benswift.me

Extempore now builds and runs on Apple Silicon.

An interactive 3D digital twin of the Neon Perceptron---a physical neural network built from flexible LEDs.

A hands-on teaching resource where learners build bigram language models with pen, paper, and dice---no computers required.

Spelunking through git history to trace this blog from Octopress in 2012 through two Clojure experiments, six years of Jekyll, and now VitePress.

After ten years on Jekyll, I moved this site to VitePress.

How to set up 11ty with Vite and Tailwind v4 for static sites that need proper asset bundling, HMR, and npm ecosystem access.

AI adoption research keeps asking 'do you use ChatGPT?'

A new project that scrapes and version-controls AI Transparency Statements from Australian Government agencies, tracking how they change over time.

Launching the Cybernetic Studio at SXSW Sydney with human-scale AI artefacts: a wooden neural network table and a pen-and-paper language model.

Rebuilding a terminal email setup with OAuth2, Office365 and neomutt in Zed---the hard-won config so you don't have to waste as many hours as I did.

Switching from Zed's Agent panel to Claude Code for flat-fee pricing, with a simple task config to keep the workflow inside Zed.

Agentic AI is about giving LLMs tools to act in the world without asking first---removing the human bottleneck.

A fully scripted burn-and-boot process for setting up Raspberry Pi 5s as fullscreen Chromium kiosks with Tailscale, WiFi and 4K support.

A hands-on 3-hour workshop where ANU undergrads train their own language model from scratch with pen, paper and dice---ending with a poetry slam.

How to wire up Zed, Tidewave and AshAI as MCP servers for an agentic Elixir development workflow, with a helper script to glue it all together.

My Times Higher Education piece on DeepSeek R1 and why universities should think twice before signing exclusive AI contracts.

Workshop materials for designing and playing parlour games with LLMs, including LLM-augmented 20 Questions and Adventures in Amphibology.

Zed config snippet for auto-formatting Markdown files on save with Prettier, including prose wrapping at 80 columns.

Using an LLM to generate trivia questions, then letting teams challenge any answers they think the model hallucinated.

Performing a livecoding music set at Shanghai Concert Hall as part of ICLC 2024.

Celebrating Chenchen Xu's PhD on weakly supervised sign language understanding, completed through lockdown.

Off on another round of parental leave until March 2024.

Asking ChatGPT to prove the five colour and four colour theorems with my mathematician father-in-law, and his reaction to the results.

Ruby 3.2's YJIT gave my Jekyll builds a 4.8x speedup---from 17 seconds down to under 4.

Draft guidelines for allowing ChatGPT in university coursework while maintaining academic integrity, with citation and accountability requirements.

Times Higher Education ran an edited cut of my post on using ChatGPT in the classroom this semester.

Celebrating Kieran Browne's PhD graduation and his thesis on the neurological metaphor in deep learning.

How to receive and validate Square payment webhooks in an Elixir/Phoenix app, with code for HMAC signature verification.

Practical advice for educators on incorporating ChatGPT into their teaching this semester rather than pretending it doesn't exist.

A bash script to auto-exclude all git repos from rclone backups, since rclone's built-in filtering can't do it alone.

Draft notes on AI-generated bullshit in higher education---the problem isn't that it's wrong, it's that Brandolini's law means we'll be overwhelmed by the sheer volume.

My first ChatGPT conversation: asking it to brainstorm strategy for the ANU School of Cybernetics.

A roundup of recent creative work: the Panic AI art installation with its big red button, plus a livecoding set at OzCHI 2022.

My Times Higher Education piece on why AI in higher education is a question about information flows, not individual tools.

An immersive cybernetic walking tour of the National Gallery of Australia after dark, co-created with BOHO Interactive and the ANU School of Cybernetics.

Rough notes and a Python script for running Stable Diffusion in a Singularity container with NVIDIA GPUs.

My Conversation piece on GitHub Copilot and whether AI coding assistants are about to put programmers out of a job.

A one-liner ImageMagick command to batch-redact the prompt text from craiyon (DALL-E mini) screenshot outputs.

A quick tidyverse R script for parsing Zoom attendance CSVs and visualising per-participant call duration with ggplot2.

A look at what the new Experiences Team at the ANU School of Cybernetics is building---weird, site-specific encounters with cybernetic ideas.

Getting a pytorch neural style transfer model running on RTX 3090s via Singularity containers, navigating CUDA version hell along the way.

Futuring works best when it's more like a radar than a lighthouse---a sense-analyse-act feedback loop, not a fixed point to steer towards.

Using cybernetics and Donella Meadows' leverage points to understand---and improve---the system of code, music and humans in a livecoding gig.

Quick notes on deploying a Phoenix 1.6 LiveView app to fly.io, including gotchas with health checks and outdated guides.

A multi-stage Dockerfile that pre-installs Ruby gems to cut GitLab CI build times for Jekyll sites by up to 90%.

Using openconnect as a reliable alternative to the GlobalProtect client for connecting to an institutional VPN on macOS.

A pre-class prompt for cybernetics students: watch some livecoding videos and think about what's shown, what's hidden, and who the feedback serves.

I'm leaving the ANU School of Computing for the new School of Cybernetics---here's what that means for students, colleagues and collaborators.

The ANU Laptop Ensemble's end-of-semester gig at sideway music bar, Sunday June 6, doors at 2pm.

The 2021 Australasian Computer Music Conference is happening in Sydney/Melbourne/online in late August---submissions welcome.