Everyone is very concerned about being respectable, so I’m going to be the goofball who raises worst-case possibilities. I think there is a 1% chance we live in Minicrypt, and a 15% chance we functionally lose confidence in our existing public-key encryption algorithms. [...] The problem here is that the speed of AI producing surprises, and the speed of...
I shipped a new feature for my blog today: the Newsletters page, which offers an index of all of the newsletters I've sent out, both my free weekly Substack and my monthly sponsors-only updates. I built the feature almost entirely using my voice, chatting away to my laptop while I cooked dinner. Codex voice mode I used the ChatGPT desktop app for this,...
When Ralph was published last year, I sat on it. People who have been reading this blog for a while know this. I first came across the idea of loop engineering in early January last year, sat on it for four months, and then started writing a lot, begging people
Here's something I've been meaning to write up for a while. It's kind of late, but I'm going to lean into the whole MCP vs. CLI argument because I have a perspective others might find interesting.What's the actual difference
Release: ttok 1.0 I released ttok 0.4, ran uv tool upgrade ttok, piped a file into the new version... and realized that it was defaulting to the GPT-4 tokenizer when it should very clearly default to GPT-5/GPT-6 instead! I figured switching the default was a reasonable excuse to finally ship a 1.0. OpenAI haven't actually confirmed that GPT-6 uses the...
Release: ttok 0.4 ttok is my CLI tool for counting tokens, using OpenAI's open source tiktoken library. It hasn't been in updated in a couple of years, but I finally fixed a Click warning, updated CI, and added a --list-models command to list available models. It works with uvx, so you can count tokens in anything like this: cat file.txt | uvx ttok Tags:...
Computer programming is, fundamentally, about two things: Problem-solving using computers Learning to control complexity while solving these problems I have a hard time imagining a future where knowing how to solve problems with computers and how to control the complexity of those solutions is less valuable than it is today, so I think it will continue...