Viewing profile — wenc

I'm one of those Canadians with a Ph.D. who left for the U.S. I didn't actually want to leave, but I was staring at the prospect of not unemployment, but underemployment. Canadian …

That is absolutely hilarious. Dario Amodei, a romcom lead.

Echoing the other folks, I have a different experience. I profile sql performance and LLMs find more opportunities than I could. All it takes is real data, a sql repl and an agent.…

Meal is a bit hard to define. Here are some cases: You can get food for under $10 at many casual NYC restaurants -- if you just order an appetizer. Also a snack is not a meal. For …

I just fed this to GPT 5.6 Sol: Counterexample to Jacobian conjecture: ((1+xy)^3 z + y^2 (1+xy) (4+3xy), y + 3 x (1+xy)^2 z + 3 x y^2 (4+3xy), 2 x - 3 x^2 y - x^3 z): \C^3\to \C^3,…

History shows that DRAM is a brutally cyclical business with boom and bust cycles. It's also heavily capital intensive. You build an expensive fab now, and then demand plummets and…

I still use Logseq and conceptually it’s still a great method for building a second brain. It fits the way my brain works. But it has been dormant for years and early attempts at s…

We can disagree about Lynnwood (that's my opinion). But Seattle does have very low social wattage. p.s. I should clarify about Lynnwood since this is contentious for folks. For me,…

No it is not. (lived experience as an ethnic minority). Lynnwood had way better restaurants and cafes that opened late. Liking Ballard doesn't mean I endorse its energy. Ballard is…

I've lived all over the country, both in big and small cities, and most recently in the Seattle area (across the lake in Kirkland) for 4 years. Seattle has trappings of a city, but…

I did a search and found that the satellite internet market size is $16B today and $38B in 2031 (5 years from now) https://www.mordorintelligence.com/industry-reports/satellit... B…

As someone from Chicago (actual Chicago, south side, not the suburbs), randomly talking to strangers is what we do. We're talking to strangers at the bus stop, at the grocery check…

Just to add to your Texas comment: there are a few larger states that have distinct hubs where people think so differently, that they might as well be living in different states. P…

Attached is the writing.md I use to steer Opus 4.8. Prompt: "use the writing.md steering on x.md and loop until all LLM traces are removed". I ran it on TFA and Pangram flagged it …

I have a steering .md file that instructs Opus how not to sound like an LLM when writing prose (I write prose in my IDE with Opus). The steering is specific to me, but I've found t…

I can attest to this. I work in Midtown Manhattan. You'd think walking around meant getting distracted by the all the activity around you that you'd forget about the problem you're…

People often say Mandarin and Cantonese are like Spanish and Portuguese, but that undersells how different they are. Your example of Spanish and French is more accurate -- same lan…

Category theory is rarely useful by itself, but it can be a mental scaffold when designing things like query languages. Microsoft's LINQ dsl within C# used category theory ideas to…

If you lived in a high place (Denver), you will find it different from a flat lowland (Chicago). Also in Rio, how high you live can be a marker depending on which part of town you …

But why though? DuckDB can still be used as a local query engine — I still use it as that. I haven’t touched any of the DuckLake stuff and the duckdb cli and Python library are sti…

DuckDB is both a standalone and a component. This effort is actually very coherent and brings it back into a familiar usage model — that of a traditional client server RDBMS. RDBMS…

When did FT become Business Insider? I have an FT subscription and they keep moving toward this kind of narrative first reporting to get clicks. It’s no longer a believable paper.

It sounds like this replaces the PCA reconstruction function with a quadratic. The normal PCA encoding: 1) Given a mean-center-scaled X matrix, get the latent variable matrix T wit…

Right now Alexa+ and Gemini are objectively better. The best is ChatGPT voice mode. It understands non English words and accents amazingly well, and even though the LLM model isn’t…