Powerful AI

The recent release of DeepSeek-R1 made a pretty big splash, breaking into the mainstream news cycle in a way that the steady model releases we’ve had for a couple years now did not do. The main focuses of these stories were that 1. it was cheap and 2. it was chinese, forcing the market to […]

I spent a few years designing and partially building a library used for the validation of front office models at a financial institution, and I thought it might be a good idea to write down what I learned during that time. It was my first ever big project and happened to some degree by accident, […]

I was talking recently to a friend about a video essayist I like, (Dan Olson of Folding Ideas) and when asked why I thought he was any good I pondered it for a moment and said “he has a lot of respect for complexity”. On reflection, I think that is one of the virtues I […]

We often talk about rewriting code and almost as often talk about whether big rewrites are even a good idea. Joel Spolsky writes a particularly harrowing story of how netscape rewrote their entire codebase and in so doing perhaps doomed their chances of recovery. In summary, here are some key things you need to keep […]

Using more abstract ideas like who is suitable for a role forces the model to consider a vast range of things, I think there is value in a test like that.