SystemHalted — Palak Mathur on software engineering, leadership, and Emacs
Recent posts
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Why Doesn’t Wisdom Accumulate?
We are extraordinarily good at accumulating technical knowledge and strangely bad at accumulating behavioral wisdom. What decades of psychology suggest about why every generation relearns patience, prejudice, and restraint almost from scratch.
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Review: An Agile Ethical/Legal Model for AI and Robotics Governance
A review of Wallach and Marchant's proposal for a Governance Coordinating Committee for AI and robotics, and why soft law needs institutional support.
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Is an Anthill Conscious?
An anthill is a useful way to think about collective intelligence, emergence, and the limits of calling a system conscious.
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Diagrams as Text
An image model returns finished pixels; a language model returns text. SVG, Mermaid, DOT, and PlantUML store a picture as text, so a language model can draw one, allowing you to edit what it draws.
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Devanagari in Unicode
This post looks at how Devanagari actually works in Unicode
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Semantic Networks as Search Spaces
A short note on semantic networks, generate-and-test search, and why explicit state representation matters in knowledge-based AI.
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My Naming Philosophy
The rules I follow when naming variables, API fields, and schema elements. Most of it is borrowed from Kent Beck, Strunk, and Russ Cox; the rest is how I read their rules when the thing being named is a variable rather than a design.
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Removing a Package and Purging Its Traces
Removing Ghostty from Ubuntu turned into a walkthrough of the Debian package lifecycle - apt remove, the ii and rc states in dpkg, apt purge, and the per-user files no package manager will clean for you.