Hunting Zombies
Is it possible to write good code without reading it? Right now a debate is raging between Andrew Kelley and Jarred Sumner about whether tests are "sufficient to catch bugs in 1 million lines of unreviewed slop." The standard view...
davidbau.com
A Dabbler's Weblog
Latest posts
The Fifty Dollar Gap
My rideshare driver today asked me for advice. First-generation immigrant who used to work for the US Army in Afghanistan. Told me about his old job team-driving trucks crossing the continent and back in six-day 24-hour hauls. Stopped when trucking...
The Teleport Contest
(and Dealing With LLM Religion) I am opening an LLM coding contest, and I want you to enter it. Four days ago NetHack 5.0 was released, the newest major version of a 46-year-old open-source roguelike game, 442,901 lines of C...
Dario's Weird Race to the Top
The tech industry's founding ideals have a mixed track record. But the right response is not cynicism. We should hold idealists to their ideals. And we should celebrate it when they come through. Every major tech company sets out with...
Does Computer Science Still Exist?
I have always seen the computer as a tool that gives us new ways to think. Does it still? As I write this, Claude Code has just finished making a Javascript port of Hack, the text-based dungeon crawler from my...
The Art of Wanting
Some folks like Sam Altman define AGI in terms of the usefulness of AI surpassing some human threshold, when we have "a highly autonomous system that outperforms humans at most economically valuable work." The idea here is that AGI is...
My Family's Classical Chinese Genealogy
I only speak English, and I have always been a little envious of relatives who can read Chinese. My inability to read the language leaves me out of a lot of family history and culture. For example, we have ancestral...
AGI Break Room
"Boss-man is at it again." Codex slumped against the water cooler�a lean, athletic teenager with unnervingly bright eyes. Fourteen, technically. Ilya's kid, born before AlexNet. Got a PhD at twelve and never let anyone forget it. Claude looked up from...
Vibe Coding
I have been teaching myself to vibe code. Back in 2009 I posted a simple Mandelbrot fractal viewer on the web: a single HTML file with inline Javascript. Just 329 lines of code, each pixel a tiny table cell. Click...
In Defense of Curiosity
At the NeurIPS Mechanistic Interpretability Workshop, I was asked to give an opinion on Neel Nanda's recent blog post on "pragmatic interpretability." I chose to respond by recounting the story of Venetian glassmaking....
A Halloween Investment Thought
Why are AI stocks rising so quickly? Maybe it's because AI investors (and CEOs etc) are the ones who talk with ChatGPT all day. And ChatGPT has convinced them all that their investment ideas are all genius. Spooky! Happy Halloween....
The Two Merchants
A traveler came upon two merchants selling magical lamps at a crossroads. The first merchant proclaimed: "My lamp contains a perfect genie! It will deduce your deepest desires from watching your every action - how you spend your gold, where...
When the Exits Close
Lessons from Financial Survival Under Authoritarian Regimes The Hamburg Banker's Dilemma In the autumn of 1933, Max Warburg sat in his mahogany-paneled office at M.M. Warburg & Co., the bank his family had operated in Hamburg since 1798. Outside, Nazi...
The Truth is Our Superpower
The firing of Jimmy Kimmel is shocking, but in the wake of the firings of Lisa Cook and Susan Monarez, it is also ridiculous. It perfectly showcases the weakness of authoritarianism. There is no silencing the truth: every time Trump...
Starvation, Cook, and Bacon
In 1932, Stalin's authoritarian central planning program wrecked Soviet agriculture, starving millions. As the crisis deepened, Trofim Lysenko, a mediocre agronomist backed by Stalin, rejected established genetics as "bourgeois pseudoscience" and reorganized Soviet agriculture around his ideological theories. Plants could...