Dan Luu

Computer latency: 1977-2017 danluu.com/input-lag/

Learning a bit about building game AIs: patreon.com/posts/152027219

Looks like I spoke too soon about the AI not being superhuman. The current Azul world champion played against it and thinks it's better than him at higher difficulties and a top 100 player played against it at default difficulty and thinks it's better than him at default.

Not to overstate — I saw someone vibe coded the same project then declared programming dead after they finished, but their bot loses to MCTS + simple heuristic. Mine was in the same state when I just had an LLM in a loop with instructions to improve the result.

It's sort of amazing how quickly you can do things now. I wanted to try writing an alphazero-style AI for Azul. With no AI background, it took me maybe 2-3 hours to (2-3 days wall clock) to beat the best public AI I could find, training on my laptop CPU: danluu.com/game/tile/

Exercises in benchmarking and experimental design, part 5: patreon.com/posts/149123122

Useless information about poker chips: patreon.com/posts/146484203

x.com/robertwiblin/s… is framed is a giant WTF, but this doesn't seem too surprising? Every time I turn off my ad blocker and try clicking ads, a fairly large fraction of them are scams of various kinds. See also, x.com/danluu/status/…

Diseconomies of scale in spam, fraud, support, and moderation: danluu.com/diseconomies-s…

How earthquake safe are Vancouver condos? patreon.com/posts/143211904

I've heard you can email jeff@ to escalate further, so I'll do that if the scam continues, but it's interesting that escalated support has no power to either do something about a serial scammer or stop what looks like a scam in progress even when they can see it's happening.

Just had a really interesting experience with escalated Amazon support, where I talked to them about a seller who appears to be a serial scammer based on seller feedback. The support person agreed but said there's nothing they can do about it, their hands are tied.

Exercises in benchmarking and experimental design, part 4: patreon.com/posts/127627543

The review-industrial complex patreon.com/posts/125570961

BTW, the above is a huge talk anti-pattern. In the median 10-minute talk I've seen, the speaker introduces themselves for 30-60 seconds and it's not uncommon to see the intro go to 2 minutes. Why are you spending 10% of your talk introducing yourself? Get to the content!

Really good post on writing/blogging advice for developers by @deliberatecoder: refactoringenglish.com/chapters/write… It's full of concrete, actionable, advice. The other sample chapters from his book also look good (refactoringenglish.com/chapters/rules…, refactoringenglish.com/chapters/commi…)

@josephscott You can also do comparisons like React vs. Vue vs. jQuery In terms of Core Web Vitals (which Google says is used as a ranking signal) we have jQuery > React > Vue. Per above, this is highly confounded with what users do, but I still find these silly comparisons fun

You can also see CWV, INP, etc. Those are confounded by what users do, so they're less about the host, but per danluu.com/slow-device/, there's value in looking at the default experience as well as what users actually do due to what's made easy or hard. h/t @josephscott

TIL archive.org provides a performance dashboard with slice and dice capability E.g., you can sort big WordPress hosts by TTFB. Below are the fraction of sites that are "good" (I'd prefer to see the distribution, but this is easily available) lookerstudio.google.com/s/ha530x6JKeE

@danluu I think this part in particular is really underrated. Once you can go really fast, things become possible that were impossible to contemplate before. Tailscale wouldn’t exist if we had done things the regular way. It’s supposed to be unthinkable.

Exercises in benchmarking and experimental design, part 3: patreon.com/posts/118646029

A version of Missile Command for the Commodore 64 where the bottom of your screen is the game state in memory and missiles cause memory corruption: csdb.dk/release/?id=13…. In the video below, a missile broke my controls and caused my cursor to get stuck moving down and left.