kmod's blog

I think a decent amount about developer productivity, and there’s a rule of thumb that I like that surprises most people when they hear it: if you simplistically convert developer salaries into $/hr and computer costs into $/hr, you get a ratio of about 6,000:1 (see later for math). In other words, it costs roughly…

Recently I’ve been working on a theory of computation that’s based on set theory, rather than the type-theory that most modern languages are built on. (I think that such a theory would be highly homogeneous in a way that makes it particularly suitable for automated analysis.) A pretty natural question for a theory of computation…

Like many people I’ve been quite amazed by all the progress with AI-generated art recently. One thing that has been clear, though, is that even though the modern crop of AIs are quite capable, they still need heavy human guidance to achieve good results. This fusion of humans and AIs has an existing name: centaurs.…

There is an ongoing societal debate about AIs and their level of functioning. There are many forms of this, such as whether we are talking about current AIs or hypothetical AIs, and what particular facet of the mind we are interested in in the moment. The most prominent recent example of this is the issue…

There’s a lot going on in the crypto world right now, and I’m not going to try to comment on all of it. One thing that I’ve seen talked about, though, is that “tether is off its peg”, and that’s what I wanted to talk about. There have always been worries about Tether’s assets, with…

I gave a talk at PyCon a few weeks ago, and the video has now been posted. There was also an article at LWN if you prefer to read about it. The idea behind the talk was that the modern Python optimization efforts (such as we’re doing with Pyston) are making Python performance more complicated…

I see it mentioned as a fact that the universe is expanding. But I was thinking — how do we know the relative ratios of distance to time? I don’t quite understand how this all works, but it seems like roughly we have an equation distance = time * speed_of_light and we know that the…

I was cheerfully living my life a couple weeks ago when suddenly I started wondering: do the real numbers actually exist? (I might not have been fully sober.) I spent some time researching this question and found the results to be remarkable, so I’m sharing what I went through and what I learned in the…

tldr: there’s a financial instrument in the crypto world that is worth one price if you are fiat-denominated and another price if you are crypto-denominated, and this instrument trades at the fiat-denominated price. The crypto world continues to redefine its value proposition, so it’s a bit hard to try to argue against a shifting goalpost,…

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how to improve my programming efficiency. I’m also trying to improve my productivity, but I don’t have much to add there. (I’m using “efficiency” to mean “output per unit time” and “productivity” to mean “amount of time spent working”, though I haven’t seen a consistent way of naming…