Essays and technical notes — software, AI, and how to think about both.
I have been rebuilding the classic games — a flood puzzle, a Lunar Lander clone — and each now takes about an hour with AI doing the programming. The step that used to bring the joy, the problem solving, is skipped. Some thoughts on what replaces it, on being deskilled, and on the honest answer to "what will you do with the time instead?"
Several researchers I heard interviewed about psychedelic medicine mentioned that they use the substances themselves. That set me wondering: can someone remain an unbiased observer of something they have personally embraced? It turns out science has names for this problem - and tools for it. A quick survey, using psychedelic research as the worked example.
The best way to prove an idea has value is to put a working version in front of real people. With AI assistance the cost of writing the code has fallen sharply — but building an app is more than writing code. Here is how I deploy my personal apps for free, or nearly free, in three tiers of increasing complexity.
Somewhere along the way, nobility in fiction became embarrassing. Characters who do right because it is right are dismissed as childish, while "morally complex" became our highest term of praise. I think this reflects a mistaken verdict about human nature — and there is good evidence the tide is worth pushing against.
The experts have sorted themselves into camps: some say AI will end us, some say it will save us. I think both camps are looking at the wrong thing. The technology is a tool. The dangers are real, but they mostly come from us — and that is precisely why they can be addressed.
Richard Hamming, the famous mathematician from Bell Labs once gave an interesting talk at a seminar. There are several specific bits of information that can be extracted from that talk.
In this article I will describe how I set up deploying two different applications to hosting sites in the same Firebase project.
This article describes the steps we took to install paving stones in our front yard. We made the paving stones ourselves using moulds that we bought.
In this article we will look at how to decompose a React component into smaller components. We will look at the steps involved and the order in which they should be performed.
