discussion about tech, footie, photos
I was asked recently what I thought about Graham Platner and realized that I hadn't really formed an opinion about him. 
 I've not written anything about him, either on socials or on here, and it seems like the iron is rapidly cooling so I might as well have a strike. 
 I live in New York, and Platner is running for office in Maine, so while his campaign has made a lot of noise nationally,…
The most hated people in America are leaders of big tech companies. This definitely wasn't true when I got into the industry, so how did we get here? 
 Our current tech environment can trace its roots to the personal computer revolution of the 70s and 80s. There was a real DIY swagger to many of the companies producing consumer grade hardware and software in the early days. The same garages…
In 1989, The Offspring released their self titled album. On it is a song called Tehran : 
 
 In your plane in the blue sky You roam again 
Words that echo in your mind 
Make your heart beat faster 
This is no Vietnam 
We will win in Iran 
 
 The strikes in Iran are morally repugnant. They are almost certainly illegal by the standards of national and international…
In 1995, Turing laureate Niklaus Wirth wrote an essay called A Plea for Lean Software in which he mostly gripes about the state of software at the time. Among these gripes is this claim which Wirth attributes to his colleague Martin Reiser 1 , though it's become to be known as Wirth's Law : 
 
 Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster. 
 
 Doing his best…
Several days ago, ICE agents murdered Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. 
 As is now customary, Stephen Miller interrupted his usual torrent of racist anti-immigrant abuse on Twitter to call Pretti an "assassin" and a "domestic terrorist" in an attempt to frame his killing as a justified police action. 
 These lies are as transparent as they are ridiculous, and that's the point . Plausible lies…
Earlier in 2025, I started to poke around and experiment with using LLM-based AI. 
 My purposes have largely been educational. While I absorbed the basics of machine learning during my general computer science education, I have never engaged directly with the topic and have not studied it deeply. I'm unlikely to ever take on a role where I am at the bleeding edge of specializing and training…
On Mar 30, 2025, Hank Green posted on BlueSky : 
 
 Some of the critiques I’ve seen [of abundance liberalism] do seem to boil down to the old mainstay of “people should stop wanting the things they want” and I don’t really know how to handle that. 
 “We don’t need more houses if they aren’t in dense cities!” Ok, but I don’t know how to make a bunch of Americans fundamentally different…
Charlie Kirk was assassinated in Utah today, just a few short hours ago. As of this writing, the suspect is still at large. We don't know anything about their politics or their motivations. 
 Kirk's body is not yet cold, but virtually everyone has already made up their mind about what this is. As Matt Pearce astutely puts it : 
 
 Information environment has reached its grotesque…
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson's book Abundance made a big splash when it landed in March of this year. I wanted to get around to reading this while on a train or a plane, but as luck would have it, I sleep incredibly well on both, so it's languished in my "to read" pile until now. 
 Because of my delay, the hot take train has already left the station to such an extent that Ezra has commented…
A lot of us in NYC are basking in the glow of an unexpectedly decisive Zohran Mamdani victory last night. In addition to the happiness that an election night could be something to celebrate, there is some schadenfreude, or in the poetic words of Ashley Feinberg , an "incredible spite bonus" to the way that big money, the Democratic gerontocracy, and a lot of other unsavoury tactics failed to tip…
I recently came across " Odin: A Programming Language Made For Me ." The author of the post has also written a book about the Odin language, and it's a really nice technical overview of aspects of Odin that he recognizes from programming practices he used at the game company "Our Machinery." 
 I'd never heard of "Our Machinery." On my first read, I wondered: "What's their story?" 
 
…
Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba and formerly one of the richest people in China, has reappeared this week. It's not the first time he's managed this feat; he also reappeared in 2023 . This time seems more impactful, because it was among a group of businessmen in the front row of an event being hosted by Chinese premier Xi Jinping. 
 A year before official reaction to his criticisms of Chinese…
I thought it would be useful to record my journey through various technologies on this blog, akin to Simon Wilison's TILs . Since my experience with LLMs has felt more like fighting a battle against their less desirable proclivities, I decided that calling it an AAR is probably more apt. 
 Last I wrote, I was getting deepseek-r1 128B running on my machine and seeing that it had a fractional…
I'm finally comfortable admitting that LLM no longer stands for Lunar Landing Module. 
 After an 8 month break where my technical output was limited to updating this blog to use SQLite instead of MongoDB and creating a Minecraft modpack and a few mods, the itch to tinker and explore is finally coming back. 
 LLM oriented development seems poised to shake up the way both hobbyists and…
If you travel in east Asia in the winter, especially to Korea or Japan, you'll find yourself somehow in strawberry season. This is because they grow short-day cultivars that flower and ripen in the winter. 
 A few years ago, I bought some of the best strawberries that I've ever had in my life off the back of a kei truck in Seoul. Their flavor reminded me of the wild strawberries that I ate as…
My blog has been on hiatus for some time. I've not published a post since April 2022, which is nearly 3 years ago. 
 I have been writing steadily in the interim, but I didn't manage to write anything that I felt met the bar that I had established for myself on this site. One of the problems with continuous self improvement is that there are diminishing returns, and it takes more and more…
I've always had a hard time describing my approach to automated testing; it tends to be much easier to explain what it isn't. This is usually a hint that I don't fully understand my own principles, but that doesn't stop me from having opinions! 

 There is a rough continuum of testing philosophy, with "what's testing?" on one end and TDD on the other. You can think of TDD as the "agile…
I don't read too many programming books, and I've not taken notes as I read a book in a long time, but as part of scheduling some downtime after my 2nd jab, I decided to spend a nice Saturday on the couch with John Ousterhout's Philosophy of Software Design . 

 These are some fleshed out versions of the notes I took to myself while reading. It is not a review: the book is good, and if you…
Jussi Pakkanen , author of the Meson build system, wrote a nice article recently called Does C++ deserve its bad rap ..? where he defends C++'s reputation as language that is hard to read and unnecessarily complex. 

 I've not been exposed to much C++ in a professional context. I learned C++98 at university, and the minor update C++03 was published while I was there, but was turned off by…
My GPU's fans recently started to malfunction, which means it smells like hot failure in my office while I'm waiting on a new GPU to arrive. 

 In the meantime, if it's not under too much stress, and the room is fairly cool, and the case is open, things work fine. When one of those isn't the case, it overheats and abruptly stops working while the computer is on, which is highly concerning.…