Articles by ColinWright
1

Trying out Techdirt's 2025 game, One Billion Users (pelicancrossing.net)

61

Generative AI and Wikipedia editing: What we learned in 2025 (wikiedu.org)

1

In Search of Causality (pelicancrossing.net)

1

A non-technical but capable friend has asked me about installing Linux (mathstodon.xyz)

1

How the Web Was Lost (around.com)

9

Study is stolen, sold, published. Now the victim is accused of plagiarism (retractionwatch.com)

2

Autonomous Aquatic Robot Is Smaller Than a Grain of Salt (wired.com)

2

The Truth About Toilet Swirl (smartereveryday.com)

6

CompSci was a golden ticket to a lucrative career. Now graduates can't get a job (telegraph.co.uk)

2

Rubenerd: The Rubenerd LLM Licencing Pac (rubenerd.com)

2

Responsible Disclosure: Chimoney Android App and KYCaid (shkspr.mobi)

2

Charlie Eggins 3BLD double world record [video] (youtube.com)

2

The Palindromic Hat-Trick (aperiodical.com)

3

Lamar wants to have children with his girlfriend. The problem? She's AI (theguardian.com)

4

The Worst Devices of CES 2026 [video] (youtube.com)

4

University of Utah finds tape with only known copy of Unix V4 hidden in storage (sltrib.com)

4

A City on Mars (wikipedia.org)

1

AI Contributions to Erdős Problems (github.com/teorth)

1

TicTacToe for the AGC (github.com/neilfraser)

6

Please Do Not Attempt to Simplify This Code (github.com/kubernetes)

3

Smart glasses: 'I was filmed and trolled online' (bbc.co.uk)

1

The application of AI tools to Erdos problems passes a milestone (mathstodon.xyz)

18

I used Lego to design a farm for people who are blind – like me (bbc.co.uk)

5

Write Yourself a Scheme in 48 Hours: An Introduction to Haskell Through Example [pdf] (2007) (wikimedia.org)

2

AI Contributions to Erdős Problems (github.com/teorth)

4

Fix the News (fixthenews.com)

3

AI summaries in Google and AI coding tools have nearly killed Stack Overflow (mastodon.social)

1

FakeParts: A New Family of AI-Generated DeepFakes (arxiv.org)

4

Happy Perihelion

3

Cursor Keys (fraser.name)

3

The Tyranny of Categorization. We must redefine our relationship with boundaries (medium.com/in-search-of-leverage)

3

A 58-Addition, Rank-23 Scheme for General 3x3 Matrix Multiplication (arxiv.org)

1

Expanding in Three Dimensions [video] (youtube.com)

1

Echoes from the Moon (arxiv.org)

3

Photo from the 60s, scanned and uploaded to Google, correctly geo-located (mastodon.scot)

1

Cows painted with zebra-like striping can avoid biting fly attack (2019) (plos.org)

4

Amazon non-consensually forced TikTok onto my family's device (neilzone.co.uk)

16

Using Vectorize to build an unreasonably good search engine in 160 lines of code (partykit.io)

1

Happy Solsthelion

1

Before Siri and Alexa, there was ELIZA [video] (youtube.com)

3

Fulton surface-to-air recovery system (wikipedia.org)

1

A shared chores list or family shopping list? Prohibited (decoded.legal)

2

Australia's Alex Carey reprieved by Snicko operator error (bbc.co.uk)

2

We should just change the spec and ask Firefox to change (github.com/whatwg)

2

Computing the Integer Binary Logarithm (janmr.com)

1

Mt Whitney Model (2022) (grwster.com)

3

Interpreters Everywhere [video] (youtube.com)

1

Norton's dome – A paradox in Newtonian physics (wikipedia.org)

96

Apple Maps claims it's 29,905 miles away (mathstodon.xyz)

4

'It May Be Worse'–No Fix for New Google Chrome Attacks (forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman)

2

'Three norths' set to leave England for hundreds of years (ordnancesurvey.co.uk)

1

Advent of Compiler Optimisations, 2025 (youtube.com)

2

GCHQ Christmas card 2025 sets annual festive challenge (bbc.co.uk)

1

Tai's model for the determination of total area under metabolic curves [pdf] (1994) (uconn.edu)

3

Students' inventiveness at circumventing technical restrictions (hcommons.social)

7

Obscuring P2P Nodes with Dandelion (johndcook.com)

1

"Not Always Right": Funny and True Stories (notalwaysright.com)

3

The best predictors of AI use across studies were aversive personality traits (nih.gov)

1

Integers, fractions, and decimals are different things to kids (2015) (mikesmathpage.wordpress.com)

1

The Thoughts of a Spiderweb (2017) (quantamagazine.org)

2

Warning to lawyers helping LiP who submitted AI-generated authorities (lawgazette.co.uk)

2

What little I know about Readily.news (cryptography.dog)

1

The Performance Inequality Gap, 2026 (infrequently.org)

1

The Earth–Moon problem is an unsolved graph coloring problem (wikipedia.org)

41

Zero knowlege proof of compositeness (johndcook.com)

1

The Performance Inequality Gap, 2026 (infrequently.org)

1

There Is No Time for This (2015) (solipsys.co.uk)

1

The Idiot Sandwich – On Embedding Alt Text (shkspr.mobi)

1

Mean Time Between Failures (pelicancrossing.net)

1

Web 0.1 (2006) (thedailywtf.com)

2

Cryptology firm cancels elections after losing encryption key (bbc.com)

50

How Slide Rules Work (amenzwa.github.io)

12

The Subversive Hyperlink (2024) (jim-nielsen.com)

3

Scientists Have Trained Bumblebees to Understand a Form of Morse Code (sciencealert.com)

1

Simplification (pelicancrossing.net)

2

Shader systems are ridiculously powerful if you're clever enough

1

Downgrading Debian from testing to stable (trixie) (neilzone.co.uk)

7

Consider a Burner Phone for Your Holiday Travel This Year (cnet.com)

4

When AI Prophecy Fails (pluralistic.net)

100

AI scrapers request commented scripts (cryptography.dog)

4

US student handcuffed after AI system apparently mistook bag of chips for gun (theguardian.com)

44

[flagged] Turns Out, Wikipedia Isn't That 'Woke' as Grokipedia Rips Off Most of Its Pages (pcmag.com)

2

Their history is just erased: Google drops a key program boosting women in tech (cnn.com)

1

Setting Up Anti Hot Linking Protections for ChatGPT (bentasker.co.uk)

65

987654321 / 123456789 (johndcook.com)

1

It's always DNS... (pelicancrossing.net)

6

Steps to take in advance in case your phone gets stolen

2

John Carlos Baez: An Introduction to the Standard Model (mathstodon.xyz)

2

Look, Another AI Browser (manuelmoreale.com)

3

Keanu Codes (keanu.codes)

6

HTTP error codes illustrated with stills from Columbo

2

A man building a starter kit for civilization (technologyreview.com)

31

Improving PixelMelt's Kindle Web Deobfuscator (shkspr.mobi)

114

Discord hack shows risks of online age checks (sky.com)

1

Quick and dirty bar-charts using HTML's meter element (shkspr.mobi)

2

Asking Claude how many "n"s are in the word "banana" ... thread. (mathstodon.xyz)

3

Microsoft is making Word automatically save new documents to OneDrive by default (msn.com)

1

Scammers are using AI to lure shoppers to fake businesses (bbc.co.uk)

3

Notes on running PostmarketOS on a OnePlus 6 (neilzone.co.uk)

3

How to *actually* test your readme (shkspr.mobi)