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...
Posts by Year
2024
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...