Jeremy Kun

I like toml but I'm too used to yaml and it's upsetting

Anyone got a nice AHK shortcut for this on desktop?

What’s a technology that you think is overhyped? I’m going to give a sideways answer to this, which is that the venture capital business model needs to be understood as requiring hype. You can go back to the Netscape IPO, and that was the proof point that made venture capital the financial lifeblood of the tech industry. Venture capital looks at valuations and growth, not necessarily at profit or revenue. So you don’t actually have to invest in technology that works, or that even makes a profit, you simply have to have a narrative that is compelling enough to float those valuations. So you see this repetitive and exhausting hype cycle as a feature in this industry. A couple of years ago, you would have been asking me about the metaverse, then last year, you would have asked me about Web3 and crypto, and for each of these inflection points there’s an Andreessen Horowitz manifesto. It’s not simply that one piece of technology is overhyped, it’s that hype is a necessary ingredient of the current business ecosystem of the tech industry. We should examine how often the financial incentive for hype is rewarded without any real social returns, without any meaningful progress in technology, without these tools and services and worlds ever actually manifesting. That’s key to understanding the growing chasm between the narrative of techno-optimists and the reality of our tech-encumbered world.

Stand by this: www.politico.com/newsletters/...

It has become painfully clear how little Republicans care about being exposed as hypocrites, as it has no effect on their ability to get what they want.

That presupposes the ability for LLM designers and service hosts to strictly control an LLM's behavior and guarantee some sort of reliability in its responses.

Maybe with enough brownies and macaroons you could buy your way into an exception 😎

Nice try, China.

Is... this normal? I would not want to use PreTeXt if the installation is so convoluted or brittle it needs Docker.

Of course, the problem here is the time constraint. You don't have time to really tell if they can do all these tasks (explain/extend/debug) in an interview.

Writing the code is a great proxy for all of these things at once.

My hot take: this is a bad idea because people are too good at bullshitting their way through an explanation once the code is written, and those people end up functioning poorly in open-ended situations. I want to work with people who can still function when a tool fails.

My 1yo helps load the silverware. Never too young 😉

Whoever said a broken clock is right twice a day just isn't imaginative enough in the ways things can break

Netflix n correlate?

I was certainly not the first to say it 😂

This.

I cannot emphasize enough how influencer and hustle culture have completely changed the internet from "weird and wonderful things people make for the heck of it" to algorithm chasing joylessness.

A metaphor for silicon valley in general, many have said

YouTube video by TEDx Talks Tech Promised Everything. Did it deliver? | Scott Hanselman | TEDxPortland

I just wanted to say, I’m probably more proud of this Ted talk than just about anything I’ve ever done so I’m gonna be absolutely useless for the next couple of weeks as I promote the shit out of this because I want you to watch it because it matters in the moment we are in youtu.be/dVG8W-0p6vg

Ew

Most of the internet used to be like this. This is actually the default, it took companies enclosing the internet and adding weird, soul-killing incentives to make people behave the way they do now. In a way, there is truly nothing special about Wikipedia except that it survived longer.

Need a better name than blogosphere. Something that connotes "rewilding" a web sanitized by algorithmic feeds and ads.

Constitution Breakdown #1: Nikole Hannah-Jones Podcast Episode · 99% Invisible · 07/25/2025 · Bonus · 1h 20m

Our first episode of the @99pi.org Constitution Breakdown is out! @romanmars.bsky.social & I had a great conversation w/ Nikole Hannah-Jones about the Preamble, plus standing armies & unlawful posses. Listen, subscribe & share. Thanks for all your support! podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/c...

Defcon 26 will have an app for identifying which sites/apps are vibe-coded as a means for identifying targets

I hope to do this again next year, around the same time. So if you're interested in joining and you live close to Portland, let me know and I can put you on the list.

Since we only had six talks, after lunch we switched to a hackathon for the HEIR compiler (https://heir.dev), and ended the day with a happy hour.

I wanted an environment where we could be open about our concerns, admit to things we don't know, and express burgeoning or unrefined opinions. Despite competition among companies, we're all on the same team in the broader effort to make privacy practical.

About 18 people attended. In the interest of fostering community, I encouraged people to give informal, even "spicy" talks, nothing was recorded, and there were extended breaks for discussion.

Since I had been having lunch with various subsets of the community, I figured it was about time to get us all in a room together.

Though Portland is a small city, it's becoming a hub for homomorphic encryption. Intel and Google both have a presence here, as well as the hardware startup Niobium, and a few individuals from other companies who happen to be based here.

On Monday, July 14th 2025, I hosted a mini-workshop on homomorphic encryption at Google's Portland, Oregon office.

Archived at: https://www.jeremykun.com/shortform/2025-07-25-0956/

Finite fields can have many dimensions, sure.