James Potato Finger

Making small low stakes games from time to time, and printing the occasional zine.

Some time doodler.

Gardening a bit.

I indulge myself in writing software and music.

Big fan of mosses.
[he/ they]

web: https://www.jameschip.io/home.html
itch: https://jameschip.itch.io/
zines: https://shop.jameschip.io

Public Key

npub1t8kyje7kss8rxcdyz777p9lel0w5fhzr5s094y38rqp0df0ydd8q4608r6

NIP-05 Address

jameschip_at_merveilles.town@momostr.pink

Profile Code

nprofile1qqs9nmzfvltggr3nvxjp000qjlulhh2ym3p6g8j6jgn3sqhk5hjxknspz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduqs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0dsdzh2k0

Publishing to

relay.damus.io

nos.lol

nostr.mom

Author Public Key

npub1t8kyje7kss8rxcdyz777p9lel0w5fhzr5s094y38rqp0df0ydd8q4608r6

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Last Notes

2026-08-31 17:34:15 UTC

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I have not done this in decades and it is a damn shame.

2026-07-04 15:16:45 UTC

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I have read so many ring bound books lately that I get this on every page.

2026-06-20 19:44:18 UTC

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this is like the old lady who swallowed a fly. You'll have to pick up something to get rid of the wasps next.

2026-06-06 16:21:24 UTC

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I read this for the first time a year or so ago and was blown away by it. I wish I could go back and read it for the first time again.

2026-05-02 19:14:31 UTC

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ah, all of the finest SI units of measurements.

2026-04-20 16:04:05 UTC

Sometimes I think about that time I went to the doctor and was reading The Dawn of Everything while waiting, and when I walked in the first thing he said was "that's a heavy read for an electrician".
That is going to live rent free in my head for the rest of my days.

2026-03-25 10:48:44 UTC

For sale locally, one cat statue.
https://assets.merveilles.town/media_attachments/files/116/289/414/808/672/072/original/c5f36b2da02076f2.jpg

2025-09-29 08:57:47 UTC

What are you currently using as a bookmark?
Mine is an old folded up shopping list.

2025-08-27 09:51:17 UTC

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behold, my mostly unreadable scratching. #MervPenmanship
https://assets.merveilles.town/media_attachments/files/115/100/099/374/354/106/original/b3b47559a99f2289.jpg

2025-08-27 06:30:10 UTC

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this is wild to me as here we were taught to write 'joined up' from very very early, almost at the same time as learning the letter shapes, and nearly nobody I know here does not write like that.
The upshot is that everyone I know has equally unique and illegible hand writing as we all drifted from the official method I to an individual style.
I would love to see how y'all write, I love seeing people's handwriting.

2025-08-23 17:18:57 UTC

Oh shit, I am out of tea! Completely out. Not a leaf in the house. What the fuck am I to do in the morning if there is no tea?
Do not suggest coffee or you will get a real slap.

2025-05-07 07:05:37 UTC

So my wife has received a complaint from a parent about her marking a students mock exam too low.
Now, the way the marking of mocks works at my wife's school is that the teachers are paired up randomly, they mark their own, and their partners, and then compare to make sure no mistakes are made.
One of the people in the department works for the exam board as a marker too, so makes sure everyone knows what to look for and how to mark.
It is a good system that works very accurately.
So the text in question has been marked twice, both times finding identical scores. When the complaint came in it was then also checked by the person who does the marking, and they got the same again.
The reason the parent insists, still, that the paper was marked low is that they have run the answers through an AI marking bot that came out with a high score.
So they then checked the marking the AI did and, shock of shocks, it is wildly wrong. It missed marks where they should have been awarded, doled out buckets of marks for things the exam board do not look for, gave marks for things that are just wrong.
It was a mess.
But the parent insists the school is wrong because a computer can not make a mistake.
And here is the thing, they are right.
A computer can not make a mistake.
This is where I remind my wife of Charles Babbage complaining of people asking him if they put the wrong input into the difference engine, would the right answer come out. Of course it wont.
In this case the input from the user is not wrong, but the input by the developers.
The model has been given a wrong instruction set, and so no matter what the input the output will always be "wrong".
And here is the astounding thing. The output is not really wrong. The computer has output the result it has been told to output. The error is not a computer error, it is a human error.
And this is a thing that troubles me about there tools. They don't eliminate human error, they amplify it.
Through lack of transparency, verification, and gimmicky marketing catchphrases, they completely mask the human error in the creation of the machine, and amplify it as valid because a machine can not make a mistake.

2025-01-14 06:54:43 UTC

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actually this is set to low 6, which it maximum. The 0 at the bottom is just there. We dont know why. To turn it off you rotate the 0 on the dial anti clockwise towards low where it reaches the end of its travel at about the 1 o'clock point.
Nothing about this makes any sense.

2025-01-13 13:50:56 UTC

There should be a chapter in The Design of Everyday Things devoted to this dial.
https://assets.merveilles.town/media_attachments/files/113/821/354/977/193/295/original/483a02a79f6cc4a6.jpg

2024-12-20 16:28:25 UTC

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How resonable is it to embed the text of a small book in a QR code I wonder.

2024-12-20 16:22:28 UTC

Me: I should update my website.
Me: *anything else, anything else at all*

2024-12-20 06:35:58 UTC

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yeah, I eill grant that "heed" might be a bit old, but who is not using "as for" and "meanwhile" in every day use. Some of these seem current for me.

2024-10-30 12:36:29 UTC

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this is now one of my favoritr threads because it names the mosses. Thanks.

2024-09-29 11:20:22 UTC

What is the point in chapters? Why bother.