Recent content on jodavaho.io
Arthur C. Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey (New American Library, 1968). I read 2001: A Space Odyssey . I read it because I hadn’t, and I’m told the author is a genius. After all the heavy political stuff, I figured I’d back off and read something fun. First up: Fantastic book. One of the best. The foreword taught me something: The book was just a long draft of the screenplay. The…
I built an Army Fitness Test scorecard. It will show you your score, works offline, and can be used to track your progress over time. It’s available here: https://aft.jodavaho.io/ My goal is to hit maximum score at age 50. My goal that I’m likely to hit is to maintain passing male scores the rest of my life.
I’ve had the pleasure of meeting, at all stages of my career/education, people much more intelligent than I am. I’ve also had the pleasure of meeting people more productive, industrious, capable, and learned than I am (not always the same!). Being a human, probably descended from social animals, I have the same first instinct of insecurity or feelings of regret. “Why can’t…
Bhaskar Sunkara, The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality (Basic Books, 2019). I’ve been requesting books on politics / political ideas that I would expect to disagree with. I think that if you can’t say why you disagree, you don’t disagree, you’re just opposed on vague vibes, and who wants to live like that (except everyone?).…
From the recommended politics shelf, finished “What Does Justice Look Like”. It’s about the Dakota and injustices during the formation of MN and their suggested path to re-establishing a tribal presence in MN. It is light on informative, heavy on persuasive. Intentionally controversial and somewhat polemical. For example: Are the Dakota entitled to the billions of dollars of…
Assume that LLMs are industrialized word association I would like to de-mystify the AI you probably use every day. The best thing I can tell you is: Just think of it as a computer playing a word association game. Intelligence and thinking and morality and motivation are not required to explain what even the most advanced chatbot/LLM/agent can do. What is an LLM It is a bunch of very good…
In this excellent essay on reverse centaurs 1 , Doctorow argues that people can either use AI as a tool (the centaurs) or be forced to let AI do the work and then you “supervise” it (reverse centaurs). You should read it. It has this banger quote: Direct link below 2 I expect it is correct that some jobs, like the highlighted customer service bots, will be almost entirely reverse…
I just finished a book about the early internet era hackers, RTM and the like. The Morris worm in particular was an amazing story. Today, I think the hacker ethos of unimpeded access to information, mistrust of authority, etc, is alive and well in the form of the huge proliferation of really good LLMs that are just free to download and use. We’ve never had it so good. (The hacker ethos of…
Social security is a joke. Prior to the “invention” of 401ks we didn’t have much option, but we do now. The point here is to play with just how bad SSC is vs a 401k (or bonds!). SSC is bad because it takes $1 from everyone, gives it to the gov, who then distributes those dollars to people who currently expect them .. because they had dollars taken from them already. Investments…
There’s been either a panic or a manic gold rush regarding AI, depending on who you talk to. 4% of GitHub public commits are being authored by Claude Code right now. At the current trajectory, we believe that Claude Code will be 20%+ of all daily commits by the end of 2026. While you blinked, AI consumed all of software development. pic.twitter.com/pFti4r6uR9 — SemiAnalysis…
What have I wrought? I have used LLMs in various formats for writing code for a while. A common question is “If LLMs make you so much more productive, what have you built?” I have a full time job, two young kids, and a full-time-working wife. Time is short - so efficiency matters. Well, here’s my (growing) answer to the question of “Where’s the shovelware?” My…
Now, I have shouted into the void on social media to no end, so, I’m posting for archival purposes my current thoughts on the situation in my home state and city. This is a post about the ICE operation in Minneapolis. First off, if you have videos of civil rights violations by ICE, please visit this site: https://www.aclu-mn.org/ice-feds-form/ To an outsider, you probably get a filtered…
Gov Walz and Mayor Frey, I’m asking you to deescalate the situation in Minneapolis, in light of prior federal/local clashes that escalated when local leadership failed to set clear deescalation norms. The safety of the people, through clear direction to city leadership, MPD, and the public, should be your top priority, not national politics or playbooks. Call for peaceful, observe+report…
Statement on AI useage I increasingly use Claude Code CLI (by Anthropic) as a coding assistant, similar to how a machinist might use CNC tools - Increasingly automatic, carefully monitored, with human interaction required at certain touchpoints, retools, or inspection points; and a lot of work front-loaded in design. There is often less manual, flow state craftsmanship except on the most critical…
I got a really good question sent to me, and I’d like to archive the response here… I mostly use Go (previously Java) and am exploring Rust for unmanned systems, particularly embedded work and autonomy like navigation and perception. Given your domain expertise, I’d love to hear your perspective: I’m bullish on Rust long term. If you’re coming from Go/Java, then…
Life is really coasting along. There are always bumps, but generally great. I spend too much time at home, working and such. Of course I’m not exercising enough. But generally, being here lets me see my kiddos the maximal amount, and also to spend more time on work. Flight Science has been a blast. We’re now fully automated! . What a journey it’s been. My kiddos are four. I…
Big news! As of last week, we’re sending fully autonomous flight optimizations directly to aircraft for our partner airlines. Huge personal milestone for me, as I worked exclusively on the optimization and estimation pipelines that do this! Why am I sending messages to cockpit screens? Flight Science tracks flights for partner airlines, and helps them improve operations. We plug into various…
Oh look … another advanced cli utility that is a rewrite + a tiny bit of functionality. And bonus, it’s in Rust! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45342943 This particular utility, z was also posted last year. It’s part of the “Warp” shell, and one could be forgiven for feeling like a dusty left-behind with all these fancy shell features. Thing is, bash is turing…
I found out today that Daniel Stenberg the guy behind curl, which is the library behind basically every web-enabled tool you use, was nominated developer of the year in Sweden. Now, honestly, this guy works hard , and curl represents the premier F/OSS experience. It’s free, ubiquitous, actively maintained, and essentially vital infrastructure. So, here’s a story about how he called my…
This horse/car analogy for LLMs is very weird. Who’s the engineer here? Are we sure this isn’t a CEO perspective where they are annoyed things can’t magically go faster and why do we have to feed these dumb engineers? Have we considered that cars can’t break new ground and require roads to and from the destination? LLMs have a kind of have a “mental GPS”…
John MacCormick, What Can Be Computed? A Practical Guide to the Theory of Computation (Princeton University Press, 2018). Quick review: It does a good job of introducing complexity theory, and is accessible for undergrads, practitioners, experienced folks, or maybe even hobby programmers with no serious background in theory (it’s hard to say how much load bearing my background was doing when…
The Endgame for LLMs Might Look Like Windows XP Hear me out. 1. The commercial space already pays for heavy, local tools Mechanical engineers pay thousands of dollars per seat for their productivity software. Those profits go directly into improving the tools. Sometimes there are cloud add-ons, but the bulk of the functionality is local and offline. The feature sets are deep: automated FEA,…
I use coding agents daily. So far, they are good for first-order effects. Things like “Fast typewriter” (doing something I would do but without interface delays) or “super copy paste” (altering an example and applying it with nuance in several places) or “super tab complete” (suggesting large blocks of text/code vs just single symbols) or even “meta…
Today I worked 11 hours, from home, checking on my sick daughter every hour or so, making sure my wife had enough sparkling water for her afternoon meetings, interviewing candidates, meeting with team, and pushing code. Remote work is great.
Coffee on a monday after a productive weekend, here’s what went well this time. Much better than usual! Don’t work weekends If at all possible, keep time to yourself on the weekend. Use it to read, relax, catch up on housework, do hobbies, spend time with wife or kids (or date otherwise). Etc. You need breaks, mentally, to remain sharp, and physically, to remain energetic. So, it…
If you were to take all technologists and instill in them a values of simplicity and re-use and longevity, and an obsession with repurposing old tech, I think you’d find they roughly sort into two camps: One would take on an intellectual journey of discovery, sailing off into the pacific to learn to live off grid, writing colorful narrative-driven articles, full of artwork, mission…
Summary In the first part of this series, I explored a primitive ‘quantitative diet’ idea. In the second part I showed how to use a simple model and some differential equations to estimate the effect of a diet on weight loss, and ‘derive’ a diet to acheive a weightloss goal. In the third part , I discussed how I track my diet using ChatGPT-4. In this part, I can share some…
Pareto Hobbies 2025 I decided to plot possible hobbies in 2025 in terms of career potential and personal enjoyment. This is a silly thing to do, but it is also a uniquely software-engineering problem to have - for some reason we seem to be prone to lots of extra curricular learning, quantified self, and a constant need to optimize ourselves for our employability. As a computer scientist and…
I’m lucky to have found a new job that is essentially my dream position. I’m now a full-time Rust programmer, but still working on a full planning stack. It’s a very small startup, and I’m completely stoked. This summer has been beautiful, and we’ve been lucky to have a lot of time with family and friends. My only side project at the moment is a Cyberpunk-like rule…
Created with chatgpt + my own notes. System Analysis Check Boot Time : Use systemd-analyze to see the total boot time. Use systemd-analyze blame to see which services take the longest to start. Use systemd-analyze critical-chain to understand the critical path. Check Boot Logs : Review the logs with journalctl -b to identify errors and warnings. Hardware and BIOS/UEFI Update BIOS/UEFI : Ensure…
Wife and I are insanely busy. We both work 50+ hours a week. The kids don’t seem to mind - still hilarious, happy, and energetic. Our nanny is the GOAT. I have not been playing many games lately. I’ve been doing a lot of yard work, and we’ve been spending a lot of time at the cabin. I’ve been working a lot, too. When I do play, I prefer Helldivers 2 by arrow head games .…
You know, it was fun while it lasted, but I just don’t have time to work on the Highfleet Optimizer anymore. It’s not like anyone was using it! We had grand ambitions though, and I learned a ton. Here’s the stuff I do not regret at all about this project: Writing a fast optimizer in C, and learning how to get that deployed to AWS Lambda Getting quite good with FastAPI, Lambda,…
Executing the strategy It’s really hard to know how much you’re eating. It’s really annoying seeing weight go up, but noise around the signal is normal, using a “predictor” helps me ralize this It’s beneficial to have a running estimate for when you’ll reach your goal. I set out and used this to calculate a daily budget of food. I’ve been at it 40…
OK, let’s talk about my diet. I’ve started a diet, with the goal of losing 32 lbs, or ~15% of my bodyweight, to get back to my circa 2000-2005 weight. I’m happy if I achieve 80% of that loss, ending up under 200. This is a long post, in which I describe the plan, and some misunderstandings I had about dieting and weight loss. Along the way, I built an estimator that uses data to…
OK, let’s talk about my diet some more. I’ve started a diet, with the goal of losing 32 lbs, or ~15% of my bodyweight, to get back to my circa 2000-2005 weight. I’m happy if I achieve 80% of that loss, ending up under 200. This is a long post, in which I describe the plan, and some misunderstandings I had about dieting and weight loss. Along the way, I built an estimator that…
OK, let’s talk about my diet. After I stopped boxing, and biking to work, and in general doing anything, food became a problem. Snacking was constant, meals were added on when someone else made them, and treats were prevalent. Turns out, when you’re burning 2500 calories in roadwork every day, this isn’t a problem. No longer. I’ve started a diet, with the goal of losing 32…
I’ve been journalling for 10+ years. In addition to forcing me to actually write down what happened that day, reviewing old entries provides a feeling of history that makes life feel soooo long and so rich. I can review my now-wife’s rocky courtship and feel grateful we made it. I looked back 3 years ago and found the day our children were conceived :D (we have twins). I can review the…
I’ve been really into the Undaunted: Stalingrad game. Have been playing a lot less Hunt showdown , since I’ve been travelling, doing jury duty, and working more on this blog and other side projects. I’m noodling a new personal finance side project, this one might actually be of general use. Highfleet Opt is still living, and we hope to do more work on it. The kids are precocious,…
I play hunt showdown a lot. It’s very fun. It’s also insanely frustrating sometimes. The game has long matches, very frantic, quick battles, and a wide variety of meaningful character specialization and equipment options. It can take dozens of matches to determine if a loadout is worth it, and there are many loadouts, and a match takes an hour … In short, it is very hard to get…
All blockchain games are predicated on guessing random numbers in exchange for money. How is this not gambling? Did you know that two percent of USA’s energy is just bitcoin mining? 1 This is dumb. Blockchain is automated gambling. I don’t mean “I’m gambling the cost of bitcoin will go up, so I buy some” I mean the entire system is: Guess a number Plug it into an…
Reading https://quiltro.org/notes/simplicity.html mastering programming https://tidyfirst.substack.com/p/mastering-programming https://matthewrocklin.com/index.html Contribute https://github.com/scipopt/russcip https://github.com/GregoireHENRY/rust-spice Writing http://graphics.stanford.edu/~seander/bithacks.html Bithacks!
Computer Science Blogs https://gavinhoward.com/ https://www.benkuhn.net/ https://danluu.com/ https://vorpus.org https://jvns.ca/ https://eta.st/ Quality sites https://news.ycombinator.com/ https://lobste.rs/ https://hackaday.com/ https://www.lesswrong.com/ Humanity Why you, personally, should want a larger population link: https://rootsofprogress.org/why-a-larger-population description: Various…
Leadership and Teams Turn the Ship Around homepage , amazon Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams amazon Related: “Let me tell you a secret” it’s the people Five Dysfunctions of a Team summary , amazon High output management amazon Army Leadership Manual pdf , cached local copy No Bullshit CTO /Tech lead guide web How to start google web
Tools asciinema : Record and share your terminal sessions, the right way. Web services wttr.in : The right way to check the weather from your terminal. qrenco.de : Generate QR codes from the command line. cheat.sh : The right way to get help from the command line. rate.sx : The right way to get currency exchange rates from the terminal.
Why do GPA and ACT scores matter? Recently, there’s been some pushback against standardized tests and college entrance exams. It begs the question: What is all this testing good for? After all, well-to-do families and students can spend more time preparing for these exams, making them an unfair indicator of wealth moreso than IQ . I propose: They are not a measure of ability but of…
Messing about with serious software In which we discuss setting up some spaceflight software from NASA inside a tiny webserver , inside an AWS lambda, and with Rust. There is no reason you’d ever want to do this, but I was stuck at home sick and needed to scratch an itch: How does one know if the sun is shining on any particular part of the moon right now? The solution is very complicated,…
As of today, we’re at 1.0 for the Highfleet tools / cogitator site. https://hfopt.jodavaho.io We provide: uploading ships, and getting a permalink for sharing. creating collections of ships you have uploaded, which can also be shared getting ship design hints from the optimizer One nice thing is that all downloads are verified to be valid .seria files. We hope you find it useful - especially…
Over-engineering Highfleet load-outs using Integer Programming I built a highfleet ship optimizer by bundling a fast C optimizer, binding to a higher level language, and providing a web API. Then, Altho built a front-end. Try it at hfopt.jodavaho.io/optimizer This post is about setting up the problem. See related posts . Dieselpunk warship schematic. Made with Midjourney. Highfleet is an…
I’m not an optimization guru by any means. It’s never been something I’ve been allowed to focus on at work, sadly. At some jobs, performance is secondary to correctness and robustness, and at others, it’s secondary to flashy features. But, I’ve used the following tricks in hotloops Dimension reduction (esp via convolution) Branchless calculation SIMD SIMD gets a lot…
I’ve been tracking my OKR’s since 2014. Sometimes I accomplish what I set out for, sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I accomplish what I put in OKRs but didn’t accomplish what I wanted. Here’s what I’ve learned. There are usually four types of OKRs, and not differentiating types makes it really hard to get what you wanted Not only are there four, but they are roughly…