Whatever Compiles #000 — Hello Computer
Photo: The Computer, 1963 — Francis E. Hamabe
Welcome to Whatever Compiles, just a collection of media I consumed over the week that I think I would enjoy reading about as a Software Engineer. Ranging from great podcasts to something I am building, and sometimes a story.
Atanasoff-Berry Computer, the ABC, first automatic electronic digital computer. This is something that was shown to me during my first tour of the Software Engineering Department at Iowa State University. Fun fact — this wasn't really known as the first digital computer till much later. Over a patent dispute this kind of came to light and people started to acknowledge it.
I watched this great video on it. It covers how it works and they do some simple math problems because more complex ones took up to 25 hours! The person talking and explaining about the computer was John Gustafson, another great scientist to come from Iowa State and who I had the pleasure to work with on the Software Engineering external advisory council back when I was a student. Cool guy!
Here's what I read, listened to, and generally let distract me this week.
The Pulse #162: Even fewer middle managers and more flexible teams? - Gergely Orosz — This great post by The Pragmatic Engineer had a lot of great topics but what caught my attention was "AI-native pods. An experiment where teams of 3 work together on a project for a month, and then the pod disbands. With AI tools, this group can ship a feature or experiment." This seems to be interesting, something we are doing at Claimable — the team is able to get so much done with AI in these timeframes where you are talking about a new feature or increasing operations tenfold with AI.
Building Claude Code with Boris Cherny — Great podcast where Boris dives into his work on how he got to Anthropic and how Claude Code is built and the cool things Boris and the team use Claude for. Cool to see Boris talk about how him and his friends made a weed review site to get smoke-free weed. Right on Boris.
GPT 5.4 Talk (YC Link) — I will be adding links that I found on YC with the YC link because I think it's fun to see people talk about it as well and sometimes I find great shitposting in the comments.
THE 2028 GLOBAL INTELLIGENCE CRISIS — This post was just wow. I saw this from Michael Burry's repost. This just covers a what-if-we-are-fucked AI economy scenario which, when read before bed, will keep you up thinking.
— Elmin