If AI Writes All the Code, What Do the Programmers Do?
Eight months ago I was producing roughly 90% human written code and 10% AI written code. This has switched surprisingly rapidly and now my code is probably 90% AI. So what do I do all day? I’ll go...
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Book Review: Babel by R.F. Kuang
The book Babel, or The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution is fascinating. And I’m not sure how much of this the author intended. It’s mainly fascinating...
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Apple is Holding my Pictures Hostage Until I Accept Their New Terms of Service
It started off a few months ago, when my iPad suddenly couldn’t play videos any more that it had recorded. It would show the first frame, but hitting the play button wouldn’t do anything. I googled...
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President Graph – FRED Data Broken Down by Party and President
I made a website to explore FRED data broken down by US president and party. This is obviously motivated by the current president. During the last election I was frustrated by how many nonsense...
View ArticleI’m Getting a Whiff of Iain Banks’ Culture
The US has been acting powerful recently and it reminded me of this question: What does it feel like to fight against a powerful AI? Not for normal people for whom there’s no difference between...
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Word Map – A Game About Hill Climbing and Stepping Stones
I really like Semantle because I noticed that progress is similar to the description in Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective by Kenneth Stanley. The objective function is very...
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How Programmers Spend Their Time
I submitted a tiny patch to flash attention. The necessary typing for the change takes less ten seconds, but the overall change took more than ten hours So where does the time go? It started when...
View ArticleHow LLMs Keep on Getting Better
If you look at the source code of a modern open source LLM, it looks very similar to the transformer described in the “Attention is all you need” paper from 2017. It’s just a stack of exactly three...
View ArticleHow to Adjust Your Kids Sleep Schedule for Daylight Savings in 15 Minute...
Daylight savings just ended so this post is coming exactly too late. But I was talking to a friend about how we just adjust 15 minutes per day, which is quite easy. She was saying “oh I wish I had...
View ArticleAvalanche Studios NYC Retrospective – An Ambitious Company Ruined by Bad...
I’ve wanted to write about this since the studio closed a year ago. Now that Contraband is also canceled I think it’s time, especially since Contraband was one of the big reasons why I left the...
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Installing a Mini-Split AC in a Brooklyn Apartment
Last year, 2024, we replaced four PTACs with a mini-split AC. I’ve been asked about it often enough (by neighbors, coworkers, friends) that I decided to write up the experience. Hopefully it’s useful...
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Revisiting Knuth’s “Premature Optimization” Paper
The most famous quote from Knuth’s paper “Structured Programming with go to Statements” is this: There is no doubt that the grail of efficiency leads to abuse. Programmers waste enormous amounts of...
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I’m Open-Sourcing my Custom Benchmark GUI
I think one of the reasons why I was able to do good performance work over the years is that at some point I started taking benchmarking seriously enough to write my own library. I used to use Google...
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Why Does Integer Addition Approximate Float Multiplication?
Here is a rough approximation of float multiplication (source): float rough_float_multiply(float a, float b) { constexpr uint32_t bias = 0x3f76d000; return...
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Initial CUDA Performance Surprises
I am somehow very late to learning CUDA. I didn’t even know until recently that CUDA is just C++ with a small amount of extra stuff. If I had known that there is so little friction to learning it, I...
View ArticleHow I use LLMs to program
Studies have shown that LLMs help novice programmers more than experienced programmers. This matches my experience. At work I see that interns or new hires have some LLM window open almost all the...
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Transform Matrices are Great and You Should Understand Them
The title of this blog post is obvious for any game programmer, but I notice that people outside of games often write clumsy code because they don’t know how transform matrices work. Especially when...
View ArticleTwo Kids Put Me on a Two Sleep Schedule
I’m writing this at 2am, having already slept from 9pm to 1am. I will sleep again from 4am to 7am. This is apparently called “biphasic sleep”, which I first heard about in the 2022 article The...
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Beautiful Branchless Binary Search
I read a blog post by Alex Muscar, “Beautiful Binary Search in D“. It describes a binary search called “Shar’s algorithm”. I’d never heard of it and it’s impossible to google, but looking at the...
View ArticleFine-grained Locking with Two-Bit Mutexes
Lets say you want to have a mutex for every item in a list with 10k elements. It feels a bit wasteful to use a std::mutex for each of those elements. In Linux std::mutex is 40 bytes, in Windows it’s...
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