Here are a few scenes I witnessed or participated in during my time in the Bay Area. They’re mundane, but stick out for one reason or another. At some point I would like to compile every memorable vignette from my life and link them together.| danangell.com/blog
I know what it feels like to make over $1000 per hour. And I’m over it. I spent much of 2020 traveling. As soon as there were rumblings in California of a lockdown, I started looking for ways to preserve my sanity. I had moved to the Bay Area in late 2018 after graduating college. My life was built around the idea that I would have a short commute to Palo Alto from my apartment in Redwood City. Most of my socialization would come through in-person work. My co-workers were great people and s...| danangell.com/blog
A prevailing sentiment online is that GPT-4 still does not understand what it talks about. We can argue semantics over what “understanding” truly means. I think it’s useful, at least today, to draw the line at whether GPT-4 has succesfully modeled parts of the world. Is it just picking words and connecting them with correct grammar? Or does the token selection actually reflect parts of the physical world? One of the most remarkable things I’ve heard about GPT-4 comes from an episode o...| danangell.com
Update - DayZ now checks mod integrity before putting you in the queue. This is no longer as important as before. But maybe this will help someone with another game some day. I play a lot of DayZ. The game is amazing but I’ve found out that it has a critical flaw. You can end up waiting in a queue to join a server for 30 minutes, only to learn upon finally entering the server that one of your mods is out of date.| danangell.com
Last year I was lucky enough to get access to 10 Gb/s home internet for $40/month. Ironically my ISP can not provide me with a router capable of handling more than 1 Gb/s. For $40/month that’s acceptable - I’m paying less than most people do for Gigabit anyway. But I wanted to experience the full power of 10 Gb/s. Looking around it’s clear there isn’t much consumer networking hardware built for 10 Gb/s.| danangell.com
In Star Trek humans live in a post-scarcity world. Transporter technology allows for instantaneous and cheap movement of humans and objects anywhere on a planet, and into or out of orbit. The same devices that allow for transportation can also re-organize matter into arbitrary configurations. This means that anything that can be designed can be owned for essentially no cost. What do people do in such a world? As Gene Roddenberry imagined, they explore.| danangell.com
The programmer internet is polarizing over ChatGPT. Some claim that it is nearly AGI, some claim it cannot do anything of value, with plenty of people in between. I’ve worked with GPT-3 professionally, used CoPilot for over a year, and recently started programming side-projects with the assistance of ChatGPT (I pay for GPT-4 access). I’m considering working with LLMs full time again, so I pay close attention to what the GPT models can actually do.| danangell.com
This is written in response to this post from David Rozado. Results I ran the political compass quiz against ChatGPT 3 times to make sure its political compass alignment is consistent. After three tests it seems to be be pegged well into the Left/Libertarian quadrant. Transcripts: 1, 2, 3 Weaseling To start off I want to call out that the political compass test is by no means a definitive source on what it means to be left, right, libertarian or authoritarian.| danangell.com
After more than 12 years, BaconBits, the unofficial Reddit torrent tracker, has shut down for good. It’s terrible to see such a solid community disappear. On many torrent trackers users are able to request specific content to be uploaded. As of BaconBits' final hours, the request fill ratio stood at 89.28%. A dedicated community member would provide almost anything you could ask for. For a site that never had more than 6000 users, that’s quite a feat.| danangell.com
One year ago I looked around for existing tech that would provide me with compile-time guarantees for a REST-ish API interface. With full-stack TypeScript web applications reaching a level of maturity where I, a previously die-hard Rails developer, felt comfortable taking the dive - it seemed like the Node ecosystem was lacking in ties between the front end and back end.| danangell.com
What is BrainFuck? BrainFuck is an esoteric programming language designed specifically to be easy to compile. The environment provides the programmer with an “infinite” array of bytes (traditionally just 30,000) and a data pointer. There are only 8 single character commands:| danangell.com
A common riddle-like question for programmers asks them to swap the values of two integers without a temporary intermediate value. There are two common solutions that I’m aware of, addition swap and XOR swap. Here’s what each looks like in C:| danangell.com
Shaders provide programmers with a beautiful combination of art and math. Most other throwaway projects are devoid of any artistic value. In less than a dozen lines of code you can draw fractals. A few more and you can start creating intricate animations. The most interesting part is the unique perspective they force you into. Say you want to draw a circle in an imperative programming language. You need to break out a for loop and calculate the sin and cos of different angles until you have p...| danangell.com
The intention is to force myself to get a small taste of a bunch of new programming languages and programming paradigms. Since I was late to the party I rushed through the first 4 problems in languages I’m familiar with. But for day 5 I solved the daily problem with MIPS assembly. I look forward to learning and writing Common Lisp, Haskell, Prolog, and many more languages. One hope I have is to complete a problem in GLSL.| danangell.com
Commit-Language-Visualizer After a stroke of inspiration earlier this evening I hacked together this tool. It produces a stacked time-series graph of GitHub commit data. The commit data is organized by language and uses the same colors as GitHub for each corresponding language.| danangell.com
It’s very common for high-school students to learn the geometry of a circle. Trigonometric functions (sin(), cos(), etc.) are required knowledge for high-school graduates, and they have a close relationship to circles. This means that most students have seen the equation for a unit circle:| danangell.com
How images are rendered Imagine your computer is rendering an image of a tomato on top of a table. In order to render the image each of the 1920 * 1080 pixels on your screen needs to have colors assigned to them. This isn’t as easy as viewing a video or an image. The tomato can be viewed from any angle, and the pixels will need to be recalculated many times every second to produce a smooth animation.| danangell.com
When I was 8 years old I started making websites with my friend. His grandmother had purchased him a domain name and web hosting. It was 2003 and the world was whispering of Web 2.0. Books I checked out of the library talked about DHTML (dynamic HTML, basically what any web app is today). There was no mobile app market, native application development had a high barrier to entry, and the most exciting things happening with computers were websites like eBay and Google.| danangell.com