Great bots make little bots to think of codes and write ’em,
And little bots have lesser bots, and so ad infinitum.
And the great bots themselves, in turn, have greater bots to go on;
While these again have greater still, and greater still, and so on.
My review of "Automated Design of Agentic Systems", a 2025 paper about agents designing agents: emptysqua.re/blog/review-...
Oh no, toilet, no.
The server would usually return no annotations (depending on which parent item the agent passed in as the get_annotations argument) and also couldn't return >100 annotations, this fixes both: github.com/54yyyu/zoter...
And here's a video presentation about the paper! emptysqua.re/blog/leasegu...
Claude Code + Zotero is an incredible combo for organizing and understanding research papers. This zotero-mcp server was just updated with two patches I made to fix how it handles notes and annotations, try it out: github.com/54yyyu/zoter...
LeaseGuard: The Movie! Here's a half-hour presentation I gave on the new protocol that enhances Raft's consistency and time-to-recovery, developed with my MongoDB colleagues and published in SIGMOD this year. emptysqua.re/blog/leasegu...
Yay, SIGMOD just published the paper I wrote with @muratdemirbas.bsky.social and Lingzhi Deng, it's about strengthening Raft's consistency and time-to-recovery lnkd.in/ef6qUJzw
The portion of people alive today, compared to the dead, is greater than ever before emptysqua.re/blog/the-dea...
AI: can it write a TLA+ spec of existing code? Can it write TLA+ at all? Let's find out! emptysqua.re/blog/review-...
What's an AI time horizon, how is it measured, and how fast is it growing? emptysqua.re/blog/review-...
What's it like at BugBash?
We think it's great, but you don't have to take it from us.
You can hear it from @isaacvando.bsky.social, @eatonphil.bsky.social, and @emptysqua.re instead.
A few tickets left.
Dammit Claude just take my job, stop dicking around.
The priest, Jo An Sensei, with his hands in gassho. An altar with a flower is in the foreground.
Jo An Sensei hugging two students who just received the Zen precepts.
A group of Zen practitioners at a dining table eating from black lacquer oryoki bowls.
A closeup of a woman's hands serving vegetables into her black lacquer bowl.
A Zen priest dabbing water on the forehead of a young woman during a precepts ceremony.
A Zen priest bowing to a woman in front of a bamboo grove during a precepts ceremony.
A small zendo with four people meditating in front of a fire in the fireplace.
A zen priest meditating in a small wooden cabin.
A man in black cotton Zen garb cooking in a cluttered kitchen.
A closeup of a man's hands washing a knife and dirty dishes in the sink.
The New Paltz Zen Center's first meditation retreat, ending with a precepts ceremony for two members!
[new blog post]
TLA+ Mental Models
muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2026/03/tla-...
#tlaplus
I gave a Zen talk, "The Dharma of Alex Honnold". He climbed a skyscraper and risked dying on live TV. Here’s what I learned from Honnold about climbing, living, and practicing the precepts.
emptysqua.re/blog/the-dha...
For any given task right now I think, "How much can I make Claude Code do for me?" I think this XKCD automation joke is only half-true right now and might be obsolescing.... xkcd.com/1319/
I so rarely get both nerd sniped and aesthetically sniped by the same thing, this is rad.
Never, ever reboot a Mac in the middle of an OS upgrade! "It seems stuck," you think. "Apple probly does an atomic swap between the old & new OSes, if I reboot it'll just clean up after itself. They're smart and they've heard of DB transactions," you think.
You are wrong. I had to reformat my HD.
How many times I’ll press my finger before my iPad recognizes my print. Which Bluetooth device my Beats will connect to first when I put them in my ears. And of course, how many tries I’ll need to plug in a USB-A cable.
Novel sources of entropy for cryptographically secure random number generators: Whether the in-flight WiFi works. Whether my phone connects to the car by USB this time. How long the next macOS update will take. How many times today I’ll close the dialog asking if Chrome can connect to nearby devices
Joshua Tree, top of Lost Horse Wall at sunset.
Magnificent California.
That thing where you don't think you look very Jewish, and then you get to middle age and see pictures of yourself and you're like "Wow I look like a middle-aged Jew now."
