Photo of Luke

Welcome to my website.

By day I am a cognitive scientist. I'm interested in similarities and differences between biological evolution and the evolution of culturally transmitted things like languages or scientific theories. I explore questions in this space using mathematical and computation models, often with strong Bayesian or information theoretic flavours. I support open access and reproducable computational science.

By night I am something of a hacker, in most of the traditional senses of that word. I write free software, mostly in Python. Statistically speaking, you are most likely to know me for PrettyTable, if anything; I'd like to be known for some cool cypherpunk project one day. More recently I have started designing free hardware; mostly audio electronics and homebrew computing stuff. I like tech which is small, simple, elegant, secure, robust, decentralised, extensible, non-consumerist, and puts the user in control while respecting their privacy and autonomy. Needless to say, I find almost everything most "tech geeks" have been excited about in the last ten years or so to be some combination of boring, irritating or horrifying.

In pursuit of the above, I am occasionally motivated to write something. In theory, long and detailed stuff becomes an article, which is occasionally updated for accuracy, completeness and up-to-dateness, while shorter, off-the-cuff stuff becomes an uncurated blog post. In practice, I put things wherever I put them.

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