Michael Bacarella

Michael Bacarella

@michael.bacarella.com

Founder GPShopper (successful exit) ex-Jane Street (pre-SBF) ex-Google (pre-Sundar) occasional shitpoaster

646 followers134 following271 posts

insurer: cybersec claims department me: hi yes, I'd like to put in a claim, my php site was hacked ins: have you heard of claude code? do you use it? me: yes ins: haven't you had, like, 6 months to auto-rewrite all of your php in a less stupid language? me:

The number of times a year I get a bill where the pay online option involves more work than just writing out a check and putting a stamp on the reply envelope is too damn high.

The interesting part of this article for me was the disabled community wasn't big enough to keep the bar economically viable and during a 3 1/2 conversation, the remaining owner shared how hard it was to keep the lights on and she was met with hostility and brought to tears. Is that part not true?

SWEs are still in such denial about AI that they're *still* not seriously discussing forming a union to reject AI while they still have some leverage. have we learned nothing from the dockworkers and the mathematicians?

I've worked inside of datacenters, been in charge of datacenters, been in planning meetings to build new datacenters and I cannot parse a single thing this web site believes about datacenters. Your rallying cry is datacenters. Datacenters. Okay.

datacenters are misunderstood. maybe if the general public could spend some time in these loud, dark, cold, cavernous rooms on big campuses with endlessly long rows of computers that look nothing like the computers they have ever interacted with and

big security doors and cages everywhere and like one human staff member per square mile they would feel more comfortable with them popping up in their back yards demanding high resource usage

We had a good thing you stupid son of a bitch. We had COBOL, mainframes, a steady paycheck. Everything we needed. Ran like clockwork. But no, you had to be the man. Too good for unions. Now a model does your job. You and your pride and your '10x engineer' ego.

Advent of OCaml, day 12 👹 **SPOILERS** This ended up being a troll problem. You could get to work like a sap, do some best-fit bin packing heuristic and it'll take 1000 CPU minutes (✋) Or you can ignore geometry entirely and pick trees whose area >= max-present-size * number-of-presents 🤦‍♂️

Most trolltacularly, this trivial fit test does *not* work on the example data but it does work on the full input! I guess there were clues. Solving it the right way is NP-hard, but I thought a bin packing heuristic was worth trying -- which did work, just was a billion times slower.

Advent of OCaml, day 10, part 1 😩 You know it's getting grim when people are posting just their part 1 solutions. Took about 4 minutes of CPU to brute force. I'm sure someone has a cute number theory solution on r/adventofcode that takes 1ms for the whole thing.

well, yolo_combinations definitely doesn't work for part 2 tried switching to BFS for part 2 and that solved some problems but not all. some have way too huge a search space this has the shape of a linear algebra problem but I can't quite make the conceptual leap 🤔

Advent of OCaml, day 10, part 1 😩 You know it's getting grim when people are posting just their part 1 solutions. Took about 4 minutes of CPU to brute force. I'm sure someone has a cute number theory solution on r/adventofcode that takes 1ms for the whole thing.

Advent of OCaml, day 9 These are starting to take too long to solve! 😅 Part 1 done (after a fun misstep trying to allocate a 100M element array...) Part 2 seems... non-trivial. Might have to throw in the towel so I can do, like, other stuff today.

ok I failed to stop thinking about this and came up with a dumb algorithm during an errand in the car for each candidate rect from p1, walk the perimeter formed by the coordinates given in the input file. reject the rectangle if we step inside of it. it takes 54s of cpu (😱) but it works!

the awkwardness of the separate add_circuit and join_circuits code was weighing heavily on me so I combined them. reduces runtime from 2s to 300ms! 99% of the time is now spent sorting 1000² pairs by distance and that seems fine

Advent of OCaml, day 7, solved 🥵 This one threw me for a bit but once I drew the path finding out on paper and stared at it for ... uhm, 40 minutes I got it. Even though this is mostly imperative, I contend you still have edge using OCaml when it comes to understanding state machine transitions.

Advent of OCaml, day 6, done (🙀) This one was quite mind numbing. It reminds me of processing those nasty "grid oriented" EDI order/sales formats that were popular as late as the 1990s I'm sure COBOL programmers would feel right at home with this one.

Advent of OCaml, day 5 done Whew. Getting the details right on this one took forever. Happy that the naive brute force solution (just construct a set in memory of the ingredients) couldn't be done and it required a bit more thinking.

At the risk of getting myself excommunicated from the OCaml community, day 5 is an example where imperative solution is easier to grok because there's no ready-made higher order function for the pattern you're employing. That is, IMO, this imperative C++ solution is clearer 🦆

Advent of OCaml, day 4, solved wasted about 20 minutes trying to understand what "eight adjacent positions" meant, squinting at only the row instead of realizing it meant also the cells above and below of course

I had this stress dream last night where we were trying to catch a flight and when we got to the security line it turned out the tickets I printed out just had a big database connection error message printed on them. And attempting to install the app failed because I can't see my screen in dreams.

how to power up your github contributor graph 1. pick favorite obscure programming language 2. build a really simple app, like a web photo album 3. find that the ecosystem libraries are missing tons of mundane features 4. submit PRs for all of these features useful? kinda. looks impressive? sure

how did Valve get away with making games on Linux work reliably? if Bill Gates was still running Microsoft he would have invited Gabe Newell into a smoke filled room and given him the speech from Network