Happy New Year 2025
US Central Time here, so still a couple hours to go, but HAPPY NEW YEAR to y’all fellow HN-ers — HN is probably the least guilt-ridden procrastination I do on the whole wide internet. Thank you to every one of you who has made HN among the most intellectually dense places on the web — […]
Déjà vu: Ghostly CVEs in my terminal title
Exploring a security bug in Ghostty that is eerily familiar. As I’ve spoken and written about all modern terminals are actually “emulating” something dating from the 1970s. The full details are surprisingly complex and having a standard building block for these things is important. We can probably do better, but it’s hard to change something […]
Building Game Prototypes with LÖVE
One of my goals for 2025 is to build a complete game. Complete as in, you can buy it on Steam or the App Store for $2.99 or so. I’ve made little games before but completing and shipping a game would probably be my largest side project yet (aside from this blog). Over the winter […]
Just Words (YC W24) Is Hiring
The future of Marketing is 1-1 hyper-personalized messaging. However, marketers spent multiple cycles setting up an “octopus” on CRM journey builders to manually write content for each persona and segment. Further, A/B testing is sequential and takes weeks to show results. We drift away from the old school A/B testing world to dynamic testing. Companies […]
Arnis: Generate Cities in Minecraft from OpenStreetMap
This open source project written in Rust generates any chosen location from the real world in Minecraft Java Edition with a high level of detail. 🖥️ Example By leveraging geospatial data from OpenStreetMap and utilizing the powerful capabilities of Rust, Arnis provides an efficient and robust solution for creating complex and accurate Minecraft worlds that […]
Things we learned about LLMs in 2024
31st December 2024 A lot has happened in the world of Large Language Models over the course of 2024. Here’s a review of things we figured out about the field in the past twelve months, plus my attempt at identifying key themes and pivotal moments. This is a sequel to my review of 2023. In […]
Dinner for One: the British comedy Germans have been laughing at for years(2018)
Ten years ago, on New Year’s Eve, my mother grabbed my English boyfriend’s arm and led him to the television. “It’s time for Dinner for One,” she said excitedly as the whole family gathered – as we do every year – to fall about laughing at an old British black-and-white comedy sketch. As the opening […]
Zildjian, a 400-year-old cymbal-making company in Massachusetts
Cymbalsmith Peter Nelson works on a cymbal on a lathe at the Zildjian cymbal factory in Norwell, Mass. (Robin Lubbock/WBUR) From symphonies to rock music, marching bands and advertising jingles — we hear Zildjian cymbals everywhere. Drummers across the globe know that name because it’s emblazoned on every gleaming disc. What’s less known is the […]
Legion Health (YC S21) Is Hiring
Legion Health is revolutionizing mental healthcare with LLM-driven telepsychiatry solutions. Our TypeScript stack (Next.js, Node.js, Supabase/PostgreSQL, Docker) empowers us to capture and analyze patient data in real time, drastically improving care outcomes while reducing operational overhead. As a mid-level engineer, you’ll: Implement new features in our patient portal, clinical dashboards, and AI-assisted scheduling workflows. Collaborate […]
Systems ideas that sound good but almost never work
@Martin_Casado tweeted some wisdom (as he often does) in this: He asked what else and I replied with a quick list. Below is “why” these don’t work. I offer this recognizing engineering is also a social science and what works/does not work is context dependent. One life lesson is that every time you say to […]