Thinking about it

The Sacred and the Profane

Fri, 08 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I've been building small tools — a chart-maker, a deploy system, a travel planner — and putting Claude inside each one. Which raises the obvious question: why bother with the code when Claude could just do the thing? An argument for why we still need code, and why I still want to see the logs.

AI Will Make It, Whether I Like It or Not

Sat, 20 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

There's a conversation I seem to keep having lately, where someone who doesn't like AI is telling me about how it is a bubble, no one will ever pay enough money for it to ever earn back all the investment etc. It often comes with some fun examples of AI fails or silly things someone like Sam Altman has said. I can't be sure what's in the mind of these people or the pundits online like Zitron who…

AI could be Anti-Innovation

Fri, 05 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The AI technologies that are dominating all the conversation in technology are controversial for a lot of good reasons. - They violate the rights of copyright holders and remove incentives for creating new good content. - They have significant environmental costs in carbon and water. - They will displace and devalue a lot of workers. - They will contribute to inequality and the wealth of the…

Whose Agent is it?

Sat, 05 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Who doesn’t want a helpful agent multiplying their efforts, saving them time etc? But given our collective experience with large digital systems and manipulation by [bad](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Zuckerberg) [actors](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk), we need to examine how do things like power, control and ownership play into this equation. Who else is interested in what your…

Conviviality over AI Agents

Wed, 28 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

> I choose the term “conviviality” to designate the opposite of industrial productivity. I intend it to mean autonomous and creative intercourse among persons, and the intercourse of persons with their environment; > > .... > > I consider conviviality to be individual freedom realized in personal interdependence and, as such, an intrinsic ethical value. I believe that, in any society, as…

QwQ tries to Geoguess

Sat, 28 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I am a big fan of Simon Willison's [writings](https://simonw.substack.com/) about AI and based on this recent [post](https://simonw.substack.com/p/qvq-qwens-new-visual-reasoning-model?utm_source=substack&publication_id=1173386&post_id=153707452&utm_medium=email&utm_content=share&utm_campaign=email-share&triggerShare=true&isFreemail=true&r=16k51&triedRedirect=true) I decided to give…

A Reading List for Today

Thu, 07 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I find these days to have little energy for hot takes, blaming or recriminations. Instead I will offer this list of some of the books I read or listened to over the last year that helped me understand where we are now and how we got here. YMMV. [The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich](https://amzn.to/3Azm7bY) - I had only planned to listen to the first part of this because I was more interested…

The most expensive spell check I can make

Mon, 14 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I am really bad at spelling. I always have been and the older I get, my ability to spell things correctly only gets worse. Often my attempts are so bad that the spelling suggestions fail because I am not even close. I started playing around with seeing how well ChatGPT could guess what I meant and was pretty impressed at how it got the right answer basically every time. Sure I was using a gallon…

How Good Can AI Get?

Fri, 16 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

After spending some time on this post I realized I'd already written a different AGI and SuperIntelligence of it which is arguably better, but I'm going to press on to finish this since I need the writing practice. When thinking about what can we expect from AI in the future, I think its good to analyze it in terms of what kinds of limitations exist on its abilities. - **Compute**: The compute…

Ruta Del Cares

Sun, 28 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I am afraid of heights. I have a dislike for glass elevators, I am unable to stand close to the edge of anything, and whenever I have attempted rock climbing, I have never made it more than 10 feet off the ground. I do like hiking though and I really wanted to do a route I had heard about in Northern Spain called the [Ruta Del Cares](https://womondoo.com/espa%C3%B1a/asturias/ruta-del-cares). I…

Cycling in Europe

Tue, 23 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

On a recent trip to Europe I got to try out some cycling in a couple of the most popular places for cycling vacations, Mallorca and Girona. The trip wasn't a cycling vacation per se but I did select those two places to be able to get a few nice rides in. I also did a few other smaller rides. A little bit about me as a cyclist to start since these things really affected my experience riding…

Fire HD 10

Thu, 11 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I've never really been a fan of tablet devices. When I want to actually do something I would much rather have a computer and my phone is good enough for mindlessly consuming garbage. This means I've never really wanted an iPad even though they are super slick devices. I often feel jealous of tablet owners when flying because watching videos on your phone can get boring after a while. However, I…

Travel Items

Tue, 04 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

We just got back from a 6 week trip in Europe. Mostly in Spain with a couple days in Amsterdam and week in Scotland to make it more complicated. A couple of years ago we did 3 months which was great but also kind of too long but that's another story. This is just a post about some of the travel items we use that we found to be pretty nice and helpful. We use the [osprey…

Money and Power

Fri, 17 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

> *In this country, you gotta make the money first. Then when you get the money, you get the power. Then when you get the power, then you get the women. - Tony Montana* I don’t think Al Pacino’s character from Scarface is a good person to emulate but he does capture something about how we often view the relationship between money and power. We know that having a lot of money gives people power.…

NicaPhoto

Sun, 24 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve lost count of how many trips I’ve made to Central America and I’ve seen many examples of programs that work to improve the lives of people there but none has impressed me more than [NicaPhoto](https://www.nicaphoto.org/). The name comes from its beginning as an idea to teach photography classes to kids in the town of [Nagarote](https://maps.app.goo.gl/NKuQyrEtLmGHewqSA) but the director soon…

Using Prometheus and Grafana with Django

Tue, 23 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

For my web app project I wanted to add some monitoring and dashboards so I decided to try out prometheus. Since I am using django I also decided to use [django-prometheus](https://pypi.org/project/django-prometheus/1.0.11/). It ended up fine but there was a bump or two along the way. The README tells you most of what you need to know. There's a few tutorials out there on the web which basically…

Vector Database with Django and pgvector

Fri, 12 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I have a small Django project I have been playing with for a while. There's more about it in this series of Building A Simple Web App, Part 1 of N : Django. The application just keeps a list of items (mostly weblinks etc) and lets me organize them. I've been experimenting with using embeddings for finding similar items or suggesting tags etc. I am using OpenAI `text-embedding-ada-002` to…

Politics, Complexity and the next big Outage

Thu, 11 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I worry a lot about how complex the world is and how unstable that makes things. I watch a lot of Adam Curtis documentaries which make me feel less alone in my thoughts but don’t make me feel better. I don’t think the world is run by some secret cabal or by the people at Davos. I think the world isn’t run by anyone. It's a complicated mess that mostly works, most of the time, but there’s a lot…

Agents and Agency

Wed, 10 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I think the first time I heard about how software agents were going to be useful to help perform tasks for us must have been with [General Magic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Magic) in the 90s. It was all the same use cases we hear about today, flight booking, recipe generation etc. Just taking out all that drudgery from our lives. I think a big part of this appeal was it makes you feel…

Do LLMs talk the way humans do?

Tue, 09 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I wonder sometimes about the difference between how an LLM talks and how I do it. It's hard to really be confident in introspecting your own cognition but at least it feels like an idea forms in my head and then I render the words. I don’t know if an LLM starts with an “idea” but it does start with some kind of context and a lot of connections and then it can keep going and render out some stuff…

The Airplane Economic Model

Thu, 21 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve never been completely satisfied with terms like wealthy, rich, middle class, poor or working class. They seem to be amorphous and ill defined to me, and mostly just get politicized for various purposes. It is hard to define groups based on income numbers because of variations in cost of living or other factors such as help from sources like family or the government so I keep looking for…

Explaining What's up with AI (Part 6 - The Dark Side)

Tue, 19 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Part 1 of the series is Explaining What's up with AI (Part 1 - What is Machine Learning?). AI like any new technology brings with it both promises of great benefits and also many concerns about how it might cause bad outcomes. Since there’s plenty of people who are already trying to get rich by selling the idea that AI will solve all our problems, I think it's worth spending some time discussing…

Explaining What’s up with AI (Part 5 – Text to Image)

Fri, 15 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Part 1 of the series is Explaining What's up with AI (Part 1 - What is Machine Learning?). After spending time talking about LLMs and what they can do with text, Let’s go back to looking at images. Text to image generators allow you to just type something like: “create an image of a cat wearing a blue baseball cap” And you get: There are several tools out there that can do this kind of thing…

Explaining What’s up with AI (Part 4 – GPT to ChatGPT)

Fri, 08 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Part 1 of the series is Explaining What's up with AI (Part 1 - What is Machine Learning?). In our last Explaining What’s up with AI (Part 3 – LLMs) we saw how an LLM when given some text to start with could generate more text. This idea forms the basis of a tool like ChatGPT but there are still a few steps to get there. GPT3 by OpenAI was maybe the most powerful model before ChatGPT. It was…

Explaining What’s up with AI (Part 3 – LLMs)

Thu, 07 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Part 1 of the series is Explaining What's up with AI (Part 1 - What is Machine Learning?). Machine learning and neural network systems have been around for a while but it seems like everything has really exploded in the last few years. We’ve gone pretty quickly from computers using AI to understand “Alexa, set a timer for 5 mins” most of the time, to worrying that AI is going to take everyone’s…

Explaining What’s up with AI (Part 2 – Neural Nets)

Wed, 06 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Part 1 of the series is Explaining What's up with AI (Part 1 - What is Machine Learning?). Many different techniques have been used for Machine Learning over the years, but since all of the most exciting recent advances have been made using neural network systems that’s what we will focus on in this series. So let’s start from the basics. A neural network is a network of neurons ok but… ##…

Explaining What's up with AI (Part 1 - What is Machine Learning?)

Tue, 05 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

A friend of mine asked me to explain to him what's going on with all this AI stuff. What should they know about it? etc. This person is very smart but not technical in all the ways we computer people like to use that word so I wanted to try to create an explanation which requires almost 0 math or knowledge about computer systems. I'm not trying to turn them into an ML coder but just give them an…

LLMs w/o Supervision

Mon, 04 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

It's pretty amazing what these What can LLMs do? in a role as an assistant to a human user. As long as a human is there to check the results, we will see more and more places where LLMs and systems built on top of them will improve the productivity of users. What's harder to think about is what are the applications where the LLM can just be trusted to get the right answer. Right now I think…

AGI and SuperIntelligence

Fri, 01 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I'm not really sure if either of these terms have solid defintions so let's start by defining them for the purposes of this post. **AGI** - An artificial intelligence which is generally as capable as a human. Maybe its better at some things, maybe a little worse at others (as are we all) but it can generally do all the things that a human could do from an intellect perspective. IMO this includes…

Good Process

Fri, 01 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Every functioning software development team or organization has a process. It might be formal or informal, functional or dysfunctional, chaotic or stable, but their is some way to describe how things get done. I don't think there is any one best process, but I do think there's some markers of what makes a good one. Overall, the most important thing that makes a process good is that people…

Asking GPT4 about Tolstoy

Wed, 29 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I've been thinking about this conception of LLMs as a lossy compression of the internet. Ted Chiang talks about this [here](https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/chatgpt-is-a-blurry-jpeg-of-the-web). Karpathy also mentions it in his latest [video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjkBMFhNj_g). What does this loss look like? It doesn't always seem like the "loss" part matters. Maybe…

New Karpathy Video

Tue, 28 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I am a big fan of Karpathy's style of explaining things so I was very happy to see this video drop. Honestly, Its not my favorite of his but it covers a lot of good topics. I enjoyed the second half more than the first but its still a good starter video for people who want to learn more. Someone else made a decent reading this for the…

Latency, UX and LLMs

Mon, 27 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Latency is well understood to be detrimental to the user experience. No one likes to wait. But there are multiple ways this affects the UX - Annoyance - I hate waiting for the page to load - Throughput - I get less done because of the time it takes to complete tasks - Success Rate - My E-commerce site has lower sales even if the latency just goes up a little bit. - Control Fidelity - This video…

GenAI and Human Creativity

Fri, 24 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

A friend shared this pretty impassioned defense of the idea that ChatGPT is bad for humanity because lowers the value of creativity which is important to the "Very Soul of the World" I am not going to try to pick apart the argument. It is a reasonable one. I do want to try to think about the different ways these new genAI techniques have become an threat to creative professions and what it…

AI Safety

Thu, 23 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I am all for making AI better and more aligned with things which are good for people. I don't really like the term AI Safety though because it seems to encompass a lot of different things which need their own proper attention. Stuff like: 1. Bias in models and bad outcomes that result (ie. [Weapons of Math…

OpenAI Playgrounds

Wed, 22 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I knew about these but I hadn't really been using them much until someone really showed me how cool they are for "playing around" with GPT. Its obvious when you say like that but I am often not very smart. When doing experiments with the chat interface I often want to try out different paths etc and this means I need to back and repeat things and hope the same experience emerges. In Chat…

GPT4 Helps me Code

Tue, 21 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Spent some time yesterday giving some of my crappy code to GPT4 and asking it to make it better. I gave it this: and asked "Can you simplify this code" ``` def form_to_data(form): form_data = [] for name in form.fields: field_data = dict() field = form.fields[name] field_data['name'] = name field_data['type'] = field.widget.input_type field_data['label'] = field.label field_data['help']…

LLMs and Pocket Calculators

Mon, 20 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I am old enough to remember when calculators became a thing. There was a weird feeling for a while that this little machine could do math so much better than people could. There was a lot of talk at the time about how smart will computers get. Will they be able to win at chess etc etc. The calculator, along with many other inventions have shown that many things which we humans do and think about…

What can LLMs do?

Fri, 17 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I wrote this up a while ago for a friend but I decided to update it and post it here. LLMs are capable of doing a lot of interesting and surprising things. They also sometimes Unknown Knowns and GPT4 Transforming Epistimology Flagging a problem in GPTV Checking up. Most things I read online about LLMs are either people trying to say either: "Well they aren't really as clever as people think.…

Image Rotation and Image Understanding

Thu, 16 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I did a bike tour across the Olympic Peninsula this year. Here's a photo I took of a snack stop (no judgement about the food selection) Lets ask ChatGPT about it: What are all the objects in this photo? **The photo includes:** - **Two bananas** - **A blue sports drink** - **A bag of Tim's Cascade Style Potato Chips (Jalapeño flavor)** - **A sandwich in a paper bag from Longhorn Barbecue** -…

More Meme-ing with GPT4

Wed, 15 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This ad campaign is kind of cringy: But GPT4 does a pretty good job reading straight from the image and interpreting the terms. The image appears to be a public health campaign attempting to utilize Gen Z slang to communicate the dangers associated with street pills, presumably containing substances like fentanyl, which are known for being highly addictive and potentially lethal. Each panel…

Talking Like a Manager

Tue, 14 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Whatever your challenges are as a manager you are going to need some solid skills in communication to be able to deal with them. As an IC you can sometimes code your way out of problems but when you are a manager you are almost always having to talk or write your way to a better place. Here'a a few tips in no particular order. **Practice what you are going to say before you say it** When…

My Rule of Meetings

Sun, 12 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Every meeting which consists only of managers is a bad meeting. Managers might actually be good people but putting them in a room with other managers usually brings out the worst in all of them.

Do the hard thing more often

Fri, 10 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

When we were developing Uru the game build process was pretty complicated. We had built all of our own tools etc from scratch including 3DSMax plugins to generate game data and we also had a custom asset management system. A lot of complexity had accreted over time to make just creating a stable build of the game into a nightmare. Of course the reaction to this was initially that we didn't do…

Varifocal Mirror

Thu, 09 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

When I was in Gradual school at UNC Chapel Hill, there were so many cool graphics projects going on its tough to even remember them all. We had huge mechanical force feedback arms, head mounted displays, all kinds of special purpose hardware including the project I worked on ([PixelPlanes](https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/74333.74341)). But we had a really interesting device that mostly sat in the…

Ephemera

Wed, 08 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I was watching For All Mankind last night and was reminded about those things called slide rules. Even though I am pretty old, I never had to use one. I missed this by one year in high school. My class was the first one where we were allowed to use a calculator. The teacher still had a giant slide rule above the blackboard which he had previously used to teach its proper usage. Rumor had it that…

Google Earth and KML

Tue, 07 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Let's say you have a KML file and you want to import it into Google Earth. Maybe its a parcel polygon you want to visualize. You can easily import the file and see your polygon displayed. Now comes the interesting part. What if you want to share this? You can't really do it because this is a "Local KML" file and: Ok so the other option is to make a Drive project: Here's a fun fact about…

Making a Chrome Extension

Mon, 06 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I have a little personal project that is basically a web app to save and share links. Not very original, but its been fun to work on and explore some ideas. I decided I wanted to write a chrome extensions so I could quickly add a new link. I started with ChatGPT: *How can I make a chrome extension to save the current URL?* I got back a full implementation which was actually pretty nice along…

Grug Dev

Fri, 03 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Someone posted this in a slack: Its maybe a little bit long and the joke wears thin by the end but also I wish I had written it. In a clever way it talks through so much of different sorts of dysfunction in Software Development. You can also read it in translation [here.](https://github.com/reidjs/grug-dev-translation/blob/main/grug_dev_translation.md) Some parts I…

Thoughts about Crypto

Thu, 02 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I don't consider myself a crypto booster or a person who thinks it's terrible and all just a big scam/ponzi etc. For sure, having unregulated money has been great for all kinds of scams and other illegal activity but I think my main POV on crypto has always been, hmm, let's see what happens. I bought a little crypto in 2017 and still hold most of it. A few year ago I cashed out some and used the…