ianreppel.org

Off the coast of Dominica, the Cetacean Translation Initiative (CETI) is feeding thousands of sperm whale codas into the same kind of large language models (LLMs) that power human chatbots.

Cassandra saw Troy burning before the first torch was even lit. She was ignored, silenced, and murdered, and the city burned anyway.

GiveWell has directed $2.3 billion in grants since 2014, of which Latin America received 0.02 cents per dollar. Yet 220 million people in the region live in or near poverty.

The Mexican cavefish kept its eye genes for over a million years after the eyes themselves disappeared. Something similar happens to companies once they achieve success.

Imitation has become the sincerest form of strategy.

The surest way to ruin an engineering team is to believe it will survive whatever you do to it.

Nothing reveals an organization’s theory of product quite like giving someone the title “product manager” while denying them a product.

Corporate wisdom assumes everyone has the same amount to lose.

We do not need LLM-powered industrial sabotage. With humans in the loop, we can self-sabotage much more efficiently.

When Anthropic proved to be a liability, I replaced Claude Code with OpenCode.

There is a narcissist in your pocket, and you are in its pocket.

I have stopped reading my colleagues’ documents.

Got no WiFi or cash to pay for LLMs? Learn how to use local LLMs with Ollama and Claude Code.

Two browser extensions can reduce insufferable content on the web: uBlock Origin and uBlacklist.

I liked Logseq for almost four years, but SQLite over plain Markdown ruined it.

Automating backwards-compatible schema evolution could recover almost $4 million in engineering capacity for a typical tech platform company.

What if Ralph Wiggum had friends?

What does it take to build an AI rehearsal system where the measure of success is that people stop using it?