I am a software engineer by trade, available for freelance and consulting. These are my writings; mostly non-professional. You can also find me on Bluesky and Github.
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Is the AI Bubble About to Burst?
August 10, 2025
I have been meaning to write a follow-up to my post about AGI with a second part. My intention was to document some examples of prominent people saying or strongly implying that AGI is imminent, to convince myself and my imagined readers that this view is pervasive. For example, here is AI researcher Geoffrey Hinton, often called the "Godfather of AI", speculating about AGI while veiling this as disinterested scientific analysis. Here is the co-founder of Anthropic speaking matter-of-factly about creating human-level AI. However, I've also started to wonder if we've hit peak AI hype, and I am going to write about that instead.
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Adding Comments To This Blog With Bluesky
August 8, 2025
I came across this blog post on Hackernews the other day and wanted to do something similar for my own blog. My reasons for doing this are similar to those outlined in the original post:
- Comments are nice to have. This site doesn’t exactly have huge readership, but I like the idea that someone could leave a comment here if they wanted to.
- That said, it is not worthwhile for me to implement my own comment solution.
- Many people have Bluesky accounts already. It is convenient to not have to make a new account to comment on my website.
- Outsourcing the data hosting, account management, etc. to Bluesky is very nice.
Natalie used React to create the blog post UI, and her blog is powered by Astro. Getting this working in Jekyll with pure Javascript was pretty simple (<100 lines of code, mostly written by ChatGPT). I’m not bothering with image support, linking back to Bluesky (except at the top) or any of the other fancier stuff that natalie b. did for now. I may improve on this eventually, but I’m happy to support text responses only for now.
The only friction with this solution is that I have to go back and edit my post’s front matter with the CID after creating the blog post and linking to it from Bluesky, but this isn’t too much hassle.
You can see the code used to fetch and render Bluesky comments on this site’s github repo.
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A Year of Working Contract
August 1, 2025
For the past year and a bit I've been working on a contract for a large Canadian Insurance company. I got the opportunity through a friend who runs a contracting firm. The experience of working for this large insurance company was interesting. This post is an account, mostly for my own memory and interest, of the work I did there.
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On Building Hoot
July 22, 2025
Hoot is an iOS app that I created for the benefit of my partner, Alana. She gave me the idea for an app that prompts users once per day with a question. Everyone answers that question at the same time, then sees each others' answers. The purpose is to stimulate conversation among friends. As Alana said "my friends are moving to different cities. Our regular chats will become more infrequent if we don't have something to prompt conversation." She used to use Twitter with her friends for this purpose, but none of them use it anymore.
I built this app as a one-man team, while working another full time job. As a result, I had these goals in mind when making technical decisions about this app:
- Developer simplicity. I wanted to use technologies that would result in less code to maintain, easy deployments, good built in observability, etc. I tried to make product decisions that would allow for straightforward code.
- Cost. I wanted to keep the cost of this project relatively low.
This blog post is an overview of how I built the app, and some of the design decisions that I made along the way.
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We Will Not Accidentally Create AGI
July 6, 2025
We need to give ourselves more credit as complex systems.
Many lay people intuitively understand that LLMs like ChatGPT are not about to become an AGI by just feeding more compute to them. Yet people intimately involved with the technology, including prominent people in the AI business like Elon Musk and Sam Altman, continually proclaim that we are months or short years away from computer superintelligence. They seem to believe that the distance between current best LLMs and AGI is more compute, or perhaps some model tweaks, or at most one more theoretical advancement. For example, Elon Musk recently claimed in an interview with YCombinator that "we're quite close to digital superintelligence. If it doesn't happen this year, then next year for sure". This exuberance regarding digital superintelligence is espoused by many prominent tech figures. You might say that of course AI CEOs will hype AI. Still, whatever these mens' motives, they are fanning the flames of an AI fanaticism that is very real.
The only real general intelligence that we know of is our own. Naturally, when evaluating the LLMs and other artificial intelligences that we have created we tend to compare them to ourselves. There has been much fanfare and maybe more anxiety each time machines become apparently better than us at some task, such as the LSAT. Of course, this anxiety dates to even before Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov at Chess. With the advent of LLMs, it appears that computers are now able to understand concepts and their relations to each other. An LLM is a vast network of nodes and connections–a map of reality. Like all maps, it is imperfect, though this alone is not a reason to discount them. Our own understanding of reality is infinitely limited and often incorrect.
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