Draft

A Checklist of Loose Ends

Draft of 2026.07.28

May include: meta ↘ &c.

I’ve had a few days of working with Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5 as a helper with various projects. Not so much coding for me, as knowing how to fix things that are broken and about which I don’t have enough experience. Why does the SSL layer of the blog fail? It was the DNS setup at the registrar, not the plugin like I thought. Is this safe to just have running on the Internet? No, not on the 2026 Internet it definitely was not. Many many things were not safe. Can there be a database? Yes, like many adult blogs already in existence for decades, there can be a database, though it turns out that so far there still doesn’t need to be one.

Oh, and as a collator. In this particular case, the request was for something like

A bullet list of internal links to the posts that leave something unfinished—mathematical recreations, little programs, complex systems examples and GP benchmarks, treated as guidelines rather than boundaries, alongside unlabeled odds and broad-brush musings—organized by broad topic, to serve as the body of a new post titled “A Checklist of Loose Ends.”

And so here we are.

If I’m very good indeed, I may be able to actually do something about some of them. With a little help, an invisible assistant, a little stick-to-it-iveness for godssakes just once, and some improved modern brain drugs. Fingers crossed.

Tilings and dominoes

Lattices and Manhattan distances

Numbers that misbehave

Drawing, and things that draw themselves

Games and puzzles proper

String chemistries and rewriting systems

Artificial chemistry and register machines

Push, and the Klapaucius interpreter

ReQ

Genetic programming: benchmarks and misgivings

Little programs, and notes to my future self

Musings that never quite landed