Posts

This is a synthesis of ideas I’ve overheard, read, discussed, and learned first-hand. It draws on over three years exploring LLMs for shaping code. My initial notes for this were part of an internal workshop I hosted for our engineering team at TORTUS Health, where we use and improve these techniques every day as we work to eliminate error in medicine. The shifting bottlenecks With the explosion in LLM capabilities, producing syntax got cheap. But good judgement did not. In many ways, AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder. ...

We all use LLMs to make code, but there are at least two distinct modes of working with them. Both are powerful, but conflating them is dangerous. It leads to burnout, loss of agency, security breaches, and disastrous outages. Instead, we want to enable better ideas, executed faster, at higher quality.

As a learning exercise, I recently implemented simple-jax-nn, a simple neural net for the MNIST dataset, written with JAX. This post is my notes on using JAX (as a PyTorch / NumPy user) from working through the JAX docs and a NN tutorial. Simple JAX neural net I managed to get it to use my MacBook’s GPU/Accelerator through the Metal support in jax-metal. It’s a little bit tricky, but will prove useful in future transformer projects that can make use of the hardware. ...

This week, whilst troubleshooting video encoding discrepancies for a film, I was reminded of the immense wizard power of debugging: the art of systematically bisecting your way to the root cause of a problem, then devising the cleanest fix. This is an art that cannot be taught and which few professions lead you to learn. Even among those that do, such as computer programming, only the most diligent practitioners come to master it, because it is at once unnatural and primordial. We can be sure that many humans will never in their lives enact this discipline, but also that it is fundamental to our success as a species. ...

A sorcerer’s guide to wielding chaotic and powerful magicks.

Embracing the exponentials and vibecoding an entire 3D game in a few days with Aider, o3-mini, and Claude 3.7 sonnet.

Notes on the interconnection of generative AI’s two leading paradims.

The development stories and roadmap for Orbital, my physics-based 3D simulator for realistic orbital maneuvers that runs in your browser with WebGL and Three.js.

A byte-sized guide to developing your taste and agency at the world’s best programming retreat.

How I spent my 12 weeks at the Recurse Center annihilating my skill issues, shipping projects, and having fun.