Recent content on Little Epiphanies
If you gave everyone an intern, would your team be more efficient? For anyone who has either been an intern or had an intern, I think the answer is emphatically and obviously no . There are many reasons to hire an intern, but speaking from my experience as a one-time intern and now years later as a senior FAANG engineer, you don’t hire an intern to make the software development lifecycle…
I stumbled upon this fascinating documentary about a city on the outskirts of Hong Kong that would feel at home in a Jodorowsky graphic novel (particularly the fantastic The Incal ). Kowloon Walled City was a military fort ceded by the Chinese to the British as part of the colony, then abandoned by British colonials and occupied by pirates and squatters. Later on, it was ruled by an organized…
Over the last 30 years, the internet has accumulated the breadth of human knowledge and experience and placed it at our fingertips. You can find almost anything on the internet—the answer to any question, the text of any book, or a survey of the research of any particular field. AI enthusiasts and tech companies poised to profit off of AI promise that, having been trained on this breadth of…
It’s been a little while since I watched Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris , the Soviet director’s 1973 movie adaptation of a classic sci-fi novel of the same name written by Stanislaw Lem. But the other day, it suddenly struck me that, for being a work from the Cold War, Solaris provides a metaphor that I have been grasping for—a metaphor that helps explain how large language models are able to learn…
I just played a surprisingly fun Earthbound-style text adventure in ChatGPT. After this, I’m convinced that we are not very far away from (simple) custom games tailor-made to your tastes. It’s also quite easy to imagine playing an AI-generated Dungeons and Dragons campaign. Prompt: I am playing a text adventure game whose theme is Earthbound, the SNES game. You present me with specific…
I’ve been reading The Productive Programmer for a book club and it’s put me on a productivity binge. It’s an older book and many of its recommendations no longer apply, so I got excited when, while researching modern alternatives for some of the tools the author recommends, I happened to stumble on Alfred . Alfred is a replacement for the Mac spotlight that has already changed…
A short review of the media I’ve consumed this week (week of 9/24/22)
of Montreal was killer - 9/11/22 - The Mohawk
A catalog of media you can borrow from me
A showcase of notable side-projects I'm proud of
