Hello

I'm Alex, a technologist from Calgary, Canada. This is my blog.

For information about myself & my philosophy, see the About, Design, and Values pages.

Miniposts are bookmarks, snippets of thought, and syndicated content from elsewhere.

Longform articles are below, sorted by date.

You may also peruse the archive.

Projects llms-full.txt

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llms.txt


Imagine my shock and surprise to discover that when I submit resumes now, I quickly see LLM research agents in my access logs pouring over my portfolio page. As time moves ever forward, I suspect I’ll be dealing with AI agents more frequently, especially in the job market. I’m not...
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Truth Functional Logic for Hackers - Part One


Bob and Alice are two hackers working on an embedded system with a severe computational constraint - there is a bug in their low-cost microcontroller making OR operations significantly slower than any other operation on the chipset. When they profiled their micropython code, they found that OR...
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Greg & the Eternal Brunch


The year was 2036. OpenAI had finally done it. After decades of press releases, quarterly existential criese, and machine learning papers so esoteric they made Finnegans Wake read like PopSci, they’d finished gpt-6z (revision 3) - a perfect, autonomous general intelligence. It’s...
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All These People Are Vampires - Building the Contra-Economy


In the 1980’s, Robert L. Crandall, head of American Airlines, removed one single olive from the salad they served passangers. He thought they wouldn’t notice - and he was right. This removal of the olive saved the company $40,000 a year.1 and began the downfall of Service Capitalism....
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2024 in Review - 100 Books


I read 100 books this year as a challenge to myself. The hardest part about reading 100 books in a year is fomatting them cleanly afterward on your website. The second hardest part is tracking them all. The actual activity is a cinch. Reading 100 books this year was directly inspired from stories of...
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The $500 Question - How Media Framing Shapes Our Reality


“In this season of giving, what are we to make of a billionaire with a soft spot for striving graduates who draws a hard line on being present for the pomp and circumstance, no matter the circumstances?” - New York Times The modern media apparatus doesn’t just report news - it...
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An AI Horror Story


So I’m reading the teachers subreddit for my daily dose of misery and sense of doom about the future when I come across an unusually worded comment. As an educator, I’ve got to agree - while crystals and essential oils can be lovely, they won’t replace a solid IEP or therapy....
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(Almost) Everything You Need to Run a Blog


We’re living in the cyber dark ages. The primary way most people interact with the internet is through social media. This is the default space people not only listen to others, but also try to make their voices heard - which is sad, because social media isn’t very good for that. It is...
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Ricotta Cheese is a PsyOp


I categorically refuse to believe anybody actually enjoys ricotta cheese. For those unfamiliar, this Italian cheese comes out of a mistaken way to boil milk in the Bronze age, and for some reason hundreds of years later, it’s still an ingredient people try to eat. It’s tasteless, so all...
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They Don't Make It like They Used To


Nostalgia for the past has supplanted our yearnings for the future, becoming the default marketing tool for corporations. Instead of asking ‘what’s new?’, they ask ‘what have we done before that you liked?’. This trend transcends marketing tactics, reflecting a...
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