How much time I've spent on Math Academy
583 active days, 14,111 XP and roughly 235 hours: what two and a half years of Math Academy actually looks like.
Emile Silvis
Latest posts
Are you controlling your LLM or limiting it?
Being in control of your coding LLM is crucial, but control has a price. A Plants vs Zombies experiment, the control–autonomy spectrum, and Reverse Engineer Driven Development (REDD).
Maybe "is AI a bubble?" is the wrong question
Bulls and bears agree the technology is real—they disagree on the clocks. Not whether AI is a bubble, but whether the payoff arrives before the financing runs out.
How 1+1 becomes 2 (part 5/5)
Pressing go: watching 1+1 run on the machine, tick by tick, until the ALU produces the 2 and it lands in the memory cell that is x.
How tiny, physical switches learn to follow instructions (part 4/5)
How instruction bits are wired straight into the machinery: the program counter, the anatomy of an instruction, and memory-mapped I/O.
How tiny, physical switches learn to remember (part 3/5)
How a clock and the data flip flop give a pile of logic gates time and memory: registers, RAM, and the heartbeat of the machine.
How a list of 1s and 0s becomes tiny, physical switches (part 2/5)
Following the 1s and 0s into hardware: adders built from logic gates, every gate built from NANDs, and the transistor at the bottom.
How 1+1 becomes a list of 1s and 0s (part 1/5)
How 1+1 in a high-level language is ground down into binary machine code: compiler, VM translator, and assembler.
LLMs' tendency to just agree with everything we say causes us to believe false things about the world
A new paper proves that sycophantic LLMs cause users to spiral into false beliefs — even perfectly rational ones.
LLM exposure for EU jobs 🇪🇺
Interactive treemaps showing LLM exposure for every occupation in the Netherlands and Europe, inspired by Karpathy's US job market visualizer
I built an interactive unit circle
An interactive unit circle tool for building intuition instead of memorising trig values
I built a computer from scratch
Building a computer from NAND gates to a working OS
Maths is now the best part of my day
How I overcame my fear of mathematics and fell in love with learning again
How I made this website
How I made this website with Cursor.
Blockchain technology is a scourge on society
Why I believe cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology are bad for society.
A thought experiment: let's add a new role to scrum — the craft master
A thought experiment exploring whether adding a 'craft master' role to Scrum could empower developers.
I did a workshop on systems thinking
A workshop on systems thinking presented at the MiXiT conference in Lyon.
A curated list of systems thinking resources
A curated list of books, websites, tools, videos and courses on systems thinking.
What I have learned from running a small software consultancy
Lessons learned from co-founding and running Glio, a small software consultancy.
Fix your budget, not your scope
An alternative to fixed bid and time-and-materials contracts for software projects: fixed budget, scope controlled.
Growth comes from real failure
Real failure hurts. And that's exactly why it drives genuine growth.
A quick review of Exploring Everyday Things with R and Ruby
A review of the book Exploring Everyday Things with R and Ruby — a fun whirlwind tour of using Ruby and R to prod at a variety of problems.