My kids often come home (from school) talking about how the environment is ruined or all of the bad things “we” did in “our” past, as Australians. Perhaps. I push back. Bad things may have been done, perhaps even for messed-up or noble reasons, but “we” don’t have to carry that guilt in order to learn/change/etc. Yes, I think we can explore this argument without downplaying all the bad things of the past. We can handle two or more ideas in our heads at once. And so can children. e.g. collective responsibility without personal guilt. ...

Regarding Code Simple Algorithms and Data Structures: Which algorithms and data structures did we have to understand + code up back in introduction to compsci? I asked gemini 2.5 flash (why doesn’t it have a prominent copy button?): Data Structures Arrays Linked Lists (Singly, Doubly, Circular) Stacks Queues Trees (Binary Trees, Binary Search Trees) Hash Tables Algorithms Sorting Algorithms (Bubble Sort, Selection Sort, Insertion Sort, Merge Sort, Quick Sort) Searching Algorithms (Linear Search, Binary Search) Recursion Graph Traversal Algorithms (Breadth-First Search - BFS, Depth-First Search - DFS) This is a helpful reference to my future self so I can keep coding these things up without having to think “what next”. ...

Vibe coding is amazingly productive, at least for experiments and prototypes. And fun. Recently, I’ve noticed something missing. A feeling. The feeling you get when thinking hard while crafting a piece of code. Of desk checking it in your head. Of thinking through edges cases. I’m missing the feeling of making my brain sweat while crafting some code. I had an idea: Why not code up simple algorithms and data structures from scratch for “fun”? ...

If you’re feeling bored or lost or directionless: serve. Go and find people you can help. Jump onto reddit. Find a subreddit of beginners in an area you know a lot about and start answering questions. Give your opinion. Quote experts. Suggest directions. Help. Serve. It works wonders.

I was listening to a podcast with Rick Rubin on his vibe coding book and he said some good stuff. The interview: Rick Rubin: Vibe Coding is the Punk Rock of Software The book: The Way of Code: The Timeless Art of Vibe Coding He said AI needs a point of view. That this is what we, as artists, supply. From the interview transcript: But the reason we go to the artists we go to or the writers we go to or the filmmakers we go to is for their point of view. The AI doesn’t have a point of view right. A point of view is what you tell it. What you tell it the point of view is to be. ...

A while back I showed how we can get a genetic algorithm in Python to run as fast then faster than a naive implementation in C. Here it is: Fast Genetic Algorithm in Python It was fun little project that mainly consisted of lots of timeit tests of different numpy functions and different ways of vectorizing the operations. The project was not very didactic. More of a progression. A show and tell. ...

I was thinking about DeepMinds AlphaEvolve from last month. It’s pretty cool. The results are cool. The overall structure is pretty straightforward-ish though. As in, it did not surprise me very much. AlphaEvolve: A Gemini-powered coding agent for designing advanced algorithms (announcement) AlphaEvolve: A coding agent for scientific and algorithmic discovery (paper, pdf) AlphaEvolve, Wikipedia Here’s how I’m thinking about it. It’s a GA with LLM operators. Something that many people have been trying, but have not unlocked this well, so far. ...

Back in grad school days, it was fun to pick NP-Complete optimization problems and have little competitions to see who could get the best solution (lowest cost) in a given time frame. One of the more popular competitions we had was made semi-formal called maxpath: Max Path Pic: I’ve always enjoyed optimization more than machine learning. I remember having coffee with Kaggle’s Anthony Goldbloom circa 2010 and saying that he should add competitions for optimization problems. It wasn’t a good fit. ...

Sometimes I don’t feel like working hard. I’ll procrastinate. Everyone does. I’ll fiddle with small stuff around the edges of the project. Bikeshedding. A trick I use to snap out of it is to “look back from the future”. I’ll pretend that I’m me but it’s the end of the year and I’m looking back at the achievements for the year. At all the projects completed. I will want to see the current project done, and more. If it’s not done, I’d be most disappointed. I’ll be asking hard questions, like: “Why the hell not? What were you doing exactly?” ...

I’ve been writing novellas for my kids for the last few months. The writing is fine. The stories, fine. Not mind blowing. The real trick is personalization. Telling stories about the kids as characters in places they know with our inside jokes. They are personalized stories. Written for them. This is key. It makes up for the so-so stories and writing. It’s a lot of work. It’s a heavy collaboration, a lot of careful specification by me of specific details to include. ...