Put the phone down. Go make the machine misbehave.
Every other week I put out one thing to build or break — a little synth in Pure Data, a bug and exactly how I found it, thirty-odd lines of assembly painting your screen colours it has no business displaying. It's all free, right here on the site.
// every issue, three things
// issues so far
Read issue #00 free → · browse all issues · plain-text editions · RSS feed
// the whole idea, in one screen
You were promised a computer. You got a slot machine.
The feed's whole job is to keep your thumb moving and your hands empty — and lately half of what slides past is machine-made mush: posts nobody wrote, pictures nobody drew, made to be forgotten a second later. Junk food that snacks on you.
And no — before you sigh — this isn't an anti-AI rant. I lean on the stuff daily to skip the boring bits and build stranger things with the hours I claw back, and I automate half my recon with it. The line I care about isn't AI or no-AI. It's this:
Same lump of silicon: in the maker's hand it's a workshop, in the consumer's hand it's a doomscrolling distraction.
So MAKE / BREAK is me stubbornly staying on the workshop side of that line, out loud, every other week — and dragging a few mates back over with me.
> reboot --into curiosity
// yes, an actual human wrote this. at 1am. that's sort of the whole point.
— the Norfolk Hacker
// two moves, one habit