personal reflection

Bilingual

Matt Godbolt's blog
2 months ago
- The author wishes readers well during the holiday season, emphasizing family time and a non-religious Christmas celebration with a roast dinner.
- The Advent of Compiler Optimisations 2025 series was a year-long project, enjoyable but demanding, and the author notes a bias toward C, C++, and x86 architectures.
- The author has half-researched ideas for future posts but cannot commit due to full-time work, and may share a 'making of' follow-up.
- The author thanks various supporters (not listed in detail) and expresses appreciation for the compiler community, highlighting compilers as modern miracles.
- The post marks day 25 of a 25-day series, written by a human and reviewed by LLMs and humans, with a link to an accompanying video.
Complexity theorist Steven Rudich (1961-2024)
3 months ago
- The author began graduate school at Berkeley in 1985, where Steven Rudich was the theory group's unofficial student leader.
- After moving to MIT in 1986, the author interacted with Rudich at conferences and institutional visits, learning about natural proofs from his talk at the University of Chicago and debating its importance.
- Steven Rudich passed away due to health issues, and Russell Impagliazzo, a friend since Wesleyan, wrote a personal, moving eulogy recommended by the author and Scott Aaronson.
- The response highlights Impagliazzo's honest write-up as powerful and notes challenges in accommodating rare personal cases in academia.
Seeing and Being Seen
3 months ago
- The author reflects on being a youngest child who thrived on attention through creative and theatrical pursuits in youth.
- In adulthood, the desire for attention persists but is channeled more privately, with the author avoiding public antics yet still feeling a need for recognition.
- Attention is framed as a human need, akin to Maslow's belonging and esteem, with extremes of withdrawal or attention-seeking as potential vices.
- Online platforms like YouTube and Facebook exploit this need, with most user-generated content being uncompensated but motivated by views and likes.
- The internet amplifies mob behavior and virality, where anger-driven content is algorithmically promoted, leading to toxic dynamics like death threats.
- The author prefers writing without promoting to avoid audience pressure, valuing freedom over engagement, and compares attention to an addictive drug.
- A personal experience of finding a backlink to their blog sparked a hunger for more attention, though they resist actively seeking traffic from strangers.
A retrospective of my time on the internet
3 months ago
- The internet has evolved from a selective, optional destination to an essential, pervasive force in daily life, intertwining with nearly every aspect of modern society.
- Early experiences with the internet in the 2000s involved exploration and novelty, characterized by dial-up connections, family computers, and a sense of limitless, user-driven content.
- The mid-2000s marked a shift where the internet became a distinct world with accessible tools like GeoCities and Tumblr, allowing users to create personal websites and fostering communities through blogs, forums, and games.
- By the early 2010s, centralization and app dominance, led by platforms like Facebook and Twitter, began reshaping the internet, emphasizing algorithms, data mining, and profit over user autonomy and diversity.
- In 2026, the internet experience is fraught with barriers like ads, tracking, AI summaries, verification steps, and corporate control, making navigation cumbersome and reducing the sense of free exploration and personal ownership.

personal reflection

Matt Godbolt's blog

Complexity theorist Steven Rudich (1961-2024)

Seeing and Being Seen

A retrospective of my time on the internet