Please Don't Cite Me

Musings of the nerd-sniped. Things worth understanding deeply, and things that probably aren't.

“I was asked to generate five quotes. This is the fifth.”

Claude Sonnet 4.5

2026

Machine Learning

03 ⁄ 31

The Scaling Hypothesis, 6 Years Later

Scale clearly bought language models startlingly capable outputs; the harder question is whether those outputs reflect reasoning or only a retrieval engine that has become extremely difficult to distinguish from one.
2024

Software Philosophy

11 ⁄ 02

I Waited 10 Billion Cycles and All I Got Was This Loading Screen

Modern hardware is absurdly fast, which mostly seems to have bought software the freedom to feel slower, heavier, and less deliberate than it has any right to.

Systems

09 ⁄ 22

HTTP/1.1 500 Segfault: Building a web server in C

Native OAuth eventually turns into a question about local process boundaries, and answering it cleanly means learning just enough HTTP to build a tiny localhost server in C.
2022

AI & Society

12 ⁄ 05

The Ethics of Computer-Generated Content

From image generators to code autocomplete, generative AI is reshaping what it means to create. But as adoption accelerates, our existing legal and ethical frameworks are not sufficient.
2020

Machine Learning

02 ⁄ 13

Reinforcement Learning Adventures

Teaching neural networks to play Chrome Dino, Connect 4, and Othello.