Hi, HN!

I co-founded Rulebase, a startup that helps fintechs and banks identify and block malicious calls from human and AI bad actors. We also create voice phishing simulations to train customer-facing staff.

We're in the current YC batch, and for our product showcase, we cloned Garry Tan's voice and tried phishing our batchmates.

We learned a lot from the experiment—most of all, how much businesses and customers need to be prepared for the present and coming wave of realistic voice clones!

> Sora serves as a foundation for models that can understand and simulate the real world, a capability we believe will be an important milestone for achieving AGI.

That struck me as a line they added to drum up more funding.

Inspired by this post two years ago, I wrote a more comprehensive version: https://chidiwilliams.com/post/quadtrees/. Also showed how quadtrees could be used for compression.

I've had my personal site for about two years now and I've found it quite valuable to maintain. (I started out with one or two articles on dev.to before moving to my own self-hosted site at https://chidiwilliams.com.)

While I haven't gotten any jobs or major opportunities from it, someone once emailed me saying one of my posts helped them prepare for (and ace) an interview at Google. Plus, I've randomly run into people who, after hearing my name, tell me they've read and liked some of my posts.

You're welcome - and thank you!

There's also Thorsten Ball's Writing an Interpreter in Go[1] and Writing a Compiler in Go[2].

[1] https://interpreterbook.com/

[2] https://compilerbook.com/

Excellent book indeed. Note that Ball's interpreter uses Pratt parsing, which doesn't require you to delve into the theory of formal languages.

I've found Pratt parsing meshes rather well with formal grammars. Anything that is better described by an operator precedence table rather than BNF should be handled by the Pratt parser, rest can be done with recursive decent.

Yes! Thorsten's books are great!

Yes, you can go through the book in much less time than six months if you're more consistent with it than I was. I took a few breaks (for days and sometimes weeks) to study and write other things.

Yes, I read and typed out all the code snippets by hand and it worked really well.

And don't be too careful in your typing either. The times when I mistyped and had to crack out `gdb` were where my learning was actively tested.

I’ve been reading Bob Nystrom’s Crafting Interpreters and learning about interpreters and compilers in general.

I'm mostly writing about programming here: https://chidiwilliams.com/