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Entropic Thoughts

entropicthoughts.com

Following is a selection of the best articles based on various criteria. If you’re new here, they may be a good place to start!

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1

Transparent leadership beats servant leadership

I spent a couple of years managing a team, and I entered that role – like many – without knowing anything about how to do it. I tried to figure out how to be a good manager, and doing so I ended up reading a lot about servant leadership . It never quite sat right with me, though. Servant leadership seems to me a lot…

2

Nvidia Stock Crash Prediction

One of the questions of the 2026 acx prediction contest is whether Nvidia’s stock price will close below $100 on any day in 2026. At the time of writing, it trades at $184 and a bit, so going down to $100 would be a near halving of the stock value of the highest valued company in the world.

4

Babel is why I keep blogging with Emacs

Every time I look at someone’s simple static site generation setup for their blog, I feel a pang of envy. I’m sure I could make a decent blogging engine in 2,000 lines of code, and it would be something I’d understand, be proud over, able to extend, and willing to share with others.

10

Are LLM merge rates not getting better?

I was reading the metr article on how llm code passes test much more often than it is of mergeable quality . They look at the performance of llm s doing programming when the success criterion is “passes all tests” and compare it to when the success criterion is “would get approved by the maintainer”. Unsurprisingly…

12

Parser Combinators Beat Regexes

Someone online was solving Advent of Code problems, and had a question about last years’ day 3 . They had a working solution using regular expressions (regexes) on String values, but they wanted to use ByteString values instead for performance reasons. They were surprised, however, that there seems to be a lack of…

13

Evaluating LLMs playing text adventures

When we first set up the llm such that it could play text adventures , we noted that none of the models we tried to use with it were any good at it. We dreamed of a way to compare them, but all I could think of was setting a goal far into the game and seeing how long it takes them to get there. I just realised there’s…

15

Advent of Code on the Z-Machine

Fantasy consoles like the Pico-8 are a great idea. A fantasy console provides a standardised and portable environment in which developers can explore ideas within creative constraints. The Z-machine , developed by Infocom in 1979, is the earliest fantasy console I know, although this is probably the first time it’s…

16

A curmudgeon tries a language server

I write code roughly the same way I did ten years ago 1 1 Well, this was true when I started drafting this article. I have since adopted robots to do much more of the actual typing of code, unless it’s a project where (a) I care about code quality, or (b) I try to learn something. : I make edits in my text editor, I…

17

You Want Technology with Warts

I normally skip presentations because I prefer reading, but Building the Hundred-Year Web Service (YouTube) was worth the time. 1 1 Note that despite “htmx” featuring in the title, very little of the presentation is actually about htmx. It is about choosing and using technology in such a way that it won’t require…