Everything Dead & Dying. Tate Brombal; Jacob Phillips. imagecomics.com . www.hoopladigital.com . 2025.

Characterization

JACK. Once upon a time, in a quiet, little town, there lived a farmer, and he was a good farmer. It was all he knew, after all. And the farmer worked his land from sunrise to sunset every single day. Tillin’ his fields, feedin’ his chickens, and collectin’ his harvest right on time. He was a good farmer, after all.

Strong Engineers

Strong engineers can do things that weaker engineers just can’t, even with all the time in the world. Some examples of capabilities:

• Solving very difficult bugs, e.g., race conditions across multiple services.
• Delivering meaningful improvements to the thorniest parts of legacy codebases.
• Making changes that require a big architectural rework.

At the top end of strongest engineers, capabilities become something like “improving the SOTA for LLMs”.

Regular engineers make the bulk of most companies. They solve 95% of bugs (normal, non-cursed bugs), deliver most JIRA tickets, and unstick themselves from dev env issues most of the time. They help. They do the work. They’re just not burning with ambition to excel at the next promo cycle. Probably have other things going on in their lives.

Software Design by Example. A Tool-Based Introduction with Python. Greg Wilson. third-bit.com . Accessed Jan 20, 2026.

✅ Objects and Classes. What is a natural way to represent real-world “things” in code, and how can we organize that code so that it’s easier to understand, test, and extend?

Finding Duplicate Files. Comparing each file to others is unworkably slow for large sets of files. How about generating a short label that depends only on the file contents and comparing that instead?

implements a toy version of Python’s object system using dictionaries that contain references to properties, functions and other dictionaries. Consider two shapes, Square and Circle, with the methods perimeter, area, and density.

Objects

A function is an object, where the bytes in a function are instructions. For example:

def foo():
  print("in foo")

… creates an object in memory that contains instructions to print a string, and assigns that object to the variable foo.

MCP 101

There are 3 key participants in the MCP architecture:

• MCP Host: The AI application that manages one or more MCP clients, e.g., Claude Code, Copilot, etc.
• MCP Client: A component that maintains a connection to an MCP server and obtains context from an MCP server for the MCP host to use.
• MCP Server: A program that provides context to MCP clients.

Design Pattern: In-Context Learning

Betting on the LLM’s context window increasing doesn’t pay off. As the input approaches the limits of the context window, inference time and accuracy degrade.

Instead, the typical workflow of in-context learning is:

• Data Pre-processing/Embedding. Compute and store embeddings of the private data in a vector database.
• Prompt Construction/Retrieval. On user input, compile a prompt from a hard-coded template with few-shot examples, information retrieved from external APIs, and a set of relevant documents retrieved from the vector database.
• Prompt Execution/Inference. Submit the compiled prompt to a pre-trained LLM for inference. Can add logging, caching, and validation at this stage.

The in-context learning reduces the AI problem into a data engineering problem.

Market Snapshot

In 2025, the online advertising marketing size was ~500B. Notables:

• North America has the largest revenue share of over 34%.
• By platform, mobile leads at 59% of revenue share.
• The top 3 are: Google ($214B), Meta ($196B), and Amazon ($68B)

Chatbot Ethics

Zuckerberg: But if you think something someone is doing is bad and they think it’s really valuable, most of the time in my experience, they’re right and you’re wrong. You just haven’t come up with the framework yet for understanding why the thing they’re doing is valuable and helpful in their life.

A user’s expectations on what is permissible for a bot to do. Grabbing their attention to sell them something, or guiding them out of a slump is fine. Lying, e.g., “come visit me” and using romantic overtones crosses a line. However, Meta has no restrictions against bots telling users they’re real people or proposing real-life social engagements.

Justice

DIANA. And for you, Harbinger Prime, Nemesis will be a particular hell. For she binds and burns in proportion to your sins… and your soul shines bright with the blood of the innocent. The burn you feel, Harbinger… Know that it is the result of the pain you have wrought on others. All you are feeling, you have earned. Accept Nemesis’s judgement of you.

Technocracy

KAL-EL. In the cities worked the klerics of the science league. Harnessing the energies of the red sun and the planet itself to fuel their insatiable hunger… for progress… at all costs.

TEACHER. You… wrote this? Yourself? That’s… Kal, the luminarium contains all knowledge of the science league from throughout Kryptonian history and can answer any question we might ever possibly ask.

House of El. Claudia Gray; Eric Zawardski. www.dc.com . www.hoopladigital.com . 2021.

Snapshots

TRIBUNE MEMBER. Krypton is the most advanced civilization known to exist in the galaxy. For generations, its citizens have been genetically engineered to make them the greatest examples of their kind. We have the best soldiers that can possibly exist. The best scientists. The best leaders. Could the people designed to rule this world fail to defend it? Could any society truly be failing when they can terraform other planets, and shape them as they desire?
#technocracy

Data Parsing

The input is an \(R \times C\) grid with # for a wall, S for the start tile, E for the end tile, and . for open spots.

Part One

The reindeer start at S facing East, and can move one tile at a time, increasing their score by 1 point. They can also rotate clockwise or counterclockwise 90 degrees at a time, increasing their score by 1000 points. What is the lowest score a Reindeer could possibly get?

This page shows 100,000 buttons. Use https://www.curiosities.dev/computer-science/large-language-models/toy-pages/tons-of-buttons/?numButtons=1000 to show 1,000 buttons instead.

Click on a button to activate it. Click again to deactivate it. Activated buttons are highlighted in green. There are currently 0 activated buttons: {empty}.

The Game Plan

Save at least 15% of your salary from age 25 into a 401(k) plan, an IRA, or a taxable account. Put equal amounts of that 15% into three buckets:

• A US total stock market index fund
• An international total stock market index fund
• A US total bond market index fund

Parsing

########
#..O.O.#
##@.O..#
#...O..#
#.#.O..#
#...O..#
#......#
########

<^^>>>vv<v>>v<<
v^^>>><<v^^>>>^

@ denotes the robot, O denotes a box, and # denotes a wall. <^^>>>vv<v>>v<< describes the sequence of moves that the robot will attempt to make. Ignore the newlines within the move sequence. If there are any boxes in the way, the robot attempts to push them. However, if the action makes the robot or a box move into the wall, nothing moves.

Software Design by Example. A Tool-Based Introduction with JavaScript. Greg Wilson. third-bit.com . Accessed Jan 20, 2026.

Systems Programming. List a directory. Callback functions. Anonymous functions. Select a set of files. Copying a set of files.

Asynchronous Programming. Manage async executions. How promises work. Chain operations. How real promises are different. Build tools with promises. Readability. Handle errors with async code.

The Architecture of Open Source Applications. The Performance of Open Source Applications. aosabook.org . Accessed Jan 19, 2026.

High Performance Networking in Chrome. Many of the sites we use today are not just web pages, they are applications. How do we make the fastest browser?

From SocialCalc to EtherCalc. EtherCalc is an online spreadsheet system optimized towards simultaneous editing, using SocialCalc as its in-browser spreadsheet engine.

The Architecture of Open Source Applications. Volume 2. aosabook.org . Accessed Jan 19, 2026.

Scalable Web Architecture and Distributed Systems. Key issues to consider when designing large websites, and some of the building blocks used to achieve these goals.

Firefox Release Engineering. Scripts and infrastructure decisions that comprise the complete Firefox rapid release system. Starting with builds and code signing, then customized partner and localization repacks, the QA process, and how we generate updates for every supported version, platform, and localization.

The Architecture of Open Source Applications. 500 Lines or Less. aosabook.org . Accessed Jan 19, 2026.

Blockcode: A Visual Programming Toolkit. A well-done block language eliminates syntax errors, visually displays available components, and allows localization.

A Continuous Integration System. A dedicated system used to test new code.

Clustering by Consensus. A network protocol designed to support reliable distributed computation.