What's in the Box? A Field Guide to AI Models
A beginner-friendly tour of parameters, quantization, MoE, context windows, and other LLM jargon.
Software engineer, indie hacker, food enthusiast.
I'm Ian, a software engineer and entrepreneur based in The Netherlands. I'm an engineer at Mercury, a financial technology company that develops bank products for startups of all sizes. I write about engineering, cooking, and life.
Engineering
Stealing from Biologists to Compile Haskell Faster
The trick that makes GHC’s ApplicativeDo optimization faster is structurally identical to how biologists predict RNA folding.
Making Haskell Talk to PostgreSQL Without Suffering
How to eliminate the three performance taxes that make database queries slow: encoding overhead, round-trip latency, and N+1 query patterns.
Archive: Automatic Optimal Pipelining of Redis Commands
Archived from Informatikr (originally published January 18, 2012). Describes how the Haskell Redis client Hedis achieves automatic and optimal pipelining by combining lazy I/O with a synchronous-looking API, getting the best of both synchronous and asynchronous approaches.
Cooking
The Cadence of Salting
When you salt matters as much as how much you salt. Understanding the timing changes everything.
Personal
What You Need to Know About Trump\
A look at the Trump administration\
Actuarial Murder and Other Diffuse Acts of Violence
An exploration of how institutional decisions and systemic policies can cause widespread harm with less accountability than direct violence, examining cases from healthcare to education where bureaucratic choices have life-altering consequences despite being treated as mere business decisions.
The Cruel Part Is
A poem
Vignettes
A collection of memories