Understanding vs impact the paradox of how to spend my time Not long ago William MacAskill, the founder of the Effective Altruist movement, visited Austin, where I got to talk with him in person for the first time. I was a fan of his book What We Owe the Future, and found him as thoughtful and eloquent face-to-face as I did
Useful patterns for building HTML tools
Revisiting Lets Build a Compiler
Under the hood of Canada Spends with Brendan Samek
Blue Current I am excited to join the Blue Current Board of Directors as Amazon anchors their Series D round. Blue Current has taken a practical approach to safe solid-state batteries and their technology addresses critical needs in both stationary storage and electric vehicles. What sets them apart is their ability to
The DC-ROMA II is the fastest RISC-V laptop and is odd Inside this Framework 13 laptop is a special mainboard developed by DeepComputing in collaboration with Framework. It has an 8-core RISC-V processor, the ESWIN 7702X—not your typical AMD, Intel, or even Arm SoC. The full laptop version I tested costs $1119 and gets you about the performance of a Raspberry
Prediction AI will make formal verification go mainstream Much has been said about the effects that AI will have on software development, but there is an angle I haven’t seen talked about: I believe that AI will bring formal verification, which for decades has been a bit of a fringe pursuit, into the software engineering mainstream. Proof
Theory and AI Alignment The following is based on a talk that I gave (remotely) at the UK AI Safety Institute Alignment Workshop on October 29, and which I then procrastinated for more than a month in writing up. Enjoy! Thanks for having me! I’m a theoretical computer scientist. I’ve spent most of my
Book recommendations from my reading in 2025 It is reading season. I know because the nights have grown long, and I just finished hoisting a live tree up a flight of stairs, festooning it with lights, and spending far too much time protecting it from repeated attack by our feline housemates. After all that, and putting the
The RAM Shortage Comes for Us All Memory price inflation comes for us all, and if you’re not affected yet, just wait. I was building a new PC last month using some parts I had bought earlier this year. The 64 Gigabyte T-Create DDR5 memory kit I used cost $209 then. Today? The same kit costs $650! Just in