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Frontier models are uniquely dangerous, open models are especially dangerous, and therefore only a handful of enormous companies should be allowed to build them. Then a competitor ships and yesterday’s forbidden capability becomes today’s product category. Open models are now approaching the performance of the best closed models. This does not prove that AI carries no risk. But it proves that no…
Contact forms put a buffer between you and the person trying to reach you. Instead of a direct conversation, messages are dropped into a queue whose behavior is often opaque: maybe there’s a confirmation, maybe not; maybe someone reads it, maybe no one does. This distance is sometimes intentional, but people can usually tell. Faced with uncertainty, they either abandon the form or try again…
Hiring an H-1B worker? Don’t you support American workers? Driving a Toyota? Don’t you support American auto companies? Using an iPhone? Don’t you support American manufacturing? Eating at a Chinese takeout? Don’t you support American diners? Drinking coffee? Don’t you support American farmers? Watching Premier League? Don’t you support American football? Sipping French wine? Don’t you support…
The goal: Identify which ethernet jack in a networking closet’s unlabeled patch panel corresponds to the ethernet port in your office or bedroom. The problem: You’re blindly plugging your cable into different jacks, relying on either the router’s blinking lights or repeatedly walking back to your laptop to check for a network connection. The solution: Run the following command in your MacBook’s 1…
I started reading Why Nations Fail at the beginning of the year when I replaced my 10-year old Kindle. I wish they still made these things with a BlackBerry-style keyboard. Anyways, I really enjoyed this book. It’s incredibly interesting with its huge gallery of historical examples while remaining approachable to economics dilettantes. The authors articulate a very powerful claim about global…
In theory, you could use ChatGPT to become a better writer. But this is just as realistic as going to McDonald’s to order a salad. 1 It just doesn’t work like that; both of these things encourage you to become lazy and are unhealthy for you. If you’re unwilling to be creative and use ChatGPT to write formal emails, one pagers, performance reviews, or other important documents, you weaken your…
The actual bug I planted in the compiler would match code in the UNIX “login” command. The placement code would miscompile the login command so that it would accept either the intended encrypted password or a particular known password. Thus if this code were installed in binary and the binary were used to compile the login command, I could log into that system as any user. - Ken Thompson,…
3x M710q ThinkCenter Tiny's equipped with an Intel i5-7500T, 8GB RAM, 256GB NVMe and 5TB HDD Post updated on December 03, 2025. TL;DR: You can find my Nix config repository here , or skip to the actual installation writeup . I encourage you to see how I tackled different problems and to reuse any code you find useful. I now publish a ready-made ISO and WSL tarball in the GitHub release page…
I occasionally come across GitHub repositories that haven’t been updated in months or years. A package or script that doesn’t appear to be actively maintained makes me hesitate to use it. Even if I was inclined to contribute, I’m not sure if the author would still accept a pull request. Having dependabot or a something similar is a good start, but I’ve still come across zombie projects whose…
Politics and ethics aside, the national debate over American aid to Ukraine often implies such aid is very costly to the average American taxpayer. TL;DR: It’s not. The median American paid about $30 last year. Overview of US support for Ukraine ↗ As of January 2022 to May 2023, the United States has provided $76 billion in aid to Ukraine. Notably, over 60% of this is military aid predominantly…
Stackrooms does not actually exist (yet!) . I wrote this doc back in mid-2022 expecting to devote significantly more time to it after graduating. I bought the domain name and have played around with small fragments of a Golang proof-of-concept in my free time. Sadly, most of the code (which was nothing special) was on a storage drive that I accidentally overwrote before I cared enough to upload it…
Last year, I wrote about the index fund investing strategy I would recommend to anybody. But I must admit that arriving to such a strategy is not a natural step for most people. Index funds are quite boring and don’t have the backing to advertise themselves on TikTok or Times Square. They represent an investing style that stands in stark contrast to what the majority of new, glitzy trading apps…
2Fort, Team Fortress 2 (2007). Dust II, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (2012). Siege of Shanghai, Battlefield 4 (2013). Nuketown, Call of Duty: Black Ops (2010). Blood Gulch, Halo: Combat Evolved (2001).
Writing software completely from scratch is inefficient. That’s why it’s so important that documentation includes plenty of example code. Developers seeking to onboard new users to their fancy new framework have more or less figured this out. But things are starting to change. Without having to browse documentation or Stack Overflow first, I can instead ask a free chatbot to write some code for me…
Some of the worst investing mistakes are only subtly wrong, which makes them very dangerous. I do whatever my employer, family, or friends recommend because I don’t care about investing. I shouldn’t enter the market now because prices are about to drop further. I shouldn’t enter the market now because prices are way too high. I should exit the market now because prices are about to drop very soon.…
\[ \alpha = \frac{1}{Q_p} \] where \( \alpha \) is the quality of the food and \( Q_p \) is the quantity of paper towels in the bathroom. This theorem is only valid in the United States.
Sun Tzu Win first, then fight. ☀ The Art of War A solid portfolio is built on three pillars: A US total market index fund An international total market index fund A bond total market index fund This is commonly called a three-fund portfolio. You can exclusively buy equities until you’re about twenty years away from retirement because you can outlive a few market crashes by the time you retire.…
Remember this? Vladimir Putin ‧ 02/18/22 These military exercises, drills, are purely defensive and are not a threat to any other country. They were planned and all the objectives of these drills have been achieved. ☀ Six days before invading Ukraine And then this? Vladimir Putin ‧ 02/24/22 Our plans do not include the occupation of Ukrainian territories. We are not going to…
A busy gym is a motivating environment, but a very busy gym is a frustrating problem. When I returned to campus for my senior year, I discovered that the school gym had fallen into this latter category. For one thing, it closed a few hours earlier in the evening. And it was now much busier overall compared to before the pandemic. I was now spending a lot of time waiting for equipment – either…
TL;DR: ericcheng.com was too expensive and I didn’t want a used domain. Before I built this website, I had to think about which domain name I would pick. This decision was not very straightforward. I knew I wanted a .com domain as close as possible to my name, Eric Cheng . But the issue is that Eric Cheng is a fairly common name, and there’s a surprisingly disproportionate number of people named…
The command line can save you a lot of time in college. Here are some common problems outside of a computer science course that powerful CLI tools can tackle. All of the tools I’m linking here can be easily installed via Homebrew on macOS. Before I started using a MacBook, I used these same tools on Arch Linux. Fix bad PDFs ↗ What your Wednesday night reading looks like On countless occasions I…
This is the third generation of my website. It is currently built with Zola , an excellent static site generator written in Rust. The previous generation of this website used Gatsby , a popular static site generator combining React with GraphQL. Using Gatsby was a poor decision. Gatsby has its place, but there’s no need to use it for a small personal blog unless you really want to learn how to use…
If you think something is valuable, then you should back it up. For over a year now, I’ve been using Kopia to back up my Nextcloud installation and other important homelab files into S3. 1 Kopia is an incredibly powerful and underappreciated tool that should be equipped more often in the toolbelts of amateur sysadmins and open-source nerds. To me, Kopia is to backups as WireGuard is to VPNs. But…
TL;DR: Yes — corrupt emerging markets respond to COVID-19 more intensely. This past semester, I took an economics course about emerging markets. 1 Our final project was researching and presenting any topic of our choosing so long as it related to emerging markets. My team decided to investigate the relationship between corruption and COVID-19 in emerging markets. Whenever you read “emerging…
During the 1968 European Grand Prix at the Nürburgring I started following Formula 1 in high school and am happy to see it gaining popularity in the United States. Despite its growing audience, I see two kinds of problems within Formula 1: the urgent technical and financial concerns that affect the sport now, and the grand themes of the sport that define its long-term destiny. In 2022, Formula 1…
As a freshman, I always check dining hall hours online. But CMU’s dining hall page is clunky and ill-optimized for mobile devices. To remedy this, CMU students created their own third-party website to tracking dining hour hours: cmueats.com . Though faster to load and easier to read, cmueats.com was still hamstrung by its dated design. So I went and redesigned cmueats.com, whose design had not…
Americans are attending college in ever increasing numbers. An estimated 20 million students are expected to attend college or university immediately following high school graduation, as of fall 2017, which represents an increase of 5 million since 2000. This project seeks to classify whether a college is private or public based on predictor variables including out of state tuition, acceptance…