Author: Dave
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The Machine That Stole My Hobby
For a couple of decades, I spent happy hours making electronic music. Not professionally — I never played a gig, never really expected anyone outside my immediate circle to listen. That wasn’t the point. The point was sitting in front of a screen with a cup of coffee, nudging a bassline until it felt right,…
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Agentic AI and the Demand for Data Centers
“Agentic AI platforms” include semi-autonomous coding agents such as Claude Code as well as general purpose agents like OpenClaw. An increasing amount of software is being developed with agentic AI. OpenClaw itself has been one of the fastest-growing open-source projects in history, used by individuals and businesses. These agentic AI platforms are profligate in their…
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The Tokenomics of Exclusion: Why AI is Becoming a Tool of the Rich
Ever since I discovered computers 55 years ago, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed exploring firmware design, compiler theory, and high level architecture, both as a salaried employee and on my own time. For me, software is the delicious intersection of art, architecture, and high-tech tools. The recent advances in AI technology supports my life-long fantasy that someday,…
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The Missing Crayon Color
Abstract: This report is a recreational investigation into the colors in a 120-count box of Crayola crayons. The 120-count box contains the largest number of colors that Crayola currently sells in a single box. Advocating for the underrepresented, we attempt to answer the question, “Which color is least well represented?” In our investigative journey, we…
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Can It Build Legos?
Abstract: Anthropic recently released Opus 4.6, a new LLM that has already received favorable reviews for its coding abilities. While coding puzzles have their charm, we are more interested in how well it can build Lego models. In this investigation, we compare the Lego-building abilities of Opus 4.6 against other frontier LLMs. The LLMs generated…
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AI Sh*t
I’m disgusted at how much of social media is AI-generated sh*t. I have two thoughts about that, a short thought and a long thought. Here’s the short thought: AI won’t take over the world, but stupidity might. Here’s the long thought: AI is like… …Electricity. It powers our lights and homes, and can start fires…
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Why I Don’t Use Windows
Microsoft assumes ownership of the components in your computer. Microsoft does not have qualms about erasing any other operating system you have installed on another drive partition and all the data with it.1 Want to encrypt your hard drive? Microsoft owns the decryption keys.2 Windows is an ad delivery platform and it is virtually impossible…
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Baby Names: Fun with Statistics
Abstract: This is a report of various statistical measures of the U.S. Social Security “Baby Names” database. Analyses include trends and predictions about popular names, surges in specific name occurrences over time, trends in name complexity and pronounceability, palindromic names, sexually ambiguous names, “forgotten” names that have fallen out of use, and more. Some of…
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Antimatter Sunflower Seeds
In the world of new LLMs, Anthropic recently released Claude Sonnet 4.5, claiming improved reasoning ability compared to Claude Sonnet 4. I compared the reasoning abilities of Sonnet 4 and Sonnet 4.5 with an absurd physics problem involving antimatter sunflower seeds and orbital mechanics. I also gave the same problem to OpenAI GPT-5 for comparison.…
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Telephone Game with Multilingual LLMs
Abstract This is an experiment inspired by the children’s game “telephone.” In that game, a secret message is whispered to the first person, then whispered from person to person, and then the original and final messages are compared and everyone giggles. In this experiment, the whisperers are large language models (LLMs) and the message is…