Well, this is awkward
Hello there. My last email was more than 5 years ago. Hope you’re doing well.
The world is completely bizarre now, right? I went offline-silent for years, trying to work on some projects and keep myself sane. Not even sure it worked out. Even if it didn't, things seem... kinda ok? So, what have I been up to since 2020…
In 2022 I joined IQM, first as a software engineer in the quantum computation team, then as an architect in the control software team. We build full-stack superconducting quantum computers, from our own chips fabrication to instruments and firmware, and high-level quantum SDKs and libraries. It's all pretty fascinating. I gave a talk about this at Pycon a few months ago.
In 2023 I started working on a side-project called Minifeed. It's a curated directory and search engine for personal blogs. It has some interesting features; I always wanted something like this for myself, so I made it available to everyone. Almost 1000 blogs 50k posts indexed!
I've been blogging a bit as well, while also trying to build a simple blogging platform called Exotext. Some of my recent posts went kinda viral:
Speaking of horses: check out a fun little game I made about the chess knight: Knight Ride. Some notes on implementation.
Yeah, I guess, I've been just doing stuff. You can follow me on Bluesky 🦋 where I occasionally hang out. I’ll do my best to send more updates in this newsletter on a monthly basis.
Raw Coder
By the early 2090s, computer programming—once called “low coding” or “raw coding”—had become a hidden, mysterious craft. By 2130, the majority of infrastructure, manufacturing, healthcare, and food production was controlled by autonomous intelligence agents. The term “AI” had fallen out of use. What the 21st century once called “AI” was now referred to simply as intelligence. Human cognition, with its increasingly limited practical application, was now known as “organic” or “basic” intelligence.
A caste of spiritual workers and priests held de facto control over society, being the only group with even a semblance of access to intelligence training and prayer (though some old people still called it “prompting”). They maintained, developed, and preserved the secret prayers that yielded the best results for everything.
By the mid-2100s, raw coding had become illegal. Even within the priesthood, the idea of controlling machines through direct commands was considered the ultimate blasphemy.
Contrary to many doomsday predictions of the past, autonomous intelligent machines had never attempted to eradicate humankind, nor were they particularly interested in altering the course of history. Philosophers stopped debating whether their intelligence could be compared to that of humans—it couldn’t. Organic intelligence was clearly inferior.
A lonely boy, the child of a wealthy couple, is about to receive a personal companion to help him navigate the world and socialize. Somewhere, in the endless, many-dimensional depths of the largest prediction models, lies a storyline in which this boy becomes the first true raw coder of the 22nd century.
Would you like to explore that storyline with me?
If so, go ahead and register your interest in my book :) Absolutely no guarantees I’ll finish it any time soon, but hey, if I do, you’ll know!
