alper.nl

2025-03-14T15:58:24Z

“The only good laws are the laws that make *me* more money.”

Y Combinator urges the White House to support Europe’s Digital Markets Act

2025-03-14T15:55:06Z

Chronicle of how you make a hit game. Balatro is amazing even if I ripped through it in a couple of days.

https://localthunk.com/blog/balatro-timeline-3aarh

2025-02-26T23:10:33Z

I usually enjoy Cortex’s romps into productivity porn, but what struck me here is that they open with Grey discovering Asana and how he spent the week setting his business and life up in it.

Lots to unpack here:

People are still discovering Asana?

Grey immediately and deeply gets what is powerful about Asana and what tradeoffs that entails.

I think that everybody who refuses to use Asana is forced to cobble together a broken version of it themselves. That is true and will stay true.

https://www.relay.fm/cortex/164

2025-02-26T21:47:02Z

Our work in software engineering consists mostly of learning and for me and my team a fair part of that is teaching. Both of these are immensely difficult and rewarding components of the job.

https://www.herostrat.us/posts/learning-the-hardest-problem-in-computer-science

2025-02-26T21:37:01Z

Here’s a good article about platform teams that I got to read an early draft of. I can say from my own experience that all of these traps are very easy to go into. Be aware and prioritize ruthlessly what works and what doesn’t work.

https://serce.me/posts/2025-01-07-six-sins-of-platform-teams

Using jj as a manager

2025-02-26T21:38:28Z

I think when people ask what’s so great about jj they tend to go deep into things such as mega-merge strategies and stacked PRs. These things are cool, no doubt, but jj can be useful starting from the very small.

In my case as a manager I commit a lot of small stuff, documentation updates, nits, fixes (and also larger bits of code). I got this down to be pretty fast using all the git aliases available.

In an ideal world I’d be doing most of my work in a worktree (which takes ages to create in our monorepo) and I could pass the change quickly in my clean main checkout folder. That would then go like this:

gcb random-new-branch
ga docs.md
gcm "Documentation update" # Or immediately gcam
gpu

But of course as a manager, my life is made out of interruptions so odds are that my main checkout folder is not clean and contains changes for something else I started but did not get to finish. Now I have a bunch of bad options:

Quickly finish the old work and push it so I can work on the new thing
Create a worktree for this tiny thing
Stash the old work and risk forgetting about it entirely
Think all of the above is too much effort and I’d just rather drop this
Go to Github.com and pass the change through the web site (best option if I can do it in one go)

With jj I don’t have to deal with most of this. Whenever I have something new I want to work on I can type: jj new main and I’m good to go. Whatever work in progress I might’ve had, has already been snapshotted and will still be there when I want to resume work on it.

And when it’s ready, I can do jj git push -c and it will send my change to our forge without me having to name the branch. I still have to describe the change but all in all jj has turned 4 steps into 2 and removed the potential blockers from this process.

2025-02-25T22:44:37Z

A beautiful lush essay and homage to an ubiquitous typeface without a name.

https://aresluna.org/the-hardest-working-font-in-manhattan

2025-02-25T22:37:11Z

I can relate to this because I’m using Cursor to write a bit of Gleam where it’s usually off entirely because this is such a small language.

It would be annoying maybe if LLMs got us into a place where literally everything becomes a React+Tailwind application but so far I don’t see a huge risk that that will happen.

What is available and what is easy does of course influence what becomes popular, but nothing new there.

https://vale.rocks/posts/ai-is-stifling-tech-adoption

2025-02-25T22:33:26Z

So much car traffic is absolutely unnecessary which makes it all the more galling that we allow people to poison everybody else by doing it.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/feb/14/brake-pad-dust-toxic-exhaust-emissions

2025-02-25T22:30:25Z

Lots of people are going to have a problem with the truth going forward, so get those Wikipedia backups handy and start thinking about how to host it in a more distributed and resilient way.

https://www.404media.co/wikipedia-prepares-for-increase-in-threats-to-us-editors-from-musk-and-his-allies

2025-02-20T21:39:02Z

Not a major surprise that minorities would be treated poorly at a nazi charity like the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

https://www.businessinsider.com/chan-zuckerberg-initiative-racial-discrimination-claim-ray-holgado-facebook-2020-11?international=true&r=US&IR=T

2025-02-20T21:33:07Z

Wheel of Time is low key one of the best fantasy tv shows out right now. Each season is going from strength to strength and the next one looks to be the best one yet.

2025-02-20T17:13:22Z

A lot has been made of this talk about Egoless Engineering but I can say that for me it came at the exactly right time. In our platform team we got to the point mentioned in the talk and are now working on #3: Empower Everybody Else.

https://egoless.engineering/#50

2025-02-20T17:01:33Z

Obsidian is a knowledge worker’s lightsaber. It’s indispensable for any kind of serious work and it is now free to use.

https://obsidian.md/blog/free-for-work

2025-02-20T16:59:52Z

Rare to see an actual apples-to-apples comparison of databases like this. Postgres comes out ahead versus Sqlite but as always, it depends.

https://www.twilio.com/en-us/blog/sqlite-postgresql-complicated

2025-02-20T16:55:42Z

Another funny relic from the depths of version control: the Octopus Merge

https://www.freblogg.com/git-octopus-merge

2025-02-20T16:54:15Z

This is the way �A Pattern Language� intended we should talk about patterns: applied and without making things more complicated. Patterns should simplify and be grasped immediately.

https://grantslatton.com/design-patterns

2025-02-20T16:51:07Z

Filing this away for future reference when at some point we’ll want to get out of managed Kubernetes.

https://bilbof.com/posts/kubernetes-on-hetzner

2025-02-18T17:13:42Z

A very good explanation about “object soup” and how Rust is uniquely poorly suited to model problems in that way. It pins down a very fundamental issue that people coming from an object oriented background run into all the time and offers a helpful solution.

https://jacko.io/object_soup.html

2025-02-18T17:11:46Z

Quanta’s write-ups of math discoveries are always enjoyable to read. In this case an undergraduate (!) figured out something new about hash tables and how fast they can be. Not sure yet when this will be shipped in code, but still it’s a pretty amazing discovery.

Undergraduate Upends a 40-Year-Old Data Science Conjecture

2025-02-18T08:47:30Z

An enjoyable dive into where all these patronyms and nicknames came from. I could make one for Turkish but where I came from the lakap (nickname) is more common than the diminutive (Hat�a = Hatice).

https://blog.plover.com/lang/etym/nickname-names.html

2025-02-18T08:44:08Z

Just one of the ways that Zuckerberg full willingly enabled neonazis on his platforms.

https://globalextremism.org/post/neo-nazis-monetize-hate-on-instagram

2025-02-18T08:42:04Z

Hundred percent sure that if the same policy would be applied to Berlin most car traffic would evaporate from our streets here immediately. Most traffic in my neighborhood is people without really that much to do who could be doing something other than driving and drug dealers.

https://www.fastcompany.com/91272434/a-million-cars-have-disappeared-what-nyc-is-like-after-one-month-of-congestion-pricing

2025-02-18T08:40:39Z

Wild to see the materials that go into making a single inference machine for private use. At scale this stuff will of course be more efficient, but still the main components will be more or less the same.

https://ewintr.nl/posts/2025/building-a-personal-private-ai-computer-on-a-budget

2025-02-11T08:30:17Z

We’ve revived our tech blog and will be sharing a bunch of stuff around our AI process and what it means to be an “AI first” company. Here’s an in-depth first piece about what it takes to develop a successful real life product with LLMs.

https://choco.com/us/stories/life-at-choco/scaling-ai-applications-with-llms

2025-02-10T21:41:14Z

@alper Hast du eine Perspektive f�r uns was wir tuen k�nnen/ tuen sollten?

Jetzt habe ich einen guten Job aber ich versuche meine Familie davon zu �berzeugen demn�chst zur�ck nach Amsterdam oder in die Schweiz umzuziehen.

Ich meine was man h�tte tun sollen ist einige von den Problemen die hier skizziert werden zu l�sen:

Nur:

Die L�sungen f�r diese Probleme gibt es schon l�ngst nur die Leute hier wollen diese nicht gel�st sehen. Sowas ist kulturell bedingt und da kann man kaum etwas gegen tun.
Es ist jetzt schon ziemlich zu sp�t und mit diesem nicht-existierenden Reformtempo hat man die Krankenkassen (Renten, Digitalisierung, usw.) irgendwann rund 2040 neu gestaltet. Dann kann man es auch lassen.

Und wenn jetzt eine CDU-Regierung kommt dann wird gar kein Problem gel�st. Dann folgt nur noch mehr Abbruch (wie wir jetzt in Berlin haben sehen k�nnen).

Also meine Tipps:

Rettet wer sich retten kann und zieh weiter nach irgendwo, wo es klimafest ist und die Kultur nicht so kaputt ist.
Sorge zumindest dass du damit gut verdienst. Der Handel in Hass, Daten, Immobilien, R�stung usw. ist lukrativ und wird das auch bleiben.

2025-02-08T20:52:26Z

LLMs are fundamentally matching the patterns they�ve seen, and their abilities are constrained by mathematical boundaries. Embedding tricks and chain-of-thought prompting simply extends their ability to do more sophisticated pattern matching. The mathematical results imply that you can always find compositional tasks whose complexity lies beyond a given system�s abilities.

LLMs are still very useful in a bunch of domains but here’s an article explaining (from a paper with a novel bound on computational complexity) why improvements in reasoning seem to have run out of steam.

Chatbot Software Begins to Face Fundamental Limitations

2025-02-08T20:45:18Z

Overview of the performance of different caching solutions for Rails comparing Redis to some competitors.

https://www.bigbinary.com/blog/caching-in-rails-with-redis-vs-alternatives

2025-02-08T20:44:17Z

It’s a shame these people are so thoroughly psychopathic (from this epic Guardian profile) because this piece about pronatalism is nothing if not well argued.

https://www.palladiummag.com/2023/04/06/birth-rates-are-collapsing

2025-02-08T13:25:56Z

This was exactly a discussion I had yesterday where when teams reach higher levels of maturity, they may catch and fix issues internally before they become full blown incidents.

So how do we than make sure we are not over-indexing on purely the operational surprises where we ran the heavy incident machinery and how do we get the right learnings and improvements disseminated throughout the organisation?

(I know how. The “how” here is how to get there.)

You’re missing your near misses

2025-02-08T13:22:06Z

Even the most basic functions in foundational libraries can be iterated on and improved by reading papers and implementing novel algorithmic approaches. Here’s a breakdown of how the time crate got faster (even though “no one has complained”).

https://jhpratt.dev/blog/optimizing-with-novel-calendrical-algorithms

2025-02-08T13:15:58Z

Good luck hiring talent for your struggling economy with racism becoming even more rampant than it normally is. Not that that is the only problem facing Germany, but it’s a huge distraction for all parties while nothing material has improved for decades.

https://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/konzerne-gegen-fremdenfeindlichkeit-100.html

2025-02-08T13:10:49Z

I enjoy James Stanier’s newsletter on engineering management a lot. This one is about information processing in organizations, something which will make or break you.

From my observation, the correlation between high functioning people in engineering leadership and usage of Obsidian is not 1.0 but it is very high. I use a fairly tricked out setup myself, but there’s value to be had here at all levels.

It’s an interesting oversight in the OODA loop sketched out in the article, that the most important step “Orientation” is omitted. Orientation is elusive and hard to pin down which is exactly why it is so key.

https://theengineeringmanager.substack.com/p/gather-decide-execute

2025-02-08T13:01:56Z

SQLite is a tiny, somewhat quirky but incredibly convenient and fast database. For side projects I definitely don’t bother with a “real” database anymore and for many of them I just check the entire .sqlite file into version control for easier deployments. Here are some tuning tips to get really blazing fast performance out of … Continue reading

2025-02-07T18:18:15Z

After missing the previous edition, I’m ‘attending’ HYTRADBOI 2025. Databases are the bread and butter of our team and I enjoy keeping up with the cutting edge of the field while using the most boring possible one at work.

https://www.hytradboi.com/2025

2025-02-07T08:03:18Z

Imagine being this rich and having this much free time and using all of those capabilities to drive yourself mad with ignorance. Nothing bad has happened to these people yet they are convinced the entire world is out to get them.

https://gizmodo.com/marc-andreessen-seems-to-think-hillary-clinton-was-actually-president-2000552062

2025-02-05T23:40:51Z

Thiel’s op-ed in the FT was truly insane. Who hurt these people?

https://www.unpopularfront.news/p/reading-thiels-op-ed

2025-02-05T23:33:23Z

As if it wasn’t obvious that the New York Times is a pile of crap, here’s them getting rid of Paul Krugman for views that aren’t Trump positive enough.

https://www.cjr.org/analysis/paul-krugman-leaving-new-york-times-heavy-hand-editing-less-frequent-columns-newsletter.php

2025-02-05T23:25:38Z

“OpenAI shocked that an AI company would train on someone else’s data without permission or compensation.”

https://www.404media.co/openai-furious-deepseek-might-have-stolen-all-the-data-openai-stole-from-us

2025-02-07T08:00:21Z

This is a very good framework from Matt Webb for organizations how to do strategic pathfinding when it comes to AI. In Germany especially, lots of orgs would benefit from doing this instead of whatever it is that they are busy with right now.

Interesting to see the word overhang used here (originally by Nat Friedman) which I normally use when talking about tech “debt” but a capability overhang is of course also possible.

https://interconnected.org/home/2023/12/08/ai-pathfinding

2025-02-05T23:05:44Z

I don’t think there’s been a Python developer tool that’s been adopted as quickly as uv is being right now. Dealing with dependencies and running Python code has never been easier.

https://treyhunner.com/2024/12/lazy-self-installing-python-scripts-with-uv

2025-02-05T23:04:21Z

Looks like food waste and food security are going to be very important going forward.

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2025/jan/14/nobel-world-food-prize-laureates-global-hunger-open-letter-food-production

2025-02-05T23:35:47Z

A write-up of the current dream stack in practice: prototype work in Python and then hook it up to Rust to bring it to production.

https://www.sonair.com/journal/building-for-safety-with-rust

2025-02-05T22:58:16Z

Quick turnarounds on fixing vulnerabilities usually correlated with general engineering operational excellence.�The best cases were clients who asked us to just give them a constant feed of anything we found, and they�d fix it right away.

Lots of interesting tidbits here from dozens of startup code audits.

Learnings from 5 years of tech startup code audits

2025-02-05T22:51:37Z

[�] the abandonment of responsibility in two dimensions. Firstly, and following on from what was already happening in �big data�, the world stopped caring about where AI got its data � fitting in nicely with �surveillance capitalism. And secondly, contrary to what professional organisations like BCS and ACM had been preaching for years, the outcomes of AI algorithms were no longer viewed as the responsibility of their designers � or anybody, really.

That’s a fairer and more informed take than most. AI systems can be very useful in limited contexts but you wouldn’t want one to decide anything material about your life.

https://www.bcs.org/articles-opinion-and-research/does-current-ai-represent-a-dead-end

2025-02-05T22:45:13Z

The scientists are all on Bluesky which is understandable given the war on science and truth taking place on Twitter.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00177-1?linkId=12635521

2025-02-05T22:41:54Z

Not politicians, just career bureaucrats deep in the system. I ask them what their favorite part of the job is. They all say “stability” or “job security” as their #1. It takes 18 months to get the city to permit your shed? They. Do. Not. Care.

All of these examples are things I struggle with also on a daily basis. I live in Berlin where nobody gives a shit about anything. The place is a dump and everybody pretends that it can’t be any other way.

It’s not hard to see why people don’t care. Most people barely have the capacity to get through the day. They don’t have it in them to care about something more. The way to get people to care more is to force them with social pressure.

https://grantslatton.com/nobody-cares

2025-02-04T20:36:31Z

Artemis, fostered with Apollo, virgin who delights in arrows, far-shooting goddess, who swiftly drives her all-golden chariot through Smyrna to vine-clad Claros, I ask that you establish a loop counting from ninety-nine to one called beerLoop.

A programming language where you make things happen by invoking the gods. Nice to see that classics upbringing to be of some professional use.

https://github.com/rottytooth/Olympus

2025-02-04T20:30:17Z

I had no idea that Git trailers were a thing, but this is pretty cool. Not sure where I’ll ever use it though: “trailers are severely underutilized”

https://alchemists.io/articles/git_trailers

2025-02-04T20:19:14Z

Slow progress on results

Blamed on everything being difficult or complicated

With a tendency to find artificial prerequisite activities that sound plausible, but on further examination aren�t.

Things are as complex as we want to make them. Most of the time complexity is an excuse for either not wanting to do something or not knowing how to do something.

I agree with this with two additions:

Most of the time things are not at all complex, they are complicated. Those are two very different things.

Complications can be a symptom of avoidance but maybe oftentimes the work is complicated. If all the work was simple, any idiot could do it. Appreciate the real complexity of the work while you are in the act of cutting through it.

Career Advice: Simplifiers Go Far, Complexifiers Get Stuck

2025-02-04T18:18:41Z

After reading about it, I started trying out Sonshi style myself. RMS is a disgusting character so let�s just pretend the guru is somebody else.

I do this during extended work sessions away from my desk.

The setup is really easy with Karabiner Elements and a new profile that disables the laptop built-in keyboard when my contra is plugged in.

https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/sonshi-style-aka-keyboard-on-laptop/

2025-01-31T11:22:05Z

We can probably look forward to see more large American companies destabilize under a regime of financialization, deregulation and competitive pressure.

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/23/boeing-details-losses-from-labor-strike-production-issues.html

2025-01-31T11:17:26Z

A pretty good explanation of all the weird acronyms that make modern e-mail infrastructure absolutely inscrutable.

That’s not really different from deep dives into DNS, TLS, CORS etc. The things we use to build the internet have become (out of necessity) incredibly specialized and complicated.

https://www.mythic-beasts.com/blog/2025/01/29/the-death-of-email-forwarding

2025-01-31T11:13:56Z

I find limited run podcast series that dive deep into a specific topic are some of the best things the medium brings forth.

Here’s one from Escape Collective that covers the intersection of a bunch of special interests: bike manufacturing, the pandemic, supply chains and how it all went to hell.

I bought a road bike myself at the end of the pandemic and the supply chain shortages made it so that I’m on a Cube CX bike which is fine but definitely not what I would have gotten if there had been a wide range of bikes to choose from.

https://escapecollective.com/how-did-the-bike-industry-get-into-such-deep-trouble

2025-01-27T08:37:39Z

An roller coaster of an interview with a series of FizzBuzz extensions that are honestly not even that bad, but poor form from the interviewers’ side not to recognize the absolute balling brilliance on display here.

I can just about follow along with this level of Typescript type level programming but to be able to whip this out during an interview is a testament of mastery.

https://kranga.notion.site/The-fizzbuzz-that-did-not-get-me-the-job-180e7c22ef3b80c3a386f7f8de720ac7

2025-01-27T08:25:31Z

Sam Altman and OpenAI are consistently unreliable. One more example that by this point should not surprise anybody.

https://the-decoder.com/openai-quietly-funded-independent-math-benchmark-before-setting-record-with-o3

2025-01-27T08:18:22Z

Let’s hope for a quick ending to Twitter.

https://www.theverge.com/2025/1/24/24351317/elon-musk-x-twitter-bank-debt-stagnant-growth

2025-01-27T08:16:49Z

Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphising Larry Ellison. You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don�t anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it�ll chop it off, the end. You don�t think �oh, the lawnmower hates me� � lawnmower doesn�t give a shit about you, lawnmower can�t hate you. Don�t anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don�t fall into that trap about Oracle.

2025-01-21T17:47:41Z

Trashfuture were really cooking when they taped “The Sulla of Suburbia” with Patrick Wyman.

They want Sulla:

They have a hierarchical view of the world:

November saying that they really want Hitler:

The op-ed departments love this stuff:

2025-01-18T11:42:20Z

I think this is a well argued plea by Ken Shirriff to stop using the term “cargo cult” and I agree with it but would like to add two things.

With a non-English speaking audience that does not have the same priors, nobody will have an idea what you are talking about if you use the term “cargo cult”. You’ll be stuck explaining the term in a ham-fisted way that will fail to convey the huge amount of history and social science involved.

One problem with rejecting the term is that it lets software engineers off the hook and allows them to pretend the way they work is different from the tribal inhabitants of pacific islands. I argue that most software engineering practice is based on folklore and is deeply tribalistic.

https://www.righto.com/2025/01/its-time-to-abandon-cargo-cult-metaphor.html

2025-01-18T11:12:54Z

No port/adapter terms to learn, no unnecessary layers of horizontal abstractions, no extraneous cognitive load.

Reducing cognitive load is continuous battle. The entropy direction of a software system is always towards more complexity.

People add a lot of this stuff out of either inexperience or because they need to look smart. The simple code that gets the job done is often looked down upon.

https://minds.md/zakirullin/cognitive

2025-01-18T11:00:09Z

What’s happening in Flint is a good example of how the social effects of institutional lapses are much more difficult to fix than just replacing a bunch of pipes. We’re seeing the same effects happening around COVID and its after effects and we’ll see many more examples of government distrust and chaotic confusion in the coming decades.

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/12/23/flint-water-crisis-2020-post-coronavirus-america-445459

2025-01-18T10:57:27Z

For those who want to introduce some whimsy into their programming and for whom using a variable width font in your code editor is a bit too far, there is now Comic Mono (via). It doesn’t even look all too terrible.

(After using Iosevka and Inconsolata for a long time, I’m now as are many people a happy Jetbrains Mono user.)

https://dtinth.github.io/comic-mono-font

2025-01-17T15:04:24Z

I would have been surprised if Devin had performed even 1/10th as well as it was hyped. This is a good clean write-up.

Social media excitement and company valuations have minimal relationship to real-world utility. We�ve found the most reliable signal comes from detailed stories of users shipping products and services.

https://www.answer.ai/posts/2025-01-08-devin.html

2025-01-16T11:42:51Z

I love Github Projects for tracking work. It’s close to the code and engineers understand it natively. I feel you can deliver features of any size with it if you work with the tool.

The only thing that’s a bit annoying is the lack of improvements from Github. There’s a bunch of quality of life features I’m used to from other tools that would really make a difference. But now with LLMs we don’t have to settle.

I asked Cursor to write me a user script that adds a “Create Follow-up Task” button (that I used a lot on Asana) to issues on Github. It did a reasonable enough job that I could tweak and then have something working for me. I could write this myself of course but the hurdle of figuring out the format and the wiring felt like a blocker.

https://github.com/alper/user-scripts/blob/main/github-followup-issue/github-followup.user.js

2025-01-16T11:22:49Z

As if it were possible for me to love htmx more, they post a governance statement that the project is stable and there will be no more new features.

This is so much better than the endless revamps and scope creep that other projects suffer from.

https://htmx.org/essays/future

2025-01-16T11:18:44Z

I’ll have to agree here that for normal engineers it’s better to not really engage with Glue work.

Just drop it. If it’s important, the org will figure out a way to pick it up. That’s why you are part of an org in the first place.

https://www.seangoedecke.com/glue-work-considered-harmful

2025-01-15T09:59:08Z

Imagine shipping an app that is so bad that the CEO has to step down. Sonos has made it happen.

https://www.theverge.com/2025/1/13/24342179/sonos-ceo-patrick-spence-resignation-reason-app

2025-01-15T09:56:26Z

Running a LLM on a Nintendo Switch is a marvellous little hack and it’s also a testament to the strength of NVIDIA’s platform.

Switch AI ?

2025-01-15T09:53:49Z

I think Facebook rolled back their block of Pixelfed but they’re right to be spooked. Showing a bunch of pictures in a stream hardly seems like a technological challenge. And what are all the people working at Instagram doing other than figuring out novel ways to track you and serve you ads?

You should definitely try out Pixelfed which is more than usable.

https://www.heise.de/en/news/Unprecedented-growth-Facebook-blocks-links-to-Instagram-alternative-Pixelfed-10237928.html

2025-01-15T09:25:29Z

A lack of knowledge about queueing theory and a dash of wishful thinking make this a common trap for most developers to believe that as long as you add bigger queues you can wiggle your way out of any scaling problem.

You can’t.

https://ferd.ca/queues-don-t-fix-overload.html

2025-01-14T08:56:50Z

Brazil still remembers that it’s a state with state power and has found a delightful habit of pouncing on social media sites. Other states should follow suit.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/brazil-gives-meta-72-hours-explain-changes-fact-checking-program-2025-01-10

2025-01-14T08:54:36Z

A more than accurate description of my entire LinkedIn experience.

https://matduggan.com/stop-trying-to-schedule-a-call-with-me

2025-01-14T08:47:30Z

The two entities arguably most responsible for keeping Germany in the digital dark ages, the CSU and Telekom, have found each other.

https://www.heise.de/news/Telekom-Chef-fordert-Digitalministerium-und-Ausbau-Turbo-Gesetz-10237291.html

2025-01-14T08:44:58Z

The Agents chapter from Chip Huyen’s book “AI Engineering” is clear and enjoyable to read. She’s right that “the concept of an agent is fairly simple” but building something functional still looks like a massive lift.

https://huyenchip.com/2025/01/07/agents.html

2025-01-12T10:35:18Z

Maps for where you’ve been in Europe and the US (via). Stayed means having spent a night there which means the only places I’ve visited and not spent the night are Slovenia (went over the border to hike a mountain there) and the Vatican.

I should probably upgrade Turkey to lived depending on your definition: stayed in your own house or registered as a resident.

My score for the US is negligible and I don’t see this changing any time soon (maybe ever).

2025-01-11T14:31:56Z

A live coding environment to create 3D graphics using signed distance functions written in the Janet programming language. Click through and edit some of the embedded examples to get a feel for how amazing this is.

https://ianthehenry.com/posts/bauble/building-bauble

2025-01-11T14:23:17Z

A thought-provoking article about how to counteract car bloat. I would add that driving a SUV is even worse than smoking because it mostly harms others, not the person doing the driving themselves.

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/391733/gigantic-suvs-are-a-public-health-threat-why-dont-we-treat-them-like-one

2025-01-11T14:16:10Z

In Germany for many transactions you need a proof of address which a Personalausweis provides for German citizens. Us foreigners don’t get one however often we ask for it. In the Netherlands moving through the country without a battery of chip cards (OV chipkaart, Bonuskaart, OV-fiets etc.), apps and associated services is costly and annoying.

The signs have been there for a while but China seems to be pushing this much further along. The question is whether it’s a deliberate move or that the number of people affected is so small that they’re a negligible edge case for the policy makers over there.

https://substack.com/home/post/p-136339096

2025-01-11T14:01:30Z

It’s rare to find writing in German as lithe and delightful as what Christoph Rauscher puts out. The monthly lists are one particularly good example. I’m learning new and interesting words still in most of his pieces.

I totally agree that “Writing = Design” and you should hire him for Design/Writing/Illustration: https://christophrauscher.de/writing/

Dezember-Liste 2024

2025-01-11T13:43:02Z

A tear down of how women still get erased from narratives like Toshi here in the new Bob Dylan movie.

https://merrillmarkoe.substack.com/p/a-complete-unknown-the-ballad-of

2025-01-11T11:52:54Z

I think Home Row Mods for your keyboard are too complicated by far to use but I’m glad these kind of comprehensive guides exist.

https://precondition.github.io/home-row-mods

2025-01-11T11:44:44Z

The lamb ad does a good job showing the madness that is online comments sections. Also it made me want to eat a nice piece of lamb.

2025-01-11T11:43:33Z

I’ve had to spend more time than I like thinking about how datetimes are stored in databases and even the commonly accepted practice of storing UTC does not work for all cases.

Specifically when you store something that would happen in the future, you need to store the location of the event as well. Otherwise any time of daylight savings change will shift your event around. This is not just for single events but can also happen for say ordering cut-off times which aren’t pinned to a single date.

Storing UTC is not a silver bullet

2025-01-08T08:55:50Z

Let’s see how this develops but good to see a positive healthcare story for AIs.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/jan/07/more-breast-cancer-cases-found-when-ai-used-in-screenings-study-finds

2025-01-08T08:53:07Z

A very useful thought experiment whenever anybody tries to pretend LLMs are ‘human’ because they sound human.

Here's why "alignment research" when it comes to LLMs is a big mess, as I see it.Claude is not a real guy. Claude is a character in the stories that an LLM has been programmed to write. Just to give it a distinct name, let's call the LLM "the Shoggoth".
— Colin (@colin-fraser.net) 2024-12-19T23:15:38.459Z

2025-01-06T06:34:56Z

[�] the Rands Leadership Slack is the most impactful thing I�ve built outside my family and job.

I can testify to the Rands Leadership Slack being an impactful thing. I’ve joined it a long time ago and more or less everything I know about engineering leadership I’ve learned there. I’m eternally grateful for all the hard work the people there put into making that a nice place to be.

https://randsinrepose.com/archives/just-hard-work

2025-01-06T06:24:00Z

RARE: Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning Enhancement for Large Language Models

Medical QA depends heavily on domain-specific knowledge that is not always available within pre-trained models, necessitating knowledge-based retrieval from external sources.

In addition medical knowledge evolves rapidly, and new treatments or updated guidelines may not be included in the model’s pertained corpus.

The question example for the reasoning process in Figure 1 is on a multiple-choice question. That seems overly simple.

In parallel, Commonsense Question Answering shares similar complexities with Medical QA, particularly in its reliance on structured multi-step reasoning and iterative evidence retrieval.

rStar (Mutual Reasoning Makes Smaller LLMs Stronger Problem-Solvers)

The rStar approach seems worth diving into. That will be the paper I read next.

Monte Carlo Tree Search

enabling the open source LLMs (LLAMA3.1) to achieve competitive performance with top closed-source LLMs like GPT-4 and GPT-4o.

We’ll come to this later in the paper. Their conclusion is that they can trick out LLAMA to get similar performance to GPT-4 in these domains.

Upper Confidence Bound applied on trees (UCT)

In contrast, rStar incorporates five distinct actions that enable more adaptive exploration:

A1: Propose a One-Step Thought. This action generates the next reasoning step based on previous steps, allowing the LLM to build the solution incrementally.

A2: Propose Remaining Thought Steps. This action enables the LLM to produce all remaining reasoning steps in one inference, similar to CoT, for simpler questions.

A3: Generate Next Sub-question and Answer. This action decomposes the main problem into a sequence of sub-questions, each solved in turn. A4: Re-answer Sub-question. This action allows the LLM to re-answer a previously generated sub- question, increasing accuracy by using few-shot prompting.

A5: Rephrase Question/Sub-question. This action rephrases the question to clarify conditions and reduce misunderstandings, enhancing the LLM�s interpretation of the problem.

I need to trace the rStar algorithm after reading the original paper. The explanation here is too short.

These queries target information that can either support or refute the content of each statement, ensuring comprehensive factual verification.

How does this approach deal with (non-)negation that LLMs often have a lot of trouble with? From a language perspective it could just as easily say I can or can’t eat grapefruit (iykyk) based on the temperature that day but especially in a medical context these kind of errors can be catastrophic.

RARE achieves substantial gains, outperforming rStar by 5.17% on MedQA, 2.19% on MedMCQA and 2.39% on MMLU-Medical.

Even if these numbers are statistically significant (which they don’t say), these increases are really modest. I would not call this in any way “substantial”.

Looking at Table 1, RARE is as much of an increase over rStar as rStar is over the next best approach so from that perspective maybe you could call it significant. The difference between worst and best framework here is around 10% across CoT, RAG, SC, rStar, RARE.

evaluated on StrategyQA (SQA), CommonsenseQA (CQA), Social IQA (SIQA) and Physical IQA (PIQA)

The main question I have is from what percentage accuracy such a system would be reasonably possible to use in a real world context. Even at 90-95% that would seem like it would be too low to rely on when the stakes are high.

By enhancing LLMs with retrieval-augmented reasoning, RARE bridges the gap between open source models and state-of-the-art proprietary systems.

The framework has only been tested on open source models like LLaMA 3.1 and not on larger proprietary models such as GPT-4. This is due to the high number of API calls required by RARE’s iterative retrieval and reasoning process, making evaluation on closed source models prohibitively costly.

So here they repeat the statement that they’ve bridged the gap but they say they haven’t used this approach with a model like GPT-4 because the number of API calls would make it too expensive.

That leaves on the table that these kind of many-call approaches are open to OpenAI because they can do these numbers of calls much more affordably from inside the house. No real gap has been closed here and it shows again how big of an advantage OpenAI has.

That raises the question: What makes GPT-4 so good? Why does it perform so much better than open source models?

RARE is designed to identify a single reasoning trajectory that leads to a correct answer but does not necessarily optimise for the best or shortest path that maximises robustness.

Any integration into medical workflows must be supervised by qualified practitioners to ensure patient safety and ethical use.

Year in Review 2024

2025-01-05T17:05:45Z

It’s been a bit of a grab bag year but overall not as bad as 2023 and a bunch of things seem to be on track.

Health

I got on the neurodiversity bandwagon this year.

First I got myself a self-paid diagnosis for ADHD. This result should not surprise anybody who knows me. I’ve forced myself to be very high functioning throughout my life but it can’t be denied that there were always some underlying issues. I’m on medication from the end of the year and have gone off caffeine.

I also got myself tested for giftedness and got a positive result there as well.

Both of these results were validating if nothing else and put a lot of things that happened in my life in a different perspective.

For anybody who’s not sure whether they should pursue this, my recommendation would be: You will only know how differently you can feel if you do.

I got a mole cut out of my skin. It’s a nice scar to have.

I’m fully vaxxed against FSME and got a booster for COVID in November. That brings me to six jabs in total.

Sports and Injuries

It could have been a great year for sports. After having a great time on our yearly trip to the Alps, I came back to Berlin and badly sprained my ankle after falling off some stairs. I didn’t need any surgery, thankfully, but it did set me back some 8 weeks of physical therapy and having to build up to walking again.

That notwithstanding, I managed to participate in three road cycling group rides this year. MAAP opening up a store here and organising open weekly rides has been really cool. The cycling and the coffee were lit. ?

I cycled up the Brocken for my first ever mountain and clocked 4201km in 2024 on Strava.

It’s my goal to weigh 75kgs and I’m still as far away from that as I ever was.

Movies

Letterbox does a good job tracking this and it was a pretty good year for movies. I review all of them over there in detail but I can say the non-Potter kids movies we watched were nice and the Japanese cinema on the whole was excellent. I saw Evil Does Not Exist two times with the second time in the local theatre live scored by its composer Eiko Ishibashi.

Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone
Dune: Part Two
Curious Tobi and the Treasure Hunt to the Flying Rivers
Glass Onion
Frozen
Tangled
Raya and the Last Dragon
Shoplifters
Luca
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
Yojimbo
Drive My Car
Perfect Days
John Wick: Chapter 4
Evil Does Not Exist
How to Blow Up a Pipeline
Harakiri
Evil Does Not Exist
Die Hard

Television

Trakt is doing a great job keeping track of which episodes of which television series I need to watch. It’s the only way I can possibly stay on top of this.

The Last of Us
Spy x Family S2
Death Note
Frieren
Tour de France: Unchained S2
Vigil
The Peripheral
Kaiju No 8
Bluey
Arcane S2

Looks like I’m turning into a weeb just like everybody else in the culture. I watch anime in part as light entertainment and in part as Japanese immersion. It’s very hard to find anime that has any kind of thematic depth. Frieren comes closest because of how it twists the standard fantasy trope into a story about loss and reminiscence.

Books

It was a fair though not great year for reading.

Sheaf Theory through Examples, Daniel Rosiak
Bring Up the Bodies, Hilary Mantel
Min kamp 2, Knausg�rd, Karl Ove
Maria Stuart, Friedrich Schiller
Arkada Yayl?lar �al?yor, Melik?ah Altunta?
My Tender Matador, Pedro Lemebel
Kafka Connect: Build and Run Data Pipelines, Mickail Maison
Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season, Forugh Farrokzhad
Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Michel Foucault
The Kubernetes Book: 2024 Edition, Nigel Poulton
Kafka Troubleshooting in Production: Stabilizing Kafka Clusters in the Cloud and On-premises, Elad Eldor
Conversational Capacity: The Secret to Building Successful Teams That Perform When the Pressure Is on, Craig Weber

I’m continuing my trend of reading one Knausg�rd and one Mantel book each year. No reason not to do that again this year.

I picked up some poetry at Perdu during my visit to Amsterdam and have been enjoying reading that.

Every time I see Maria Stuart (which I got put on to by Past Present Future’s fantastic Great Political Fictions series) in the list, I think: “I need to read more Schiller.” but then I keep forgetting to get the files off Gutenberg. Germans sure knew how to write back in the day.

Trips

Besides the trip to the Alps, I went to the Netherlands once in 2024 for Kars’s viva and we took a trip to idyllic Hiddensee after my foot was healed. Much more travel is slated for next year!

Other Culture

I don’t go to exhibitions for lack of time. Besides seeing Evil Does Not Exist in the theatre I managed to burn a ticket to the opera and one to a dance show due to conflicting commitments and forgetfulness. I’m not sure whether I’m going to retry this.

I took the kids to see Ronja at an open air show which was fun.

Miscellaneous

I was a member of the Greens but I cancelled that because even if they’re the least bad political party in Germany, they have been doing a lot of things that I do not wish to support from the inside. I wrote about that here.

I continued to learn and maintain my Japanese level in preparation for my trip in 2025.

I learned a bunch around Kubernetes and Kafka but would have liked to do more programming. I refreshed my algorithms a bit and picked up Factor to play with.

2025-01-04T17:47:46Z

The terminal I use daily (because it’s the best really), fish, has been rewritten entirely in Rust, because it’s nice and more fun: “For one, fish is a hobby project, and that means we want it to be fun for us. Nobody is being paid to work on fish, so we�need�it to be fun. Being fun and interesting also attracts contributors.”

I can testify to this because when most of the code was rewritten I checked it out, built it and poked around a bunch to see how it works. I don’t think I would have done that or enjoyed doing it if it had been a C++ codebase. That was also when I was confronted with the fact that what makes a terminal really complicated is not the language in which it is programmed, but the underlying system that it is an interface to.

The story of the port and its success is legendary as far as these things go.

https://fishshell.com/blog/rustport

2025-01-04T17:26:17Z

There was a brief period where Foursquare based recommendations were good and drawn from your wider social graph. Now we’ve gone back to Yelp and Google Maps where reviews and ratings don’t mean anything. A lower than 4 star review on GMaps has netted me a cease-and-desist e-mail for defamation.

That puts personally curated travel docs and word of mouth back in play as Thrillist describes here. Every Dutch person has or knows somebody who has a Berlin Google Doc with all the Geheimtipps. Dutch people’s tastes are fairly predictable and pedestrian, so these’ll mostly be cheap Asian eateries in Prenzlauerberg but that’s also fine.

For me the most interesting recommendations for Berlin but also for other cities come through TikTok. The algorithm is well tuned to my type of person and in the short videos it’s pretty easy to size up whether somebody knows what they’re talking about or not.

https://www.thrillist.com/travel/nation/google-docs-are-the-ideal-travel-guides

2025-01-03T13:46:00Z

As a parent and as a social media user, I don’t buy that something that’s harmful to adults is not EVEN MORE harmful to children.

The platforms need to be curtailed and this entire situation has to be shutdown as soon as possible. We can keep our kids off smartphones but what about others?

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jan/03/psychiatrist-children-smartphones-mental-health-harm

2025-01-03T11:10:03Z

Musks’s attack on Wikipedia is another step in getting rid of information sources where they can’t control the narrative and the “truth”. Everything they’re doing is built on lies.

https://www.citationneeded.news/elon-musk-and-the-rights-war-on-wikipedia

2025-01-03T00:10:29Z

Hans de Zwart’s end of the year media overviews are one of the highlights of what still happens on personal blogs for me. He’s a voracious reader and one of the rare people who acts on his moral clarity. Also, Hans is a great guy and I had the chance to briefly catch-up with him last year.

I’ll see if I can pull something together, but definitely go through his list. I always pick up more than a couple of interesting things to explore.

The books I read, the podcasts I listened to, the films and other culture I saw in 2024

2025-01-03T00:01:50Z

The o3 AGI result looked so noteworthy that I dove into it. I read one of the papers that’s at the base of the approach and thought it was pretty interesting.

Turns out that it was mostly bullshit and everybody was doing another round of “let’s pretend that AGI is real”. What a shambles.

https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/c39

2025-01-02T23:52:14Z

Trust Laura Olin, nobody has to stay on Twitter. It’s a bad place that’s only getting worse.

You don’t actually have to stay on Twitter.

2025-01-02T23:49:53Z

An overview of the year in databases by Andy Pavlo that does not pull any punches. I learned a bunch of things (and I somewhat keep up with this area).

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~pavlo/blog/2025/01/2024-databases-retrospective.html

2025-01-02T14:32:40Z

I think for sure we’ve built an Erlang but even then again Erlang is such an esoteric environment that I would barely consider using it to be an alternative. Where would you start and how would you get other people onboarded?

https://vereis.com/posts/you_built_an_erlang

2025-01-02T14:28:45Z

A cautionary tale of how you can try to avoid Kubernetes to then step-by-step build the same thing yourself but poorly.

https://www.macchaffee.com/blog/2024/you-have-built-a-kubernetes

2025-01-02T14:22:37Z

Another take on the old adage that writing the code is the easy part of software engineering. The real work is figuring out what has to be built and how. Once that is clear, the actual building can be done relatively quickly and linearly.

I think the notion of a dead program is useful though it’s not always that clear cut:

The death of a program happens when the programmer team possessing its theory is dissolved. A dead program may continue to be used for execution in a computer and to produce useful results.

https://olano.dev/blog/software-design-is-knowledge-building