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.

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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 crises, 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. Its unveiling was...
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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 passengers. 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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