Ron

There’s a famous Usenet story about a programmer (Mel) who refused higher level abstractions. It was the late 1950s, and even in that era, Mel was…well today we’d call him a boomer. Mel only wrote in raw hexadecimal. He didn’t approve of compilers, and refused to use optimizing assemblers. "You never know where it's going to put things”, he said. Everyone else in the company was moving on to FORTRAN, and they didn’t understand why Mel was so stubborn about using new tools. He *loved* self-modifying code. “If a program can’t rewrite its own code”, he asked, “what good is it?” Mel eventually left the company, and other engineers were tasked with understanding what was left. Mel’s hand-optimized routines always beat the assemblers; but some of it looked absolutely bizarre. One engineer took ~2 weeks to understand why there were loops with no exit condition…yet the program worked fine. I won’t spoil all the details, you should really read it, it’s short. But it’s a fantastic piece on “what defines a real programmer?”…which is becoming increasingly relevant in this vibe-coded era. I strive to understand computers as deeply as Mel! If we aren’t careful, we’re going to lose the “Mels” of this world to time. That’s part of why I go so deep in my youtube videos. I hope that younger viewers are genuinely fascinated by the inner workings of our machines, instead of handing everything off to higher abstractions.

When choosing a partner to have children with, select for intelligence. Everything else is secondary. Everything

Good news: men already do half of all work within households! You can just calculate the statistics! All this data is public!

Every man eventually discovers that competence is the only real stabilizer of self-esteem; no amount of praise, affirmation, or philosophical comfort can replace the confidence that comes from knowing you can produce results even when conditions are hostile.

Poems that ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini all seem to "like" when you ask for poetry related to being/making LLMs: Rilke's "Archaic Torso of Apollo" Stevens' "Idea of Order at Key West" Borges's "The Golem" (or "The Other Tiger") Pessoa's "Autopsychography" Pretty apt choices!

Every man has to be interested in one of these; 1. Geo-Politics 2. History 3. Philosophy 4. Economics One to make you mad, One to calm you down, One to make you question reality and One to make you see Exploitation.

TIL that 2x2 games live on a torus (Robinson and Goforth 2005) if we just care about orderings of the payoffs and connect single payoff swaps. Here is one visualisation from arxiv.org/abs/1010.4727

Neural networks and machine learning, visualized

execution beats intelligence every single time

Fun fact: inconsistent reinforcement is one of the strongest ways to create attachment. It's the same psychological pattern used in gambling unpredictability keeps you hooked.

So, are archaeologists just, like, retarded, or what? I’m never going to understand this thing where educated people would rather look stupid than say something that violates their politics. It’s such a black pill. You really have to imagine of people like this that there’s nothing they wouldn’t do, no evil they wouldn’t countenance. They’ll literally just say anything. They can be made to believe anything.

Watching your boy at the bar drop his paycheck on two unemployed bitches with fake lips

Claude Opus 4.7 just implemented an AlphaZero-style self-play pipeline from scratch. It did this on consumer hardware in three hours, then beat the Pascal Pons solver 7 of 8 as first-mover on Connect Four. No other frontier coding agent tested cleared 2 of 8. This paper proposes a new way to evaluate coding agents: hand them a minimal task description, give them a tight budget, and ask them to autonomously rebuild a famous ML breakthrough. Connect Four + AlphaZero is the first instance. It's small enough to run on a laptop and hard enough to require a real research engineering loop (MCTS, neural value/policy nets, self-play, training schedule). We've been measuring coding agents on patches and unit tests. This shifts the bar to "can the agent build a non-trivial ML system end-to-end on its own?" The answer is now yes for at least one frontier model. Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2604.25067 Learn to build effective AI agents in our academy: academy.dair.ai

Alexander wept. Caesar wept. Jesus wept. Your problem in life is not that you are too passionate. Your problem is that you are not passionate enough.

We implemented @karpathy 's MicroGPT fully on FPGA fabric. No GPU. No PyTorch. No CPU inference loop. Just a transformer burned into hardware, generating 50,000+ tokens/sec. The model is small, but the idea is not: inference does not have to live only in software 👇

[ML Grind] Yesterday I took the day to work on the model training of the GPT-like model. I built the tokenization/embedding layers, the multi-head attention mechanism, added the transformer blocks to the GPTModel, and trained it on input text of 5k tokens (not big but useful for learning purposes).

Going through the KNBS 2026 economic survey apo kwa women’s economic empowerment index and I hope hao wababa hulia that women are now more empowered than men waipitie.

I want to debunk the claim that I see a lot around here that Obsidian is "just plain text markdown files" which means "you can take them anywhere and open them with any app" That simply isn't true Yes, maybe the raw text of the notes is markdown, but many other parts cannot be moved elsewhere and opened by other apps: 1. The .obsidian/ directory contains your JSON config with plugins, settings, hotkeys, workspace state, link format, attachment paths – those can't be moved elsewhere 2. Plugin state files – Readwise's path-to-ID map, Templater's settings, Tasks plugin's database, Excalidraw's drawing data – even if plugins can be recreated, these settings cannot 3. .canvas files – JSON, not markdown. They reference notes by path and won't survive a move 4. .base files – JSON-based database/views over your notes. Same path-fragility 5. .excalidraw.md files – markdown wrapper around an Excalidraw JSON blob. Looks like markdown, isn't really 6. The link graph itself – backlinks, graph view, "linked mentions" – all computed from filenames and link references. They survive because the references are in the markdown, but they require Obsidian (or an Obsidian-aware tool) to materialize 7. Plugin-managed folders – Readwise output, Web Clipper output, Daily Notes location, Templates folder. Each is a folder whose contents are owned by an external system tracked in plugin state 8. Sync state – Obsidian Sync, iCloud, Dropbox, Google Drive each maintain their own state about what's where and what's been resolved. Move operations interfere with this state 9. Embedded query results – Dataview queries, Tasks queries, Bases queries. The query is in the markdown; the result is computed live and never persisted So technically you CAN move your files elsewhere, but you'd destroy most of what makes them valuable – the graph, the plugin state, the canvases, the embedded queries, the sync state, and any structural intent encoded in folder placement Which means you're just as locked in to Obsidian as any other "proprietary" app, it's just a hidden lock-in that's obscured by inaccurate marketing Saying "Obsidian is just markdown files" is like saying "your house is just bricks" The bricks are real and moveable – but the architecture, plumbing, and wiring aren't bricks, and those are most of what makes the house function