On technical clutter

We often worry about resources we’re about to run out of: oil, helium, phosphates… but what about those we’ve already depleted? Throughout history, humanity has exhausted some natural resources and species, some with disruptive consequences and others with none at all. Most of these examples are thought to be depleted, since the world is a large...

'Tis the season! For the third year, I'm starting my advent of no-AI: uninstalling Copilot and logging out of Claude/ChatGPT/Gemini for a month. This helps me assess how dependent on it I've become, and how much rustier I am when stripped of my artificial thinking augments. Christmas is usually presented as a warm time to be with the people, and...

Most recent language models have switched from the typical ReLU and GELU activation functions to something called SwiGLU. In trying to understand it, I realized most materials assume a lot of prior knowledge and there isn't a simple explanation of why it is good. So let's go the bottom-up approach and try to explain it from scratch. Activation...

Recently my posts were getting a bit too techy and serious, so I want to make up for it. Last year, I was in charge of setting up and maintaining our 40+ camp bikes, trikes, e-bikes and scooters, so here is a list of advice I gathered for anyone who needs to do some maintenance on theirs. Do it camp-wise Being able to fix the main problems for...

Coding time-related stuff is complicated: timezones, concurrency, API quotas, multi-party synchronization, networking… everything that time touches becomes messy. In this post, I want to describe some typical time-related function wrappers that are useful during the dev experience, with a special focus on front-end examples. Throttle Throttling...