Learning a bit about building game AIs:

https://www.patreon.com/posts/152027219

It's sort of amazing how quickly you can do things now. I wanted to try writing an alphazero-style AI for Azul. With no AI background, it took me maybe 2-3 hours to (2-3 days wall clock) to beat the best AI I could find to play against:

https://danluu.com/game/tile/

I don't think the AI is superhuman, but I've just been training it on a CPU on my laptop and it's not bad and measurably better every few hours, so maybe it will get there if I just let it run for longer (or if I get a real workstation)

Exercises in benchmarking and experimental design, part 5:

https://www.patreon.com/posts/149123122

Useless information about poker chips:

https://www.patreon.com/posts/146484203

How earthquake safe are Vancouver condos?

https://www.patreon.com/posts/143211904

Interesting story about Google publishing someone's phone number on searches for them when they gave the number to Google for account verification/security:

https://danq.me/2025/05/21/google-shared-my-phone-number/

Reminds me of the time a company I worked for (AFAIK) accidentally used phone numbers obtained the same way for ad targeting and got fined $150M

Exercises in benchmarking and experimental design, part 4:

https://www.patreon.com/posts/127627543

Is one of the big drivers of consumer demand for compute going to be solving expensive proof of work proxies?

I'm still semi-banned from reddit (https://mastodon.social/@danluu/113426851280402188) and, ironically, had to start browsing it with a scraper because the scraper has good anti-blocking techniques and I don't, much like how way SEO spammers are better at ranking than people who make legit content.

With the resources AI companies have, proof of work can't "win", but it seems like the least ineffective technique?

The review-industrial complex

https://www.patreon.com/posts/125570961

This exchange between some programmers and a non-programmer typifies what I was getting at in https://danluu.com/codenames/#appendix-writing-the-code-for-the-post

Programmer 1: GPT-4o and Claude Haiku are useless for programming
Programmer 2: Claude Sonnet is useless for programming
Non-programmer: What do you mean GPT-4o is useless? I don't know how to program and created an app that makes $10k/mo with GPT-4o

LLMs have allowed non-programmers to produce apps for years and programmers are calling these things useless for programming.