bedaire.com

Epistle to the Infrastructure Team

Fri, 19 Jun 2026 18:00:00 -0500

Paul, senior software engineer on the data and infrastructure team, called to design and implement a set of tools and MCP for an agentic harness, set apart for the technical vision of the CTO, which he outlined beforehand through his directors in the 2026 engineering roadmap, the vision concerning Claude, trained on all human knowledge according to the data, and declared to have expert coding ability according to the benchmarks, through whom we can execute on our product roadmap to bring about a Series B round,

Hex Inspector

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 09:00:00 -0500

ChatGPT, author of Don Quixote

Mon, 05 Jan 2026 12:00:00 -0500

Jorge Luis Borges died on June 14, 1986, a couple of months before the landmark paper from Rumelhart, Hinton and Williams that demonstrated that backpropagation could be used to train neural networks. He might have noticed, in 1985-6, when they showed a neural network that could learn XOR, ending the (first) “AI winter” started by Minsky and Papert’s Perceptrons book in the late sixties. He might further have followed the rapid progress of those years in the early 80s, including a small network for character recognition from 1985.

The Ten Dual Commandments

Mon, 10 Nov 2025 17:00:00 -0500

Ten rules for human/AI writing collaborations:

You, as the human, give meaning.
You’re the author; the AI is the assistant. Don’t bow down to it or serve it.
Don’t take the AI’s words in vain; make them your own before you call them your own.
Remember that writing is thinking. Leslie Lamport said, “If you’re thinking without writing, you only think you’re thinking.”
Honor your own voice so that people will read what you write.
Let the AI challenge your work: ask it to find mistakes you made.
Let the AI proofread your work: ask it to find ways you were unclear.
Let the AI tighten your work: ask it to find where you lost focus.
Let the AI expand your work: ask it to find ideas you didn’t explore enough.
Let the AI surprise you: ask it what you didn’t think to ask.

Odd Baseball Plays

Sun, 09 Nov 2025 12:00:00 -0500

Some interesting plays, found by playing with statcast’s data from 2015-2024.

Swinging pitchout

The most halfhearted attempt ever to protect a runner on a hit-and-run. Good thing he missed; the throw ended up in center field and the runner made it to third.

Foul pitchout

A more serious attempt to actually hit the ball. This one actually played out well: Diaz grounded out but the runner advanced to second, and later scored the go-ahead run on a base hit.

The American Flag

Fri, 11 Jul 2025 09:00:00 -0500

The American flag has fifty stars and thirteen stripes, representing the fifty states and thirteen original colonies. But which ones are they?

I

Naively there are

\binom{50}{13} = 354,860,518,600

possibilities. King George would have no chance of finding them! But we can do better.

II

Clearly the thirteen colonies must have been contiguous. Let’s look at the map of the United States again:

Map of an Empire

Mon, 02 Jun 2025 12:00:00 -0500

Lewis Carroll first posed the thought experiment in 1893:

“That’s another thing we’ve learned from your Nation,” said Mein Herr, “map-making. But we’ve carried it much further than you. What do you consider the largest map that would be really useful?”

“About six inches to the mile.”

“Only six inches!” exclaimed Mein Herr. “We very soon got to six yards to the mile. Then we tried a hundred yards to the mile. And then came the grandest idea of all! We actually made a map of the country, on the scale of a mile to the mile!”

Four Software Engineers

Fri, 04 Apr 2025 18:00:00 -0500

The Torah speaks of four types of software engineers - the staff engineer, the senior engineer, the junior engineer, and the intern.

The staff engineer, what does he say? “What are the servers, pipelines, and databases that make up the system?” And you must show him the system diagram, and explain to him every detail down to the data layer.

The senior engineer, what does he say? “What is this legacy system to you?” “To you”, he says, not to him. When he sets himself apart from the team, he denies the basic premise, that every engineer is responsible for the success of the system. And you must set his teeth on edge and tell him, “Because of this legacy system, the customers continue to pay my invoices.” “My invoices”, not his, for had he started the company, he would not even have reached ramen profitability.

The Eldritch Express

Wed, 25 Dec 2024 12:00:00 -0500

I

As I lay in bed that fateful evening, I recalled with mounting unease an unsettling conversation I’d had with Farnsworth just a few days prior. With an intensity far beyond his mere decade, he swore to me that there would be no visit tonight from an ancient, long-buried horror. There would be no arrival, he assured me, heralded by the spectral tolling of otherworldly bells, as the eldritch legends had foretold. Yet he was dogged in his insistence, almost monomaniacal, as though some unseen force compelled him to press the matter beyond all reason. His eyes burned with a fervor I dared not meet, their light clawing at the boundaries of his mortal frame, as though his very soul strained to break free and issue its ominous warning.

Ethics of the Founders

Sun, 28 Apr 2024 11:20:58 -0500

In Pirkei Avot, the sages passed on their wisdom in many areas of life. It’s lesser known that they focused heavily on startups and the tech world:

On Ramen profitability:

Such is the way of a life [of a startup]: you shall eat bread with salt, and rationed water shall you drink; you shall sleep on the ground, your life will be one of privation, and in [your startup] shall you labor. If you do this, “Happy shall you be and it shall be good for you” (Psalms 128:2): “Happy shall you be” in this world [while working on the startup], “and it shall be good for you” in the world to come [after acquisition by Facebook or Google].