Viewing profile — linguae

I’m quite optimistic about the long-term future of local LLMs for privacy and cost control reasons. An LLM running on my own hardware, even if it’s not a laptop but a home server, …

I also enjoy my Blackwings, though my normal pencil of choice is the Mitsubishi Hi-Uni HB, which is cheaper than the Blackwing but is still an awesome pencil. I think my supply of …

In some areas like the San Francisco Bay Area, schools would have to pay astronomically more in order for teachers to compete against software engineers. I’m a community college pr…

I want 2006-era Facebook. No algorithmic feed. No viral posts. No AI slop. Just updates from my friends and acquaintances.

There were exceptions, and I use “were” and not “are” because I don’t know any modern Silicon Valley companies that value loyalty, though I know some people at Apple and Google wit…

Maybe I’m looking through rose-colored glasses, but while people need money, there was a time where there was more idealism from the founders and the employees. Steve Jobs could’ve…

I agree regarding the West Coast in general. Seattle and Los Angeles are also similarly expensive, and even Sacramento (my hometown) isn’t much of an improvement. A few months ago …

I don’t know where you live, but in the Bay Area prices have exploded since COVID. I remember a decade ago when it was still possible to get a super burrito for under $10; in fact,…

Additionally, as a former industry researcher myself who now teaches at a community college, there is less research freedom in industry, especially with very free places like 1970-…

I’m an noob to Lean myself, but my best explanation is that asserts are checks that happen at runtime. Imagine compile-time asserts, where the compiler is able to determine the val…

I’m out of the loop these days in systems research since I largely focus on programming languages and AI these days (though I still love systems) and I treat research more as a sid…

I may be biased since I interned at Google in 2013 and 2014, but Google in the 2000s and early 2010s felt downright magical as someone who wanted to pursue a career in systems soft…

I’ve been thinking about this over the past few days. There was an exciting keynote at PLDI 2026 by MIT professor Saman Amarasinghe where he talked about the intersection between c…

I'm a professor at a community college in Silicon Valley, and my students use online textbooks. I try to use Creative Commons or other libre textbooks, but sometimes I use paid tex…

I may be naïve or completely uninformed, but given the federal government’s vast resources, including supercomputers, national laboratories, the NSA, and many talented employees, w…

When you have monopolistic or near-monopolistic control over platforms and other key pieces of software such as office suites, taste is irrelevant since people are still buying lic…

Come to think of it, modern cars have a lot of electronics such as touchscreens, cameras, and sensors. It wouldn’t surprise me if new car prices are not immune to what’s happening …

This pressure works for pure software companies that don’t depend on hardware sales and that have competition. Unfortunately not all software vendors will respond to inflated RAM a…

The only other event I could remember in the history of Apple that is remotely comparable is the release of the original Power Mac G4 towers in 1999. They were originally going to …

That’s terrible. I purchased my M4 Mac Mini (base 16/256 model) two months ago because I wanted an ARM Mac for a software project. I feared that the M5 Mac Mini would have a price …

Rob Pike of Plan 9 and Go fame lamented this back in 2000 in his “Systems Software Research is Irrelevant” talk: http://herpolhode.com/rob/utah2000.pdf I’d love to see a new operat…

XP also introduced activation, which is one of the reasons I prefer Windows 2000 to XP.

I feel the exact same way. I was a Ron Paul Republican from 2007 (when I became old enough to vote) until 2016, when I changed my registration to “no party preference” in the after…

I’m not optimistic about the near future. It seems that the post-WWII order in the developed world is disintegrating. It seems that the political and business elites of America and…

Germany has both the Autobahn and rail.