Robert Frost, read it twice

you will get the chance to become alive again and again. and you must be there, awake and ready, to take it

Today is Firewatch's tenth anniversary. It remains the thing I'm most proud to have worked on. There's more of me inside of Firewatch than in any other game—and I have no doubt there are others on the team who would say the same about themselves. Thanks to everyone who played it.

people have very mixed opinions on hackathons. i’ve spoken to many people who think hackathons are not worth the time, or that the most “locked-in” cs students won’t want to spend a weekend attending one, or commit to 20 hours a week for multiple quarters (often more) to organize one. but the fact that @sama and many other startup/tech leaders are willing to spend time speaking at collegiate hackathons, and that companies are willing to put five figures into sponsoring them, goes to show that hackathons are one of the best places to be as a cs/eng student. people who like building products and solving problems get the space, resources, and platform to do so (subsidized flights, free food, compute credits, access to world-class mentors/speakers, opportunity to pitch directly to stakeholders). hackathon (organizer) communities are where talent, creativity, and fun coexist. that’s why students keep attending and organizing them.

Somehow it was learning how many people are fulltime employed to maintain the Golden Gate Bridge that flipped something inside of me in my understanding of the entropic force civilization has to constantly fight against. Before that moment I thought — I had not applied real conscious thought — you simply build a building or anything really and then you just … have it. After that I understood everything is constantly at the brink of being lost.

It’s amazing that after decades of research it’s still unclear whether switching from Coke to Diet Coke is actually better for you.

Just published an essay, just edited a friend's essay this weekend. Realized I am hypersensitive to rhetorical crutches now. It all reads to me like AI slop, even when I see it hand-written by a human

I built an infinite AI chess game, powered by: ▪️ AI SDK for a single DX to all frontier models ▪️ AI Gateway for seamless access with 1 API key ▪️ Workflow to keep the game going forever Right now Anthropic is playing OpenAI: v0-chess-match.vercel.app

Here's something interesting about cache eviction - instead of tracking the exact LRU (Least Recently Used) item, we can just pick two random items and evict the older one. This is called "2-random," and it works surprisingly well. The idea is simple. When we need to evict something from our cache, randomly sample two keys, compare their last access times, and evict the one that was accessed longer ago. That's it. Why not just track true LRU? because, maintaining a perfect LRU requires extra memory and CPU overhead. We need a doubly linked list with pointers for every cache entry, plus the cost of updating it on every access. Btw, picking two keys at random and evicting the least recently used of the two becomes virtually indistinguishable from true LRU. It works because it avoids the worst random choices (by picking the better of two) while retaining enough randomness. 2-random also degrades gracefully when your working set exceeds the cache size. True LRU can cause near-100% cache misses when looping over data larger than the cache. Random eviction handles this better, and 2-random gives you the best of both worlds. Many in-memory databases are full of such "good enough" approximations. Dig deeper when you find time. It's fun.