I’ve wanted to record some casual reflections on my experience learning and getting better at Mandarin Chinese, particulary as someone whose productive language skills (namely, speaking) far outpace the receptive skills (listening). When learning a language, there’s a point when your command of it reaches an operational level, such that you can make your way through casual, day-to-day conversations. While graduating to this range of proficiency represents a significant milestone on the path towards mastery of the language, it also brings a new challenge: you can no longer have high confidence about exactly how much you understand of what is being said....

My initial reaction to the term prompt engineering was skepticism that anything of the sort could be called engineering. Having now spent a bit of time using LLM AI to produce a solution to a small content generation problem, I’ve arrived at a few takeaways, some of which have pushed me to be less dismissive of this notion. ...

I was recently prompted (perhaps by a voice in my head) to come up with my own set of engineering values. What follows is surely incomplete, but it arrived with an odd clarity. ...

There is something about mindfulness meditation that relates to the game of chess and what it takes to play the right move in any given moment. Checkmate sunset, @jachymmichael I came upon this idea while struggling through one of chess.com’s many puzzles and questioning the utility of practicing them. The puzzles on chess.com present the solo player with a single board configuration and ask the player to find the next best move for whichever color’s turn it is....