Major errors on this blog (and their corrections) | Patreon

Here's a list of errors on this blog that I think were fairly serious. While what I think of as serious is, of course, subjective, I don't think there's any reasonable way to avoid that because, e.g., I make a huge number of typos, so many that the majority of acknowledgements on many posts are for people who e-mailed or DM'ed me typo fixes.

A list that included everything, including typos would both be uninteresting for other people to read as well as high overhead for me, which is why I've drawn the line somewhere. An example of an error I don't think of as serious is, in this post on how I learned to program, I originally had the dates wrong on when the competition programmers from my high school made money (it was a couple years after I thought it was). In that case, and many others, I don't think that the date being wrong changes anything significant about the post.

Although I'm publishing the original version of this in 2021, I expect this list to grow over time. I hope that I've become more careful and that the list will grow more slowly in the future than it has in the past, but that remains to be seen. I view it as a good sign that a large fraction of the list is from my first three months of blogging, in 2013, but that's no reason to get complacent!

I've added a classification below that's how I think of the errors, but that classification is also arbitrary and the categories aren't even mutually exclusive. If I ever collect enough of these that it's difficult to hold them all in my head at once, I might create a tag system and use that to classify them instead, but I hope to not accumulate so many major errors that I feel like I need a tag system for readers to easily peruse them.

Thanks to Anja Boskovic and Ville Sundberg for comments/corrections/discussion.