Notes

(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.) Gilmour Space TechnologiesThe Australian Eris Block 1 in November 2025 ...

This wee note is about physics results I noticed suggesting it may be possible to greatly reduce the power and water required by datacentres. This is in a field of physics I am not remotely able to verify but I’m keeping an eye on what seems to be happening. Large Language Models are subject to the laws of physics in a bad way, because they use so much electricity and make so much heat. Landauer’s principle ↗ identifies the thermodynamic cost of information erasure, and some later work builds on this to show that computation can avoid erasure through logical reversibility. ...

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. ...