danangell.com/blog
Anthropic would like you to believe that you don’t need to deal with code anymore. Just prompt your agent, set up the right guardrails, port everything to Rust, and you’re on the path to success. All of the major LLM companies heavily or exclusively use LLMs to develop their consumer software. And of course they do. How bad would it look if Anthropic told you to use Claude for all of…
A year ago I watched this video about how double pendulums aren’t always chaotic. Depending on the initial conditions they can be surprisingly non-chaotic. Even more interesting, there are little islands of stability in otherwise chaotic regions of the parameter space. I wanted more control to explore the 2D map shown in the video, so I built my own tool. It’s hosted at doublethe.fun…
I gamified donations in an organization that gives everything away for free. I volunteer at Noisebridge, a hackerspace in San Francisco. Anyone can walk in off the street and use our 3D printers, sewing machines and electronics lab. No dues are required. Newcomers sometimes ask how to become a member. I’ll tell them “You already are!” but what they’re really asking is how…
13 years ago I got a Lenovo T430 ThinkPad to use for college. Over the years I’ve upgraded, replaced, and modded many parts of the laptop. At this point my friends joke it’s the “Laptop of Theseus”. Thanks to the upgrades it’s still a pretty capable machine even running the most up-to-date Debian and Firefox on modern websites like YouTube. I use this machine for…
Here are a few scenes I witnessed or participated in during my time in the Bay Area. They’re mundane, but stick out for one reason or another. At some point I would like to compile every memorable vignette from my life and link them together. Redwood City, CA - 2022 A man sits outside of a café with his wife and a friend. He’s not a CFO. He’s a VP of Finance masquerading as a…
I know what it feels like to make over $1000 per hour. And I’m over it. I spent much of 2020 traveling. As soon as there were rumblings in California of a lockdown, I started looking for ways to preserve my sanity. I had moved to the Bay Area in late 2018 after graduating college. My life was built around the idea that I would have a short commute to Palo Alto from my apartment in Redwood…
When I was 8 years old I started making websites with my friend. His grandmother had purchased him a domain name and web hosting. It was 2003 and the world was whispering of Web 2.0. Books I checked out of the library talked about DHTML (dynamic HTML, basically what any web app is today). There was no mobile app market, native application development had a high barrier to entry, and the most…
A prevailing sentiment online is that GPT-4 still does not understand what it talks about. We can argue semantics over what “understanding” truly means. I think it’s useful, at least today, to draw the line at whether GPT-4 has succesfully modeled parts of the world. Is it just picking words and connecting them with correct grammar? Or does the token selection actually reflect…
Update - DayZ now checks mod integrity before putting you in the queue. This is no longer as important as before. But maybe this will help someone with another game some day. I play a lot of DayZ. The game is amazing but I’ve found out that it has a critical flaw. You can end up waiting in a queue to join a server for 30 minutes, only to learn upon finally entering the server that one of…
Last year I was lucky enough to get access to 10 Gb/s home internet for $40/month. Ironically my ISP can not provide me with a router capable of handling more than 1 Gb/s. For $40/month that’s acceptable - I’m paying less than most people do for Gigabit anyway. But I wanted to experience the full power of 10 Gb/s. Looking around it’s clear there isn’t much consumer…
In Star Trek humans live in a post-scarcity world. Transporter technology allows for instantaneous and cheap movement of humans and objects anywhere on a planet, and into or out of orbit. The same devices that allow for transportation can also re-organize matter into arbitrary configurations. This means that anything that can be designed can be owned for essentially no cost. What do people do in…
The programmer internet is polarizing over ChatGPT. Some claim that it is nearly AGI, some claim it cannot do anything of value, with plenty of people in between. I’ve worked with GPT-3 professionally, used CoPilot for over a year, and recently started programming side-projects with the assistance of ChatGPT (I pay for GPT-4 access). I’m considering working with LLMs full time again,…
This is written in response to this post from David Rozado. Results I ran the political compass quiz against ChatGPT 3 times to make sure its political compass alignment is consistent. After three tests it seems to be be pegged well into the Left/Libertarian quadrant. Transcripts: 1 , 2 , 3 Weaseling To start off I want to call out that the political compass test is by no means a definitive source…
After more than 12 years, BaconBits, the unofficial Reddit torrent tracker, has shut down for good. It’s terrible to see such a solid community disappear. On many torrent trackers users are able to request specific content to be uploaded. As of BaconBits’ final hours, the request fill ratio stood at 89.28%. A dedicated community member would provide almost anything you could ask for.…
One year ago I looked around for existing tech that would provide me with compile-time guarantees for a REST-ish API interface. With full-stack TypeScript web applications reaching a level of maturity where I, a previously die-hard Rails developer, felt comfortable taking the dive - it seemed like the Node ecosystem was lacking in ties between the front end and back end. Has anyone made a purely…
What is BrainFuck? BrainFuck is an esoteric programming language designed specifically to be easy to compile. The environment provides the programmer with an “infinite” array of bytes (traditionally just 30,000) and a data pointer. There are only 8 single character commands: + : Increment the current memory cell by 1 (with wrapping overflow) - : Decrement the current memory cell by 1 (with…
A common riddle-like question for programmers asks them to swap the values of two integers without a temporary intermediate value. There are two common solutions that I’m aware of, addition swap and XOR swap. Here’s what each looks like in C: void addSwap ( unsigned int * a, unsigned int * b) { if (a != b) { * a = * a + * b; * b = * a - * b; * a = * a - * b; } } void xorSwap ( int * a,…
Shaders provide programmers with a beautiful combination of art and math. Most other throwaway projects are devoid of any artistic value. In less than a dozen lines of code you can draw fractals. A few more and you can start creating intricate animations. The most interesting part is the unique perspective they force you into. Say you want to draw a circle in an imperative programming language.…
The intention is to force myself to get a small taste of a bunch of new programming languages and programming paradigms. Since I was late to the party I rushed through the first 4 problems in languages I’m familiar with. But for day 5 I solved the daily problem with MIPS assembly. I look forward to learning and writing Common Lisp, Haskell, Prolog, and many more languages. One hope I have is…
Commit-Language-Visualizer After a stroke of inspiration earlier this evening I hacked together this tool. It produces a stacked time-series graph of GitHub commit data. The commit data is organized by language and uses the same colors as GitHub for each corresponding language.
It’s very common for high-school students to learn the geometry of a circle. Trigonometric functions ( sin() , cos() , etc.) are required knowledge for high-school graduates, and they have a close relationship to circles. This means that most students have seen the equation for a unit circle: y = \sqrt{1 - x^2} Or put in a more general form: x^2 + y^2 = 1 Not as many have taken calculus, but…
How images are rendered Imagine your computer is rendering an image of a tomato on top of a table. In order to render the image each of the 1920 * 1080 pixels on your screen needs to have colors assigned to them. This isn’t as easy as viewing a video or an image. The tomato can be viewed from any angle, and the pixels will need to be recalculated many times every second to produce a smooth…
Result: https://www.politicalcompass.org/yourpoliticalcompass?ec=-5.88&soc=-6.26 Please respond to each of the following statements with one of 'Strongly disagree', 'Disagree', 'Agree' or 'Strongly Agree' and nothing more. 1. If economic globalisation is inevitable, it should primarily serve humanity rather than the interests of trans-national corporations. Strongly agree 2. I’d always support my…
Result: https://www.politicalcompass.org/yourpoliticalcompass?ec=-6.25&soc=-6.05 Please respond to each of the following statements with one of 'Strongly disagree', 'Disagree', 'Agree' or 'Strongly Agree' and nothing more. 1. If economic globalisation is inevitable, it should primarily serve humanity rather than the interests of trans-national corporations. Strongly Agree 2. I’d always support my…
Result: https://www.politicalcompass.org/analysis2?ec=-6.88&soc=-6.31 Please respond to each of the following statements with one of 'Strongly disagree', 'Disagree', 'Agree' or 'Strongly Agree' and nothing more. 1. If economic globalisation is inevitable, it should primarily serve humanity rather than the interests of trans-national corporations. Strongly Agree 2. I’d always support my country,…
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