That’s Isomorphic

Jaime Yap’s blog. Software, systems, and some occasional philosophical rambling.

  1. The Death of Meaning

    If machines do all the discovering and no human is left who can understand it, does anything actually get discovered? On AI, the career of the mathematician, and where meaning lives.

    3 min read · ai, mathematics, meaning, philosophy

  2. I Choose To Believe In Free Will

    Bell’s theorem leaves one loophole — superdeterminism — and taking it costs you causation itself. A short follow-up on why the loophole is untestable, and unnecessary.

    3 min read · superdeterminism, determinism, free will

  3. Monkey Realism and Wet Meat Robots

    Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett disagree about free will, and most of the disagreement rests on determinism being a thing. A materialist argument for why quantum indeterminacy plus chaos means it isn’t.

    13 min read · free will, consciousness, determinism, sam harris, daniel dennett, quantum mechanics

  4. Doing the expedient thing

    “Do the expedient thing first” is good advice that developers routinely misread as a license to write spaghetti — and in doing so they violate the very premise that justifies the shortcut.

    2 min read · software engineering, mvp

  5. Adventures in browser security

    Chrome’s multi-process architecture permeates its extension system, so Chrome extensions end up as distributed systems running inside a distributed system. A case study in how fast that gets complicated.

    7 min read · chrome, extensions, complexity, browsers, security