9 March 2025

33 links · Sunday

My next-to-last project — Crooked Timber

A couple of weeks back, I wrote a post about some of the work that USAID did.  Now I’d like to drill down a bit and talk about some of the work that I personally did for USAID.

Increase Your Optionality

A choice isn’t just about where it takes you immediately. It's about the choices you get to make thereafter. The best choice is usually the one that opens the greatest number of promising branches (not just the one tied to a single, seemingly perfect outcome).

Four Years of Jai

I’ve been programming for long enough to be righteously cantankerous about a lot of things. The list of languages, frameworks and libraries I’ve worked with professionally or on personal projects is too long to list – but it includes everything from C and asse…

The ESP32 "backdoor" that wasn't | Dark Mentor LLC

This post refutes the claim that researchers found a "backdoor" in ESP32 Bluetooth chips. What the researchers highlight (vendor-specific HCI commands to read & write controller memory) is a common design pattern found in other Bluetooth chips from other vendo…

A Committed Year

A year ago, I committed to writing a bit of code every day. It's been a wild ride. Let's talk about what I've learned.

What Switzerland Gets Wrong

There’s been lots of talk lately on how to make Europe more competitive. Grand strategies and and ambitious initiatives are often proposed. Yet these discussions often overlook the small administrative and practical hurdles entrepreneurs face daily.

List of Brave browser CONTROVERSIES

Way back in 2016, [Brave promised to remove banner ads from websites and replace them with their own](https://archive.is/W0k4j), basically trying...

a Case-Study in Clojure & OCaml

Recently I've started picking up Clojure, as an attempt to try doing some web programming with proper macro support (ClojureScript in particular seems to be quite good Lisp implementation with robust web integration).

There is No Automatic Reset for Engineering

Do you remember all those rushed changes that your developers implemented three years ago, and how they complained about the design damage t...

Par Part 3: Par, Continued

Par is notoriously difficult to understand, but mostly due to a lack of resources. This post hopes to build on the prior posts on sequent calculus and linear logic to show how par is not such an alien concept after all, and make the theory much more accessible…

About Work and Organising Teams

Rethinking work structures: from rigid hierarchies to autonomous teams inspired by historical hamlets and modern Teal principles.

Perfect usecase for a bad llm models

Everyone is chasing the best AI models. The ones that can generate entire systems in one shot. But what if bad AI models were actually useful for something? Like, say… technical interviews?