I built another thing. I don’t think it’s useful, not really, but I still built it. If, by some chance, you had always wanted a online search engine dedicated to Visions of Heaven and Hell, a 1994 documentary broadcast on Channel 4, then…congratulations? And we should probably say hello at some point?
The search engine in question.
Most of this was two afternoons, and the second was spent fiddling with CSS and picking an embedding model that would be fine in a browser process1.
I still can’t really tell you why I did it, either. I spent a good part of my free evenings in early July mainlining a lot of mid-90s BBC/C4 docs on the Internet and what it was going to do to us. Smiling at some bits and going “Oh, well, damn, you nailed that one.” Simultaneously re-reading The Invisibles to fully bask in that there’s-a-new-world-coming feeling2. I’d never seen Visions before, somehow, and it just felt like something I wanted to cut up and process with 2026 open source technology.
If you really want to be afraid, I have over 500 editions of Horizon on my NAS and I think the world needs them to be searchable…
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The Tree-SAE model took a bit longer, but as you might imagine, that was built for a potential revamp of my Adam Curtis site, so it was just hanging around and I thought it would transfer pretty nicely… ↩︎
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I was told there would be a lot more smart drinks and programmable nanofields in my future. ↩︎