Hi, I’m Nick.
I’m a Software Engineer, and this is my blog for sharing my ideas and experiences.
Life is often absurd, and software is no different. Let’s enjoy it together.
Hi, I’m Nick.
I’m a Software Engineer, and this is my blog for sharing my ideas and experiences.
Life is often absurd, and software is no different. Let’s enjoy it together.
When I started programming around 2014, there was an incredible excitement stirring. React had just started catching on, and it was unlocking a huge amount of pent up creativity in the web development space. Web apps really started to become feasible for anyone to make, and the tooling was improving on the daily. Then, a young man named Dave Abramov came along and blew the world away with Redux. It was wild. ...
We are entering an age where we have more time to think, imagine, and chase our ambitions. As Armin Ronacher wonderfully puts it, he’s freed himself of the toil of working at the level of writing the code, and has the time to pick up a book and read as Claude Code churns away at his commands. I’ve felt a similar unburdening. Using Deep Research, I’m able to quickly explore deep ideas without having to burn a Sunday afternoon on it. I’m able to stay more engaged with my kids and job, and have more mental capacity to explore the bigger ideas. ...
“I feel like we are nearing the end of times. We humans are losing faith in ourselves”. Hayao Miyazaki AGI has been achieved. Artificial Ghibli Images. On May 25th, @sama announced the launch of a new update to OpenAI’s 4o model, with an improvement to the models image generating capabilities. People quickly realized that when providing the model with an image in it’s prompt, it is capable of applying a “style transfer” to it, allowing them to re-imagine their photos in any way they wished. Inevitably, we all settled on Anime styles, and the heart-warming and wonderous style of the Ghibli studio stood out as the most popular. ...
Even before the unprecedented news that the Typescript compiler is being rewritten in Go, I was feeling the pull towards the language Go. As a C# developer of 6 years, I’ve had a love/hate relationship with it. On one hand, it’s an incredibly productive and elegant language. Every year they add more lovely syntax sugar, and I admit I have a bit of a sweet tooth for nice syntax. But “Startup Culture” seems to shun C#, even though many of it’s ideas have influenced other languages, like being the first language with async/await. ...
Updated 6/3 Long beards who craft systems level software often speak of Undefined Behavior, where if you break the rules of a language like C or C++ and do things that the compiler assumes can never happen, you can elicit the compiler to do crazy things. Today, we use LLMs as an indeterministic compiler. The vagueness of English could generate any kind of code, differing without much understanding from the programmer. Its Undefined Behavior in a new form. Maybe the code compiles, or maybe not, but it doesn’t always do what it’s supposed to. ...
I’m starting a blog. What better time than now? A time where AI can churn out ungodly reams of optimistic lies, commit subtly broken code, and forge deep fakes faster than you can say phishing. It’s a time of great fear and excitement for what could be. A time where it all hangs on the balance of a knife’s edge. I became a software engineer because I love tinkering with machines. They can make dreams come true, invent unimaginable sounds and pictures, and solve equations faster than any person ever could. But now the machines have learned our language, can speak it and follow our commands directly. Now is an exciting time. ...