Hi! 👋
My name is Lev. I live in San Francisco and work in the tech industry. I am passionate about building teams and helping people solve complex business problems. I'm currently working at Dagger where I get to work with an amazing team and spend my time helping developers remove toil from CI/CD.
Outside of work I enjoy cooking, eating, chess, reading, writing, music, peloton, traveling, and public transit. I spend a little bit of time every day studying Chinese. I am surrounded by great friends and a wonderful family. I am traveling on a journey through space and time with Aosheng, who is a brilliant designer and my favorite person in the world.
Recent Posts
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How to Play in the World Cup
There are two ways to play in the world cup. You can either qualify or you can host the games.
I see this as an analogy for a career in the tech industry. The world cup is “a seat at the table”. If you want to be an executive in a tech company you can climb your way to the top or you can take a shortcut and start your own company.
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长沙臭豆腐 - Changsha Stinky Tofu
My Chinese teacher gave me some homework to describe a place I want to travel to and what I am going to do when I get there. This is what I came up with.
明年我想去长沙旅游。
我的朋友告诉我，长沙有好吃的臭豆腐。 我想吃那个豆腐！😋
It says:
I want to travel to Changsha next year.
My friend told me that Changesha has delicious stinky tofu.
I want to eat that tofu.
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Changsha Skyline Image By Ckproject - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=73973380Stinky Tofu Image By N509FZ - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=92501017
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видно по глазам - you can see it in the eyes
I read a post today from Rene Coignard where he tells the story of unexpectedly being spoken to in Russian at a McDonalds in Germany. It reminded me of this time that I went to the Grounds for Sculpture in Trenton, NJ.
I was wandering around the grounds and enjoying all the wonderful sculptures when I came across a lake. There were two women standing near the shore and they were both chatting in Russian. Then one of them looked over at me and shouted to me in Russian “Hey! Can you take our photo?”
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Dagger Feels Like Magic
I’ve been working on a Dagger module for interacting with the Bluesky API.
I wrote the first version in Python, using the atproto library. It worked well and was easy to use, but I noticed that none of my links, mentions, or hashtags were showing up. I ignored this for a while, but today decided to investigate this some more since the whole world seems to be showing up on Bluesky this week.
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Answering a Question from the Imitation Game
I was reading the paper by Alan Turing that introduces the imitation game:
https://courses.cs.umbc.edu/471/papers/turing.pdf
I came across this question, which I decided to put into all of the current models in DuckDuckGo AI chat to see what happens:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=DuckDuckGo+AI+Chat&ia=chat&duckai=1
Q: Please write me a sonnet on the subject of the Forth Bridge.
GPT-4o mini
Upon the Firth, where steel and sky embrace, The Fourth Bridge stands, a marvel bold and grand, Its arches rise, a testament to grace, A ribbon forged by human heart and hand.