Essays by Brian Lee

Essays

Follow me via RSS or via the newsletter.

...by tag

personal, llms, software engineering, strategy, machine learning, popular ⭐️, cartesian tutor, chemistry, alphago, music, math, sustainability

...by date

2026-01-07 | New year reflections
2025-12-23 | Joining Jane Street
2025-12-22 | Interviewing for ML/AI Engineers ⭐️
2025-11-03 | Next steps for Cartesian Tutor
2025-10-12 | Strategies and Tactics for working with Coding Agents ⭐️
2025-09-24 | Startup update 20: LLM Zombies
2025-09-16 | Startup update 19: Email scraping; Taste
2025-09-12 | Taste ⭐️
2025-09-11 | Startup update 18: Pivoting out of engineering workstreams
2025-09-03 | Startup update 17: Claude as codebase navigator
2025-08-29 | How to study for the USNCO Chemistry Olympiads
2025-08-23 | Multimodal LLMs are blind
2025-08-23 | Claude as Pipeline Orchestrator
2025-08-23 | Startup update 16: A belated update and two bonus essays
2025-08-04 | Startup update 15: Scraping PDFs is still hard
2025-07-29 | What ChatGPT Study Mode gets right and wrong
2025-07-28 | Startup update 14: In search of a nail
2025-07-20 | Startup update 13: Slop, slop, everywhere
2025-07-14 | Making my startup weekly updates public
2025-07-14 | Startup update 12: What's the moat?
2025-07-07 | Startup update 11: Bad Claude, bad!
2025-06-29 | Startup update 10: Curriculum compilation
2025-06-23 | Startup update 9: Curriculum design
2025-06-16 | Startup update 8: YOLO mode
2025-06-09 | Startup update 7: cartesiantutor.com is live
2025-06-01 | Startup update 6: Usage plans+limits
2025-05-28 | LLM Shibboleths determine AI effectiveness ⭐️
2025-05-24 | Startup update 5: Officially incorporated!
2025-05-16 | Startup update 4: First magic moment
2025-05-12 | Startup update 3: Gell-mann AmnesiAI
2025-05-05 | Leaving Databricks to Build an LLM-First Company
2025-05-05 | Startup update 2: LLM musings
2025-04-26 | Startup update 1: Embracing the vibecode
2025-04-14 | From GnuGo to AlphaGo Zero: A Roadmap for Solving Difficult Problems
2025-02-14 | The AI Infra War: Winners and losers
2024-11-25 | Learn Perfect Pitch in 15 years ⭐️
2024-10-27 | Score of Chopin's Waltz in A minor (2024)
2024-10-20 | Useful Debates
2024-08-08 | This site now supports Dark Mode
2024-06-11 | The Tyranny of the Flake Equation ⭐️
2024-05-02 | Who pays you? And why? ⭐️
2024-03-31 | Small Data, Big Compute ⭐️
2024-02-01 | Finding New Mountains to Climb
2023-12-12 | Bureaucratic Leverage ⭐️
2023-10-11 | How to be a Good Codemate
2023-09-23 | Simplifying Fluffy Constructors in Unit Tests
2023-09-12 | Optimal Bureaucracy
2023-09-06 | Better ways to name your utils module
2023-07-11 | Blogging FAQs
2023-07-03 | Readability: Google's Temple to Engineering Excellence ⭐️
2023-04-26 | Why did Google Brain exist? ⭐️
2023-02-14 | A Research Codebase Manifesto ⭐️
2023-01-03 | The FactoBattery ⭐️
2022-12-30 | Getting fired and surviving
2022-11-27 | For Want of a JOIN ⭐️
2022-09-10 | Machine Learning for Scent Prediction
2022-07-24 | A Diabolically Difficult Chemistry Puzzle
2022-07-13 | The Chemistry of Refrigerants
2022-07-09 | The Sulfur Untethering
2022-05-28 | Notes on the Earth's Carbon Cycle
2022-03-22 | Deep Learning on Electronic Medical Records is doomed to fail ⭐️
2022-02-27 | Unexpected Shunts in the Supply Chain
2022-02-22 | 2021 Advent of Code in Haskell
2022-01-23 | Bulk and Cut as a Metaphor for Codebase Growth
2021-08-02 | Carbon Neutral Concrete - the numbers ⭐️
2021-03-28 | Homeostasis and Volatility
2020-09-13 | Data-oriented Programming in Python ⭐️
2020-09-13 | Vectorizing Graph Algorithms ⭐️
2019-10-30 | Estimating vapor pressure from boiling point
2019-10-29 | Understanding the AUROC metric
2019-04-02 | Why study algorithms?
2019-01-10 | Forays into 3D geometry
2018-11-25 | Algorithmic Bias
2018-10-18 | An Adversarial Adversarial Paper Review Review
2018-10-18 | Carbon dioxide and closed rooms
2018-05-15 | A Deep Dive into Monte Carlo Tree Search ⭐️
2018-04-04 | How to shuffle in TensorFlow ⭐️
2018-03-10 | Rewriting moderndescartes.com as a static site
2017-12-03 | AlphaGo Zero: an analysis
2017-09-16 | Trip Report: World AI Go Open
2017-05-11 | The Goose That Stopped Laying Golden Eggs
2017-04-29 | The asymptotic value of 2n choose n
2017-03-14 | My Path to Machine Learning
2017-01-20 | Manipulating Probability Distribution Functions
2016-12-28 | Notes on Musical Notation
2016-12-04 | Using Linear Counting, LogLog, and HyperLogLog to Estimate Cardinality
2016-11-06 | Estimating the Birthday Paradox Cutoff
2016-10-18 | Bitpacking and Compression of Sparse Datasets
2016-10-06 | Profiling with Flame graphs
2016-09-22 | Why RESTful APIs?
2016-09-04 | How (Not?) to Use Python's List Comprehensions ⭐️
2016-09-02 | How to Detect Edges using ConvNets
2016-09-02 | Proper Initialization of Weights for DCNNs
2016-08-23 | Implementing the Game of Go (Part 1)
2016-07-05 | Training AlphaGo's Policy Network
2016-06-27 | The Ultimatum Game
2016-06-07 | What's a TensorFlow?
2016-06-05 | Metabolic networks as computation
2016-05-19 | Explaining Backpropagation in Neural Networks using Pascal's Triangle
2016-03-26 | Asking for Help
2015-11-29 | Running out of Care
2015-11-07 | Work habits
2015-09-24 | Why I Write
2015-05-10 | Lessons from a year at Hubspot
2015-03-16 | A Pythonista's Initial Thoughts on Java
2015-03-01 | Why We Hate Surge Pricing - and what Uber can do about it
2014-11-29 | It's not about the culture code!
2014-10-13 | Coding practices, part 1 of ?
2014-08-23 | Why Idempotency Matters
2014-05-01 | Fractal Plants
2014-03-17 | Intraprocess Communication
2014-03-14 | Making "Real" Programs
2014-03-14 | Path Shenanigans
2014-03-07 | Fibs
2013-09-09 | Dropping Out of Grad School
2012-06-24 | Four Short Stories on Error Checking
2012-02-03 | Harmonic Curiosities
2012-01-01 | Identity Crisis
2011-12-13 | Discovering Physics
2011-12-08 | Universities are Fashion Brands
2011-10-23 | Unsolved Problems in Chemistry
2011-08-23 | Lessons from Doctor Who
2011-05-21 | Premature Career Decisions
2011-05-15 | Hello World