alive
.posts
2024
How Do You Get Good at Programming Language Design?
I get asked a lot in the lab to help people out with API and language design. I wish I had resources I could point people at to learn better, but I don’t. As...
Mindfulness and Abstraction Design
Formalism and Awareness Skill building helps us focus our awareness. Formalism is an incredible scalpel for sharpening thought. It forces us to be really pr...
Why Doing Research Is Like Playing Jazz
This post is from November 26, 2021. I have lightly edited it and published it now, because the ideas are still on my mind. I played jazz trumpet from ele...
HCI Is the Bottleneck
HCI Is the Bottleneck in a World with Strong AI As model capabilities advance, we are rapidly gaining the ability to generate images, videos, and audio from...
home
Hide it in a box. Tape it shut. All the duct tape in the world will do. Don’t feel. Feeling is an avalanche. Too much. Best not to feel. When I’m in my littl...
On Blogging. On Creating
Purpose: This is a pep talk document. If you’re ever on the fence about writing a post. Return to this place. The only way to fail is not to finish writi...
2023
Flapjax Revisited
Reactive programming for UI applications has been studied for a long time. But while the academic literature has focused mostly on functional reactive progra...
Searching for My Next Scenius
The notion of ikigai as criteria for leading a rich and fulfilling life is very popular these days. But I think it’s missing one crucial element: communit...
What Does Orthogonality Mean in PL Design?
Summary Orthogonality is a pervasive, but tacit, design principle in the PL community. Orthogonal design concepts are ones that don't intersect. A consequen...
Natural Semantic Metalanguage: The Other, Other ML
What’s the difference between being “happy,” “contented,” and “pleased?” How would you explain this difference to someone who doesn’t know English? For those...
Humans Are Not Turing Machines
One criticism of current LLMs is that they can’t reliably do sophisticated math or logic problems out of the box that humans seem to be capable of. In essenc...
2022
If You Give a Dev a DAG
To increase the expressiveness of your API, let users write arbitrary programs. If You Give a Dev a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG)… (left) neural network ...
Formality Considered Harmful
“Formality Considered Harmful”: A Paper I Love There are some papers that stick in my mind. These are good papers. But there are some papers that when I tel...
2021
Writing a Research Paper: A Meta-Guide
These notes are a work in progress! Writing is not something that has come easily to me. Through middle and high school I routinely would not complete essay...