recursion

I got a email from a recruiter at a major technology company that explained why they were interested in me:

Hello Luke,

I hope all is well! I am part of the leadership team here at [Company], focusing on hiring leaders for key areas such as Gen AI, Monetization, and Core Infra.

I’ve taken a close look at your background and some highlights include:

Staff Engineer with Deep Search Systems Experience and End-to-End Ownership

At GitHub, you’ve led development on critical parts of Code Search across the stack — from document ingest in Go and backend services in Rust, to React frontend components and system instrumentation. You’ve re-architected services out of the monolith for major cost savings and built experimental platforms using Kafka and Elasticsearch. That kind of full-stack ownership and large-scale system thinking aligns directly with the kinds of challenges [Company] faces in Search Infra, Integrity, and Ranking.

Proven Builder with Startup Hustle and Broad Platform Versatility

From co-founding YC-backed FanChatter and launching jumbotron-powered photo apps, to building data platforms at Premise and leading critical infrastructure at Swiftype, you’ve shown repeated impact across backend search, observability, and product engineering. One recommender put it simply: “If I had the luxury of building a dev team from scratch, Luke is one of the first people I’d call.” That blend of technical depth, startup initiative, and platform reliability is exactly what [Company] seeks in Staff-level engineers.

It took me a second to realize why this email seemed so weird. It was rephrasing things I wrote for my LinkedIn profile. On LinkedIn, I try to summarize my professional experience in a way that (hopefully) makes me seem like a strong engineer. This LLM rephrasing of my resume isn’t a hallucination – it all comes from things I wrote – but seeing it rewritten like this is weird, like a case of déjà vu.

Charity Majors:

Every job I’ve ever taken, I knew within the first week whether it was right for me or not. That might be overstating things a bit (memory can be like that). But I definitely had a strong visceral reaction to the company within days after starting, and the rest of my tenure played out more or less congruent with that reaction.

This has been true for me, too. I always try to get a sense of what a company will be like during the interview, but sometimes the impression isn’t accurate. Once, I took a job that seemed interesting. By the end of the first day, I knew it was a bad fit. I tried to give it some time, but my first impression was right.

In The Middle Kingdoms Martyn Rady writes about the development of state capacity in Central Europe in the nineteenth century. In France, Britain, and the United States the presumption of the law favored the citizen: what is not forbidden is allowed. In Central Europe, it was the opposite. Governments and bureaucracies could govern by decree where the law was silent through “administrative discretion” (freie Verwaltung). This created a very powerful administrative state.

In the twentieth century that administrative state was used for mass murder. Rady writes about one of the most messed up things I’ve ever read about the Holocaust:

The administration of the railways is illustrative of the bureaucratic ethos that made murder possible. Some two thousand trains belonging to German Reich Railways (Deutsche Reichsbahn) conveyed about three million Jews to their deaths. Each train had to be separately commissioned and paid for by Himmler’s staff according to passenger numbers. The rate was based on second-class fares (even though the passengers were crammed into wagons) and worked out according to kilometre distance. The railway administration charged Himmler’s office half fare for children under ten, and those under four went for free. Trains with more than four hundred people qualified as holiday excursions and were eligible for further reductions. Only the guards were counted as return fares.

Did you know fonts can include arbitrary code to shape text? I didn’t.

In particular, this “arbitrary” code could in principle be an entire LLM inference engine with trained parameters bundled inside, relying on treating text containing magic symbols for fake “ligatures” to initialize the LLM and use it to generate text.

Hats off for an amazing hack.

We have two drivers, one car, and zero parking spaces. That means hunting for street parking in our assigned residential parking zone. This can be difficult, because state law prevents charging based on demand and there’s no limit on the number of permits issued. At $16 per month for 200 square feet, this is the cheapest rent in San Francisco.

Since it can be hard to find parking and there are two of us putting the car wherever we can find a spot, sometimes one person will park the car and the other person won’t know where it is when they need to use it. I realized we could use a shared AirTag to solve the problem. Here’s what it looks like:

It works pretty well. The only problem I’ve found is that when we’re lucky enough to park in front of our apartment, Find My thinks the item is with you. But given that I can see the car in that case, it’s not a big downside.

Will Larson shares some sobering career advice for 2025. This is mostly aimed at engineering leaders, but the general feeling of this being a time of great change and uncertainty seems accurate for tech careers in general. Navigating the transition from ZIRP to AI is going to be challenging for a lot of companies.

It’s said that the golden age of science fiction is thirteen. It was certainly true for me. I spent a lot of time pouring over my high school library’s copy of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (second edition) edited by Peter Nicholls and John Clute. I learned a lot about the genre and the works of my favorite authors.

I got a blast of nostalgia from stumbling on a search result to the online version. All the entries from the printed edition are there and it’s still being updated weekly. The site also has an active Bluesky account posting new entries, memorials, and anniversaries daily.