Interviewing With AI

The vibe-coding trend is alarming to anyone who values correctness in code. Putting AI generated code into production without full scrutiny adds operational risk to the extent that your system relies on correctness. With increasing use of AI tooling in development, how do you ens…

Scripting asciinema

The asciinema program captures shell interactions in a form that can be replayed, or turned into an animated gif file. It’s an extremely convenient way to demonstrate command-line operations and utilities. But used directly it has one basic weakness: the need to type in the comma…

Pipelines Without Pipes

The pipeline program constructs a pipeline from its arguments. The first argument is the separator. The program splits the command line on separator arguments and constructs a pipeline from the components. Here’s what it looks like in use: pipeline What good does this do? I…

Friedman, Pigou, Coase

In a rightly famous 1960 meetingFamous among economists, at least. Sadly, no attendee recorded the meeting. Ronald Coase persuaded a room full of University of Chicago economists that his view on what we now call externalities and transaction costs (the costs associated with mar…

How Fast Is Gas?

I gave this prompt to Claude today: I want to estimate the total gasoline fueling capacity in the United States. The key questions are: * How many operational gas pumps are there in the United States? * What is the speed at which an individual pump can fuel a vehicle? * How much …