. But another reason is that this tool is becoming more tuned to me all the time. ...
I was once delighted to receive a phone call from the Scottish health services for a PET scan ↗ . I had been feeling helpless in the face of a dangerous problem called ‘radiophobia’, and this was a breakthrough, so I was pleased. 💡 Advised not to have a scan due to radiation risk? If you or your children are advised against having a scan due to radiation risks, you may wish to read some of the official and scientific references at the bottom of this article. This isn’t about self-doctoring – evidently not a good idea – but about being informed. It will take a while for practices within the NHS to catch up to current understanding. I am in the fortunate position of working at a university where I have access to people who understand these things. When a medical person told me You don’t need a PET scan, and we limit the number of scans people have, because we don’t want to cause more problems than we find, it seemed a little odd. I made enquiries and learned that radiophobia can cause people to miss out on healthcare. ...
AI ethics and safety work mostly focuses on making individual models smarter and better-behaved via guidelines and persuasion, with not much hope ↗ this will succeed. You should especially not feel safe when an AI company reassures you about their guardrails ↗ . When you hear guardrails think of telling a dog “Don’t bite the furniture inside the house today”, because you can never know what will actually happen. The concept of Artificial Organisations doesn’t require AIs to be reliable, it ensures that when an AI goes wrong there are hard limits on how much damage it causes. Similarly we can put the dog outside the house, so no matter how bitey it is the furniture cannot be bitten. I have been spending a good deal of 2026 trying to use this concept to make AI less dangerous and more useful. I even have it studying me as an apprentice . This is mostly the opposite to Anthropic’s idea of a constitution . ...
Patents and the MIT License Some of my software projects use MIT so I have studied this issue. Although in many respects the world has moved on from copyright wars to much higher-stakes legal shenanigans, the detail of licensing still matters. In my case: My LumoSQL project is based on probably the most-used software, SQLite, whose license states it is in the “Public Domain”. The meaning of this isn’t entirely clear in some cases, and a 21st century software project starting decades after SQLite shouldn’t copy this. I chose MIT as a commonly accepted alternative, but which license is that exactly, and what does the text imply about patents? This is known, but I had to dig. The MIT license is massively used, but who will defend it if needed? We know the answer for the GPL, and also Apache-type licenses. I am now satisfied that quite a lot of enormous organisations really do care about MIT. There are lots of reasons why MIT isn’t ideal, but in my view those are trumped by it being widely accepted as fit for purpose, and relied upon by organisations who care that it remains effective and unambiguous. My notes are mostly kept in my many contributions ↗ to the Wikipedia page on the MIT License ↗ since that is where the decades-old knowledge of the MIT license origins is already maintained. The legal minds in many of the largest companies in the world seem to accept that at least in the US the MIT license implies a patent grant. As probably the most-used open source license, the MIT license has many wealthy corporate defenders if anyone wanted to test that idea.
I made a new website recently. My goals: Modern-looking Easy to maintain, minimal infrastructure Content lasts indefinitely even as web technologies come and go I decided on a static website ↗ , with content in Markdown ↗ and a modest amount of templating. I chose the Hugo ↗ static site generator with the PaperMod ↗ theme, plus a second theme ↗ for CV-type timelines. I used bundled system fonts (no Google Fonts tracking by calling googleapis). ...
My new website ↗ is nice enough, but it really needs work. I’m offering prizes! Small fixes for wording, grammar or links — my warmest thanks A page or more of such small fixes — I will buy you the (non-outrageous) beverage of your choice A substantial improvement or correction consisting of a page or more — a pizza from a mutually agreed place 10 non-trivial pull requests for the codeberg repository ↗ — I’ll help you learn Linux, if that’s a thing you want Assistance to help me fix items from the following list — prizes as per the above, based on scale/complexity Things to be added or improved: ...
I have an interest in non-electronic computers as an educational tool. An horologer is someone who makes mechanical clocks and watches, and horologers definitely don’t believe in electronics. That’s why I published Shearer, D. (2007). "Communication: A Request for Collaboration." Horological Journal, 149(12), p. 471., which sounds much fancier than the letter to the editor it was. Given I didn’t even know the British Horological Institute ↗ existed until a week prior it makes me very pleased. ...
(written in 2008) How a young Australian discovered Open Source and a career. Eventually learning that a mixture of code, law and mathematics is a frontier for human rights battles. It isn’t often I come face to face with myself after a twenty-something year break, but I did yesterday. As a first year university student at the South Australian Institute of Technology ↗ in Adelaide I did landscape gardening oddjobs for companies. I noticed a company called Australian Launch Vehicles (ALV), which sounded very cool, so in I went. ALV was founded by a pair of entrepreneurial rocket scientists. Despite decades of rocketry history in South Australia ↗ , there was no local space industry. (Establishing Australian spaceflight in 1987 was ambitious; they failed but others are giving it a go.) ...
Random humans and computers Humans are terrible at randomness. If you ask people to write down a list of random numbers the result can usually be shown to not be random at all. Stage magicians and marketing experts exploit our inability to assess how random an event is. But computers, surely they should be random? It sure feels like it when your printer jams. But no, computers are often worse than humans at being random, and that’s a problem. Randomness is exceedingly important to making computers and networks work. ...