Douwe Osinga's Blog

Notes on code, side projects, travel, and other things I built or thought about. Running since 2003.

Sunday, May 3, 2026

The Web of Babel: Browsing the Internet’s Latent Space

  The BBC never published a digital edition of the Battle of Waterloo, but in the latent space of a Large Language Model (LLM), that page do...

Tuesday, January 13, 2026

Wanting to be an astronaut turned me into a Software Engineer

When I was a kid I wanted to become an astronaut. But then I found out you have to be a pilot first and that seemed boring. So I decided to ...

Thursday, January 1, 2026

The High Cost of Free Testing

(this first appeared on Block's blog ) I hold the generally unpopular opinion that we write too many tests. Most tests written have nega...

Saturday, July 5, 2025

We're all idiots and that's fine

I learned something about myself and the world. I discussed it over a beer with a good friend of mine and he thought it was interesting enou...

Tuesday, September 17, 2024

Founder mode is wishful thinking

Another one of Paul Graham’s essays is making the rounds: founder mode . Paul’s writing is generally thoughtful and to the point, but I am n...

Friday, May 24, 2024

Taxes and Human Development in US States

As Franklin would have it, nothing in this life is certain but death and taxes . And when it comes to US states it is generally thought ther...

Sunday, April 14, 2024

YC Companies in a spreadsheet

I was looking around for a spreadsheet with all Y-Companies, but couldn’t find one, or at least nothing recent. The top Google Result is dep...