Recent content on Bogdan Buduroiu
We must break with the totally erroneous perception that it is everyone’s civil liberty to communicate on encrypted messaging services. This was the quote of the quote of the former Danish Minister of Justice, when speaking on online communication, and the expectation of online privacy. Without getting too ideological, I firmly believe that, if you want current liberal democracy to prevail,…
My first original piece on the company blog, aimed at understanding how blending autoregressive generation and symbolic programs not only boosts the effectiveness of AI Agents on long-horizon tasks, but is also a free test oracle for steering Agent trajectories.
I’m instinctively appalled by news like this, but I’m also wondering, to what extent is the content inside these rare books made effectively useless to humanity, mainly due to the amount of gatekeeping that access to these kinds of materials enjoy.
When I started using Obsidian , it was a niche tool for people that were into Zettelkasten and Dark Mode. The Obsidianmaxxing scene seems to have migrated from Second Brainers to the AI technorati, given my mates were chatting about connecting Claude Code to Obsidian via MCP 1 . I blame this on Obsidian’s file-over-app philosophy that works out of the box with tools like Claude Code, and…
The Meiji Shrine in Central Tokyo is one of the largest Shinto shrines in Japan. It was dedicated to the deified spirits of Emperor Meiji and his wife for their role in the Meiji Restoration. The second and biggest torii gate in the Meiji Shrine complex is made out of Taiwanese Alishan Cypress Despite being built in 1920, the shrine and the surrounding park don’t look their age — stepping…
For Framework to be effective and cheap, they need scale and normies to switch. If that’s through Omarchy, good. If 1 more person can not buy an XPS this year, I’m happy. If Framework and Omarchy gets 1 more person to not buy a license from genocidaire-enabling Microsoft, I’m happy. I think this is orders of magnitude a better outcome, regardless of DHH. You could just buy second…
Strict No LLM / No AI Policy No LLMs for issues. No LLMs for pull requests. No LLMs for comments on the bug tracker, including translation. English is encouraged, but not required. You are welcome to post in your native language and rely on others to have their own translation tools of choice to interpret your words. Reading this on the Zig project page, I brushed it off as Zig sticking their head…
At the end of my AI Lent wrap up post post I wrote: I was sure that I would renounce the use of AI tools for good, and proudly proclaim my newfound wisdom and virtue to the world. Now, I’m not so sure. I recently stumbled upon this company’s landing page and hiring pitch: Your job is to build software environments that frontier AI fails at. You’ll do most of the building through coding…
Planning on making a proper build around this, which has some sort of weatherproofing, and can be mounted out-front.
Interesting insight that MoE models might be better suited for self-hosting, since apps like Claude Code require multiple models to work in parallel for different tasks.
Easter weekend has come and gone in a blitz, and seemingly, so has this challenge. As a reminder for those coming here for the first time: Refresher on ‘AI Lent’ In Christian tradition, Lent is a 40-day fast and repentance preceding Easter, beginning on Ash Wednesday and ending before Maundy Thursday or Easter. In that same vein, I chose to embark on a 40-day fast from any AI use.
It almost feels like writing a journal entry detailing some sort of relapse on the road to an addiction I’m trying to break. It felt like something I knew I shouldn’t do, but was too tempting not to indulge in. I felt my brain freed up from thinking about hard problems, and able to just scroll the internet while the agents did the work for me. After a couple of days, I was…
Article argues that we should value maintainers as guardians, and that maintaining is an unappreciated job, because if maintaining is done right, nothing happens.
A big part of the skill in building software is understanding what’s possible and what isn’t, and having at least a rough idea of how those things can be accomplished. At some point, I will release my post on why I think, regardless of LLM-assisted coding (but even more because of LLM-assisted coding), taste is one of the most important skills a Software Engineer can hone.
These “reforms” have predictably eroded the capacity of governments to carry out basic functions while increasing their dependence on profit-driven companies and contractors that often cost significantly more than government employees. […] contractors now outnumber federal employees by more than two to one (the size of the federal workforce has remained largely unchanged over the last half…
TLDR at the end For someone with a lot of free time to tinker with tech, Apple feels kinda meh nowadays. Don’t get me wrong, I think the technical innovations that allow the M Series chips to be this ridiculously powerful, battery efficient, silent, and cool is nothing short of impressive. The iPhone is also an incredibly well built product with an amazing camera, crisp Facetime calls, and…
I love this format, I like to see more human curation of content.
I haven’t watched any of the Marvel movies, the last Disney movie I enjoyed was the 1998 version of Mulan. However, I feel like I’ve watched all the Avengers movies by just seeing the billboard ads that appeared in Taipei, as well as through the plastic slop that gets shipped to movie theatres with the release. I’m not sure about Hollywood, but for STEM disciplines, a lot of…
Age verification is obviously a “casus belli” that a bunch of (mostly Western, mostly European) leaders adopt because they realise the next 10-20 years will be marked by having to lead from positions of deep unpopularity. Brussels though, chooses the path of authoritarianism and crushing dissent, to unite in a “totalitarian war union” (to borrow from Varoufakis), instead of…
Ok, * cracks knuckles * I know what I need to do to refactor this. It’s a bit hairy, at times containing anti-patterns, and quite highly coupled, but it’s nothing I haven’t tackled before. Oh wait… actually I spoke too soon, I think my initial assessment of the problem space was wrong, and there is a reason we ended up with this spagetto. I still have claude installed on…
What if instead of measuring AI by the standard of human intelligence, we measured human intelligence by the standard of AI. We have a clearer understanding of how AI works, than how the human brain works. Could this exercise actually help us derive some insights into ourselves? The paper argues that we’ve been actually doing this for decades, starting with how superhuman abilities…
Still really really hard to work with large codebases without AI, it’s really mentally draining, but I think it’s because I’ve relied on Claude Code for so long. This is so ironic, since refactoring large codebases should’ve been the Achilles heel of coding agents. I went back to my vim strategy to understand where I’m going wrong and why it’s hard for me to…
Long read about how the reading revolution of the 18th century was “a catastrophe for the ultra-privileged and exploitative aristocrats of the European aristocratic ancient regime”, how the rapid expansion of literacy helped destroy the old system of government with kings at the top, lords and clergy underneath and peasants squirming at the very bottom, and how our modern loss of…
Google Maps is not a directory, it’s a market maker. A lot of interesting findings in this one, including that Google Maps is surprisingly bad at categorising cuisines and restaurants (I’ve seen this as well in Taiwan), as well as the author’s own algorithm for finding underrated gems (and avoiding overrated restaurants) in London.
KPIs for digital products trend upwards and to the right when they provide us with the cloth mother to comfort our monkey brains. Despite the internet ridiculing Punch-kun’s use of a stuffed orangutan to comfort itself when being rejected by other macaques, this behaviour shows a socially positive way of dealing with loneliness and rejection.
it was the summer before my final year in university that a mate of mine introduced me to Ian Goodfellow’s “Explaining and Harnessing Adversarial Examples”. we were sitting in a Spoons on Southampton’s High Street when he showed me the infamous panda to gibbon via adversarial noise photo. as my final year started, i urged my supervisor to allow me to pick my own subject to…
Weekend time, spent it reading and engaging with various communities on Mastodon. Reading a lot more about the theoretical and machine learning part of training and deploying LLMs. Metrics Score Note Satisfaction Mental fatigue / cognitive load Number of PRs merged Time to complete desired features Confidence in released features
I’m treating this blog as future self-reference first. I consider keeping this digital garden well kept for myself will make it useful for others too.
I make use of RETURNING heavily when writing Postgres-based worker queues. It allows me to claim a job and immediately scan the returned row into a struct, unmarshall the payload based on the operation type, and dispatch it without a second round-trip to the database.
ThePrimeagen gloated about buying Micron stock when he learned that AI is very memory hungry, I didn’t really have my finger on the pulse to that degree. As someone that appreciates digital sovereignty, moving back to thin clients is something I fear. We can play around in the FOSS inflatable pool, but unless we manage to open source fabbing our own silicon, it’s nothing more than…
My second day without AI, it took me 4 hours to write a simple Express API
Most software engineering involves plumbing together the same 4 SaaS tools that corporate approved and negotiated contracts with . Most software engineers are mercenaries, typing away for cash. Most of the frustration software engineers face in the industry comes from the deadly impression that they’re actually artists.
Good balance between hype and doom in this article responding a NYT’s op-ed calling AI ‘mid’ . A piece stuck out to me is how the author describes AI changing the constraint landscape , especially around how we interact with information: Transformer-based AI has fundamentally changed how we interact with information […]. Being able to skip, summarize and compare content -…
Rediscovering the beauty of computation primitives - loops, templates, etc. I mainly did some edits to my dotfiles and this blog. Introduced the /links archetype (inspired by Simon Willison ) and fixed some broken Tailwind CSS. Metrics Score Note Satisfaction 8 Mental fatigue / cognitive load 3 mostly templating work today Number of PRs merged 0 Time to complete desired features 8 Confidence in…
I find a lot of links, many of them end up in Linkhut , which is quite nice for social sharing, but I’d like to surface them here too.
Today I wrote a small Express-based API. When letting my mind flow freely, a lot of ideas bubbled up naturally, as opposed to forcing half-baked ones out through a plan mode session where I iterate with Claude. I ended up not going the route of a managed API Gateway like Apigee, and rolling my own auth. The hard part has been finding information. Websearch is terrible, I’m spending 5-10…
Cancelled Claude Max, uninstalled Claude Code, as I won’t be needing them for the next 40 days. Wrote a small Nix package, noticed vim motions feeling rusty. Also feels much harder to think how to structure a piece of code. Definitely feeling the atrophy Metrics Score Note Satisfaction 6 mostly just frustrated that everything feels hard again Mental fatigue / cognitive load 8 learning to…
陪女友返鄉為了不要把手夾在屁股裡拜訪要買一些伴手禮。 到北車的時間已經有點趕，滿座的火車10分鐘以內就會離開月台。好啊買兩盒六月初一蛋捲絕對不會出錯。 我乖乖去排隊，前一位買9盒蛋捲的阿姨準備結帳。浪費的每一秒都感覺離錯過火車更近了一步。 同時，阿姨開始猶豫9盒蛋捲夠不夠…「再買3盒比較好，你們最受歡迎的口味是哪一個… 好那再3盒芝麻好了」。 店員：「現在買5送一，免費送你再兩盒，想要什麼口味呢」。 這句話使阿姨重新考慮她全部的蛋捲佈局，「啊啊啊那這6盒芝麻要換3個原味3盒巧克力」。 最後總共買了15盒。店員問她：「要不要買袋子」 「不要」
The 40 days of Lent are typically associated with the days Jesus spent fasting in the desert, resisting the temptation of Satan. It has become a religious tradition in Christian religions to also fast from Ash Wednesday to Easter. I think it’s unfair to compare the Devil to AI, but I digress. 'My Child will X' meme with a take on AI However, to keep in tune with the story of Lent, starting…
I chose Hugo for setting up my static blog. I like using vim , and I want to just use the tools I already use for coding to write markdown blog posts, run git add . && git commit -m "new" && git push origin main and have a new article land on my blog. I want my repo to be my CMS, my declarative configuration of all Hugo parameters and plugins, as well as the declarative configuration of the build…
I like to be fast. I like to code fast. I like to press two keys and refactor the name of a function across an entire repository. I like Treesitter. I also like LSPs. And most importantly, I use vim btw . As an engineer, one of your main jobs is keeping multiple concepts in your mind, letting them slosh around up there until eureka strikes, and ultimately, knowing precisely where to find or insert…
My mate organised a “setup Openclaw” hangout today. I’m not really thrilled about Clawdbot , Moltbot , Openclaw, but what the hell, my theme for 2026 is community, hanging out with friends is part of community, and I thought I could give myself a nice challenge here, so I joined, with the idea of setting up Openclaw my own way. Since Sprites and exe.dev came on the scene,…
Mike Carney leading with Thucydides’ quote on “strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they must”. Thucydides does not offer the line, “The strong do what they can,” as a neutral analysis of how international affairs operate. He offers it as an expression of the reckless arrogance that brought about the destruction of the Athenian Empire. Impressive seeing western world leaders challenging…
When people talk about controversial emojis, they usually think of: the finger-pinch emoji U+1F90F (🤏) that was at the center of anti-feminist conspiracy theories alleging it’s use for body-shaming men. the water gun emoji U+1F52B (🔫) which replaced the revolver emoji following US school shootings the pregnant man, pregnant person emoji U+1FAC3 U+1FAC4 (🫃 🫄) which are used to represent…
Warning - Please read before proceeding Following the steps outlined in this blog post might brick your device
When I bought my first Linux laptop, the Framework 13, I decided I wanted to do something different. Similar to how I wanted to forego prebuilt blog themes for my personal blog and instead let the style reflect my person, I also wanted to opt for a completely bare distro that would allow me to configure my laptop just how I saw fit. Nothing more, nothing less. So I took the leap from the pristine,…
Updated frequently, keep checking… 父母 Beats, eats and seats. Mix between an American diner and a British pub.