Listening to the Talking Planet
Off the coast of Dominica, the Cetacean Translation Initiative (CETI) is feeding thousands of sperm whale codas into the same kind of large language models (LLMs) that power human chatbots.
ianreppel.org
Ian Reppel's website on quantum computing, machine learning, product management, stereoscopy, archaeology, fiction, and more
Latest posts
The Cassandra Tax
Cassandra saw Troy burning before the first torch was even lit. She was ignored, silenced, and murdered, and the city burned anyway.
Why Effective Altruism Ignores Latin America
GiveWell has directed $2.3 billion in grants since 2014, of which Latin America received 0.02 cents per dollar. Yet 220 million people in the region live in or near poverty.
How Successful Companies Go Blind
The Mexican cavefish kept its eye genes for over a million years after the eyes themselves disappeared. Something similar happens to companies once they achieve success.
The Emperor's New Xerox
Imitation has become the sincerest form of strategy.
The Tragedy of the Engineering Commons
The surest way to ruin an engineering team is to believe it will survive whatever you do to it.
The Product Manager Who Manages No Products
Nothing reveals an organization’s philosophy of product quite like giving someone the title “product manager” while denying them a product.
Ironclad
Corporate wisdom assumes everyone has the same amount to lose.
LLM-Powered Self-Sabotage
We do not need LLM-powered industrial sabotage. With humans in the loop, we can self-sabotage much more efficiently.
Adieu, Claude
When Anthropic proved to be a liability, I replaced Claude Code with OpenCode.
The Narcissist in Your Pocket
There is a narcissist in your pocket, and you are in its pocket.
Lost in Compression
I have stopped reading my colleagues’ documents.
Local LLMs for Zed and Obsidian
Got no WiFi or cash to pay for LLMs? Learn how to use local LLMs with Ollama and Claude Code.
Making the Web Palatable with uBlock Origin and uBlacklist
Two browser extensions can reduce insufferable content on the web: uBlock Origin and uBlacklist.
1,350 Days with Logseq
I liked Logseq for almost four years, but SQLite over plain Markdown ruined it.
Agent-Assisted Schema Evolution
Automating backwards-compatible schema evolution could recover almost $4 million in engineering capacity for a typical tech platform company.
Crossfire: Multi-Agent Adversarial Refinement
What if Ralph Wiggum had friends?
A Dojo for Human Interactions
What does it take to build an AI rehearsal system where the measure of success is that people stop using it?
The AI Benchmark Trap
What does benchmark supremacy have to do with operational reliability?
PMF: Product/Market Folklore
Ask a product manager about PMF and they will almost certainly rattle off the Sean Ellis test with its 40% threshold. What few realize is that it’s mostly rubbish.
The Quantum Cradle
What if the origin of life was not a one-in-a-zillion fluke, but a physical inevitability, solved by Earth’s crust acting as a quantum search engine?
Reimagining Private Health Insurance in Argentina
What if private health insurance in Argentina is broken on purpose? ReSalud is a blueprint for a buildable digital insurer: regulated infrastructure with a product surface, an operating model, and unit economics that work!
The Mind as a City
Consciousness is best understood as a system, not a single entity.
Ralph Wiggum as a Degenerate Evolutionary Search
Ralph Wiggum works because it is a degenerate evolutionary search algorithm.
The Missing Middle of Machine Learning Infrastructure
The hard part of machine learning is not serving features but deciding what they are.
Define Once, Rewrite Anyway
A feature in machine learning is only defined once—until you demand it be correct.
Beyond Oracles: LLMs as Question Machines
It’s not a bad thing finding out that you don’t have all the answers. You start asking the right questions. Dr Erik Selvig in Thor (2011)
The Spectral Gap Problem in Quantum Annealing
Quantum annealing promises quantum advantage, courtesy of quantum tunnelling. But a single, elusive quantity, the spectral gap, determines whether it works. And in almost all interesting cases, that gap is either vanishingly small, unknowable in advance, or both.
The Ones Whose Light the World Dimmed
A lament for the gentle, and a reckoning with the rain that soaked them.
A Vision for a Calmer World
Imagine a world that is less angry, less anxious, less stressed.