Tim Bradshaw

The kingdom of lost hope A little over a year ago I wrote an essay called A history of the near future. How have things gone since then? Badly. Trump won the 2025 election convincingly, and has done exactly what ‘alarmists’ like me knew he would. Armed an... See more

Literals and constants in Common Lisp Or, constantp is not enough. Because I do a lot of things with Štar, and for other reasons, I spend a fair amount of time writing various compile-time optimizers for things which have the semantics of function calls. ... See more

Bubble talk has not damped Silicon Valley AI rush Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. During the 2010s tech boom, Silicon Valley’s uniform was the hooded sweatshirt. Mark Zuckerberg caused a stir on Wal... See more

A timing macro for Common Lisp For a long time I’ve used a little macro to time chunks of code to avoid an endless succession of boilerplate functions to do this. I’ve finally published the wretched thing. If you’re writing programs where you care about p... See more

The lost cause of the Lisp machines I am just really bored by Lisp Machine romantics at this point: they should go away. I expect they never will. History Symbolics went bankrupt in early 1993. In the way of these things various remnants of the company li... See more