Happy new year!

New articles

Updated LLM Benchmark (Gemini 3 Flash)

You might be interested in the discussion and methodology notes, but this is the TL;DR:

Full article 7–15 minute read): Updated LLM Benchmark (Gemini 3 Flash)

Flashcard of the week

This is a sentence I read in some ACX article which I liked.

Higher education is a machine for _________.

I've always been annoyed when highly educated people assume it's all their toil, tears, and sweat that got them there. In many cases it is! But in very many cases it also isn't – particularly where I live, where quality higher education is state financed and relatively cheap.

This is a good thing, but getting a high education in my country is as much about winning the birth lottery (being a citizen of my country) as it is about hard work.

The answer is that higher education is a machine for

laundering privilege

I know a lot of people take offense to this, but I stand by it.

Multi-criteria shortest path: premium newsletter

The next premium newsletter is being drafted! It will, among other things, have a tutorial on how to compute the shortest path according to multiple criteria at the same time. I'm using this to better understand a board game my children received on Christmas, where play money can be used to buy one's way out of throwing dice – but it's not obvious when that trade is a good idea.

(The personal notes section also contains some stuff about migrating my son from NetBSD to FreeBSD, and reinstalling the FreeBSD home server which has had a broken ZFS mirror since summer.)

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When you do, you'll also get access to the most recent premium newsletter about optimising automated test runtime, text adventures, storytelling, and links to three small games I've enjoyed recently. Oh, and that mysterious image illustrating compass sighting. Right, and the full archive of the other 8 premium newsletters, too.

(I have raised the price for new subscribers because (a) the archive of premium newsletters has grown, and (b) I have been told people want to support the blog with more than $2 per month. But I also don't want to shut anyone out – if you cannot afford the premium subscription for any reason, reach out to me and we'll come to an agreement.)

Your opinions

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