Daniel Spiewak

It's been done before. The mathematicians complain.

github: https://github.com/djspiewak

Last Notes

2026-03-08 23:23:25 GMT

After a long and winding waiting room… Cats Effect 3.7.0 has finally been tagged! https://github.com/typelevel/cats-effect/releases/tag/v3.7.0 This is a big one because it represents the culmination of all the planning and scheming and hard work to make truly native multithreaded execution functional on Scala Native 0.5.

2025-07-10 23:58:08 GMT

One of my coworkers refers to Open Source as “the most incredible thing humanity has ever accomplished.” When he says that, he’s not making a socioeconomic or political statement, nor is he ignoring technical shortcomings. Rather, he is making an observation about how millions of people have created this immense pile of loosely coupled legos that actually all kind of fit together, without any central direction or fiat authority, with the only final arbiter being user adoption.

2025-05-19 02:41:08 GMT

- reply

The problem at the end of the day is really no one knows what AI will actually be worth to society as a technology. A lot of smart people say “a lot!” A lot of other smart people say “very little!” A lot of rich people are betting a lot of money on the first one. A lot of everyone is getting their productive work used in ways they didn’t foresee or consent to.
So since the smart people are divided and muddled, the tie breaker is often the author’s priors about rich people and capitalism.

2025-05-19 02:38:09 GMT

I’ve recently realized that essentially all opinion pieces about the energy/carbon/capital/resource impact of AI invariably spend thousands of words on napkin math figures based on shaky assumptions on how models and data centers work, all to come up with some bottom line number…
And then they invariably throw it away and conclude one of the following: either no cost is worthwhile since AI is valueless, or no cost is too high since AI’s potential is infinite. Why not dispense with the bad math?