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Paul, senior software engineer on the data and infrastructure team, called to design and implement a set of tools and MCP for an agentic harness, set apart for the technical vision of the CTO, which he outlined beforehand through his directors in the 2026 engineering roadmap, the vision concerning Claude, trained on all human knowledge according to the data, and declared to have expert coding…
Jorge Luis Borges died on June 14, 1986, a couple of months before the landmark paper from Rumelhart, Hinton and Williams that demonstrated that backpropagation could be used to train neural networks. He might have noticed, in 1985-6, when they showed a neural network that could learn XOR, ending the (first) “AI winter” started by Minsky and Papert’s Perceptrons book in the late…
Ten rules for human/AI writing collaborations: You, as the human, give meaning. You’re the author; the AI is the assistant. Don’t bow down to it or serve it. Don’t take the AI’s words in vain; make them your own before you call them your own. Remember that writing is thinking. Leslie Lamport said, “If you’re thinking without writing, you only think you’re…
Some interesting plays, found by playing with statcast’s data from 2015-2024. Swinging pitchout The most halfhearted attempt ever to protect a runner on a hit-and-run. Good thing he missed; the throw ended up in center field and the runner made it to third. Foul pitchout A more serious attempt to actually hit the ball. This one actually played out well: Diaz grounded out but the runner…
The American flag has fifty stars and thirteen stripes, representing the fifty states and thirteen original colonies. But which ones are they? I Naively there are ( 50 13 ) = 354 , 860 , 518 , 600 \binom{50}{13} = 354,860,518,600 possibilities. King George would have no chance of finding them! But we can do better. II Clearly the thirteen colonies must have been contiguous. Let’s look at the…
Lewis Carroll first posed the thought experiment in 1893 : “That’s another thing we’ve learned from your Nation,” said Mein Herr, “map-making. But we’ve carried it much further than you. What do you consider the largest map that would be really useful?” “About six inches to the mile.” “Only six inches!” exclaimed Mein Herr.…
The Torah speaks of four types of software engineers - the staff engineer, the senior engineer, the junior engineer, and the intern . The staff engineer , what does he say? “What are the servers, pipelines, and databases that make up the system?” And you must show him the system diagram, and explain to him every detail down to the data layer. The senior engineer , what does he say?…
I As I lay in bed that fateful evening, I recalled with mounting unease an unsettling conversation I’d had with Farnsworth just a few days prior. With an intensity far beyond his mere decade, he swore to me that there would be no visit tonight from an ancient, long-buried horror. There would be no arrival, he assured me, heralded by the spectral tolling of otherworldly bells, as the eldritch…
In Pirkei Avot, the sages passed on their wisdom in many areas of life. It’s lesser known that they focused heavily on startups and the tech world: On Ramen profitability : Such is the way of a life [of a startup]: you shall eat bread with salt, and rationed water shall you drink; you shall sleep on the ground, your life will be one of privation, and in [your startup] shall you labor. If you…