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In May 2025, in a luxury Manhattan townhouse, a man hung suspended over a five-story stairwell. His captors—led by crypto investor John Woeltz—had already beaten him and held a gun to his head... Continue reading "Black Box, Blood Money" The most important thing we build in technology and academia is not capability, but credibility. It does not matter how fast we calculate, how smart we are, or the brilliance of the products or papers we make, if we cannot answer the question "Why should anybody believe anything we say?" In my life I have paid a lot of tax. And every year, after participating in debates about how to spend it all—town, state, and country—I have been proud to write each tax check even when I disagree with the decisions. This is the first year I have had serious misgivings. I spent 20 years making products in industry before switching to teach in academia, so I am frequently asked to compare the two paths by PhD students (and prosepctive PhD students) who are facing the c

--> davidbau.com Gadgets and Programming --> davidbau.com A Dabbler's Weblog July 16, 2026 Hunting Zombies Is it possible to write good code without reading it? Right now a debate is raging between Andrew Kelley and Jarred Sumner about whether tests are "sufficient to catch bugs in 1 million lines of unreviewed slop." The standard view in the community is that "yes, you can do it if you test it well." But I think that view vastly oversimplifies the challenge. Testing a million-line codebase is harder than it seems. So in this post we will crack open the problem with some specifics. We will tak

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