ian k. duncanλ
Section 01Intro
Engineer
Strong opinions, strongly typed.
Software engineer and entrepreneur in The Netherlands.
I’m an engineer at Mercury, a financial technology company building bank products for startups. I write about engineering, cooking, and life.
Section 02Archive
Essays
Longer-form, opinionated writing.
Engineering, personal, and cooking.
37 entriesScheveningen, 1898
Latest
Who Owns the Machines? The AI risk worth losing sleep over isn’t a rogue superintelligence. It’s cheap, AI-powered hacking of brittle infrastructure, and a handful of companies using the fear to lock everyone else out of the technology. Sex, AI, and the Apocalypse How a community devoted to thinking clearly incubated salvation stories, abusive experiments, race science, and an affection for autocracy, and why that history matters now that its alumni are asking for public trust on AI. Getting Freaky in the Age of AI The only way to have a competitive edge in the age of AI is to be aggressively weird with what you build. The Mathematics of Build Queue Optimization and Auto-Scaling A deep dive into queueing theory and auto-scaling for CI/CD build fleets, exploring when and how to optimize build infrastructure for both cost and developer productivity. Deconstruct the Monolith: Composable App Bootstrapping with Fractal Layer How fractal-layer attacks the compilation bottleneck and initialization chaos of the monolithic App datatype by treating startup as a composable graph of resource-managed layers. Brief aan de Eerste Kamer over box 3 · A letter to the Dutch Senate on Box 3 Waarom de vermogensaanwasbelasting slecht uitpakt — voor de belastingplichtige, de schatkist en de economie. · Why the accrual tax is bad for the taxpayer, the Treasury, and the economy.
Browse the full archive From the archive
“The only way to have a competitive edge in the age of AI is to be aggressively weird with what you build.”
Section 03Notes
Notes
Loose, unpolished thinking from my knowledge base. Working with the garage door open.
Read the working notes Jacquard loom,
programmed by punched cards
programmed by punched cards
Section 04Tools
Harwell Dekatron,
1951
1951
Workbench
RFC Browser On this site
All projects An annotated reader for IETF RFCs with enhanced typography and relationship graphs.
GHC Memory Layout Visualizer On this siteInteractive visualization of how GHC lays out Haskell data types on the heap.
Temporal.io Haskell Client GitHubDurable execution for Haskell, in the face of failure.
Haskell OpenTelemetry SDK GitHubPrimary author and maintainer of the Haskell OpenTelemetry ecosystem.