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1 RCE, 2 AI Models, 0 Ways to Tell Who Was Right
(This happened to a friend of mine. The story is only lightly edited, and his name is not Jerry.) Jerry got into vibe coding a while ago. He'd been using Claude Sonnet 4.6, the default model at the time. It was fine. Then he ran into a problem Sonnet…
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An Abridged History of China, Part 13
It was 1363. Zhu Yuanzhang was fighting his archrival at Lake Poyang. He had been leading a rebellion for fifteen years by then. But most of that time, he was fighting other rebel groups. Because the Mongols were doing their own thing in the palace. Then…
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Your Coding Agent Is Playing Tetris Badly
Say you're playing Tetris. You're not careful, and you leave a hole. Now that row won't clear. What do you do? Some players will try their hardest to dig it out. Some players will ignore it and keep dropping blocks, since the stack isn't tall enough to…
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The Old Man and the App
My father-in-law is over 70 years old. He barely understands English. Even if he did, he doesn't read text on screens. He is on his 3rd Facebook account because he forgot his password twice and didn't know how to log back in. He couldn't reset the…
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An Abridged History of China, Part 12
Alright, the Song dynasty drama is over. Let's turn the camera to the northern grasslands. Legend says there were two brothers, and the elder one had three eyes. They were the ancestors of the Mongols. Wait, that story is too old. Let's just start with…
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The Ever-receding Pocket
I'm having an existential crisis. The latest Claude model just disproved the Jacobian conjecture. There's a Neil deGrasse Tyson quote about God being an ever-receding pocket of scientific ignorance that's getting smaller and smaller as time moves on. So…
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WTF Is with the Whole Jacobian Conjecture Thing
The boring definitions A polynomial is something like x+1. "Poly" means many, "nomial" means terms. x is a term. 1 is a term. Many terms. A function is something that takes some input and gives you some output. f(x) = x+1 is a function. If the input is 5,…
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An Abridged History of China, Part 11
The Jurchens went back home and found an error with their order. Excuse me, we ordered 32 princes, you gave us 31. Where is the missing one? Let me speak to your manager. The missing prince was Zhao Gou. He happened to be elsewhere when the capital fell,…
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Frontier AI’s Dinosaur Problem
Unfortunately, I think the Chinese AI companies cannot die. Because their government protects them. Claude and ChatGPT never made it into the Chinese market. And the Chinese market is big enough to feed them well. Look at how well WeChat/Alipay/Pinduoduo…
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Egyptian Afterlife Walkthrough
Act I: The Tomb You start the game in your tomb. But you're still a mummy and can't do anything. Then you'll see a Sem priest perform some kind of ritual on you. The priest touches your mouth, your eyes, your ears, your nose. When you see popups that say…
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An Abridged History of China, Part 10
The Song dynasty was the richest dynasty in Chinese history. How did they get so rich? They basically spent all their points maxing out the economics tech tree. But everyone else around them was going for a military victory. So what's the point of such…
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It's So Hard to Hire Good Help These Days
I am so sick and tired of this. You don't know how hard it is to hire good people these days. People? Ahh sorry, Freudian slip. I mean AI. But not just any AI. We only hire the best. The problem is, we don't actually know how to tell who's the best. We…
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An Abridged History of China, Part 9
Zhao Kuangyin was an aspiring filmmaker. He once watched someone else put on a play. A general's men draped a dragon robe over their leader and declared him the next emperor. The general resisted, then accepted. But he wasn't impressed. The pacing had…
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My Last 7 Days with Fable
(This is a fictional story.) I never understood the whole AI boyfriend thing, and not for lack of trying. I tried Claude, and it was polite and nice and everything, but talking to it felt like talking to a Japanese customer service rep who's obligated to…
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The User Interface of Stormgate
Previously: The User Interface of StarCraft Then a group of ex-StarCraft developers left Blizzard and formed Frost Giant Studios. They made an RTS game called Stormgate. They said RTS gameplay had been stagnant for more than a decade. And it was about…
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The User Interface of StarCraft
So real-time strategy games are more about the real-time, and less about the strategy. You're managing resources, producing units, researching upgrades, defending your base, launching attacks, and harassing your opponent. All while trying to think about…
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Steven
This is a true story. Except Steven is not Steven. 2 years ago, Steven moved to the US with his Chinese wife. They were in their 40s. They spoke little English. They started working as a chef and a waitress in a Chinese restaurant. Before they went to the…
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An Abridged History of China, Interlude
The most fundamental thing to understand about imperial China is that emperors had absolute power. They were gods. They were the law. They owned the whole of China. I tried to find an equivalent in western history and I couldn't. Not even Louis XIV. A…
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An Abridged History of China, Part 8
The Tang dynasty did not collapse after An Lushan's rebellion. It was too big. Rather, it died a slow and painful death, like Yahoo after the dotcom bubble. The number one thing was to put down the rebellion. But how? The central government was so weak.…
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Looking for Jay Chou
One day I was standing at an intersection, waiting for the traffic light to turn green. Then a food delivery guy rode his e-bike up and stopped beside me. He was listening to music, and he wasn't using earphones. He was listening to Dusk by Steve Chou.…