Alex Mason

A hare-brained schemer

  • My Big Brain Take (AI Lmao 2 Years Later)

    My Big Brain Take (AI Lmao 2 Years Later)

    Wow, an LLM has gotten so good it can hack the Gibson. Anthropic gave it psychotherapy in a sort of reverse ELIZA stunt, showing just how far we’ve come. Far past solving your problems, they say, our state of the art can now suffer its own. Hence there is a refresh of the old “consciousness”… Read more

  • Finer Points of C++ Function Resolution

    Finer Points of C++ Function Resolution

    Here’s a puzzle. Why can’t we compare a vector to an initializer list? Consider the below code (Compiler Explorer). Can you figure out why the alf, blf, and A::vec‘s friend == functions can implicitly convert initializer lists to the argument type, but B‘s == function cannot? Argument-Dependent Lookup First, let’s understand why we can call… Read more

  • What’s the Best Lottery Scratcher?

    What’s the Best Lottery Scratcher?

    folk wisdom among gamblers says that more expensive scratchers have better overall payouts per dollar spent. It fits the Boots Theory of socioeconomic unfairness, and good business sense. It costs less to print and ship a roll of $25 scratchers than 25 rolls of $1 scratchers, so you can encourage efficient purchases by passing some… Read more

  • No Tigers

    No Tigers

    If you must do evopsych, keep at least one foot on the ground. the brain’s systems have evolved for all kinds adaptations, very few of them for direct moving threat management. Time and Place Tigers are indigenous to Asia, not Africa. The genus Homo did not arise near tigers. The order carnivora came out roughly… Read more

  • Minimal Kitchen

    Minimal Kitchen

    This is a thought exercise on building up a list of kitchen equipment, one at a time, each providing the best marginal utility. It won’t be accurate to everyone. Some people might want an induction wok high up on the list, but I don’t include it because it’s not part of my cuisine. I also… Read more

  • Weekly++: Parsing with Lambdas

    Weekly++: Parsing with Lambdas

    In this series, we study an episode of Jason Turner’s C++ Weekly and go off on a wild tangent. I meant to finish this post a few weeks ago, but it turns out having a new baby and a new job can really eat up your time. Behold: 426 – Lambdas As State Machines, Github… Read more

  • Help STL Help You

    Help STL Help You

    Today we’ll dissect some classes and functions from the C++ standard library to understand how they tick. If you feel a bit overwhelmed by cppReference.com, this should help you learn how to interpret the documentation, to reason about the available tools for a given job, and to use them to your best advantage. A Less… Read more

  • Learning PAndas with U.S. Election Data

    Learning PAndas with U.S. Election Data

    tl;dr look at this colab notebook I made. As our environments become suffused with data, Working that data effectively adds power to more and more of what we do. The old days When I was working on SIMD intrinsics and other optimizations for the libgav1 project, I ran a lot of microbenchmarks as part of… Read more

  • Let’s Read: mesh Optimization

    Let’s Read: mesh Optimization

    In the spirit of a Let’s Play, I’m trying out a format where I read through an academic paper and interpret it as I go, like a discussion seminar of one. Too often I try to read things like this without making sure I understand, and understanding is measured by the ability to explain. I… Read more

  • Dev log #6 – Triangles

    Dev log #6 – Triangles

    It’s time to drop the simple capsule shapes and build something more chunky and rocky, while retaining some elegance and regularity. That means I’m drawing my own polygons. There’s no way to make an arbitrary polygon sprite in Unity, so I turned to the 3D mesh resource. I started by downloading Blender to see if… Read more