I'm interested in high performance systems, compilers, machine learning and all sorts of technology. I work at Anthropic in SF on ML interpretability research and spend a lot of time in NYC.

About Me

Recent Blog Posts

• 02 Dec 2023 » All my favorite tracing tools: eBPF, QEMU, Perfetto, new ones I built and more
• 02 Jan 2023 » Production Twitter on One Machine? 100Gbps NICs and NVMe are fast
• 06 Nov 2022 » My DIY ergonomic travel workstation with aluminum and magnets
• 15 May 2022 » Latency testing remote browsing: Why display streaming is hard
• 09 May 2021 » Making reverse engineering tools for DEF CON Quals
• 14 Mar 2021 » Implicit In-order Forests: Zooming a billion trace events at 60fps
• 04 Sep 2020 » Hard to discover tips and apps for making macOS pleasant
• 15 Aug 2020 » Reverse engineering an AI spaceship game at DEF CON CTF
• 19 Jul 2020 » My tier list of interesting YouTube channels
• 20 May 2020 » Measuring keyboard-to-photon latency with a light sensor

Stuff I've Done

This is a list of the things I have worked on and am currently working on. It is in kind of chronological order. I will try and write down all the things I have worked on. Unfortunately I don’t remember many of the things I worked on in years gone by.

2022

• Designed a laser-cut aluminum keyboard case that uses magnets to double as a lap board.
• Started at Anthropic doing mechanistic interpretability research for large language models on Chris Olah’s team. Moved to SF.

2021

• Started having a more vibrant social life and spent less time on blogging and personal projects.
• Started designing a super-bright modular LED light bar for apartment lighting.
• Implemented magic-trace for Jane Street.
• Played with Samurai in the DEF CON CTF qualifiers and finals.

2020

• Played with Samurai in the Hackasat CTF. I helped with some Rust binary reverse engineering and signal processing.
• Played with Samurai in the DEF CON CTF Quals, we came 2nd. I solved floood and helped with bytecoooding, whooo and some others.
• Made a Sublime Text plugin that collapses 3-line short if statements in Go programs (if err != nil { return } frequently) onto one by folding the whitespace.
• Built a light-sensor-based hardware latency tester for testing keyboard-to-screen UI latency
• Wrote a fun library that can telefork a program to a different computer, and a blog post about it.

2019

• Made a font patcher that uses arcane OpenType shaping trickery to do things like underline alternating groups of 3 digits from the right.
• Rewrote Rate With Science in Rust for easier deployment and less breakage.
• Built an extremely bright LED lighting setup for my apartment using socket strands, 20 cool LED bulbs, 20 warm bulbs, and smart dimmers for scheduling brightness and color temperature.
• Moved to NYC
• Decided to dedicate much more effort than usual to writing blog articles in the summer and then did.
• Experimented with and researched the best way to run OpenAI’s GPT-2 language model on a laptop CPU or GPU, with possible applications in my friend Jacob’s Deep TabNine autocompleter.
• Did a bunch of experimenting to figure out how to do glitchless Metal window resizing.
• Wrote a patcher for adding custom songs to Beat Saber on the Oculus Quest VR headset.
• Finished my CS degree at the University of Waterloo!
• Made a portmanteau generator in Rust for TerribleHack XIII.
• Wrote a Sublime Text plugin for automatically importing modules in Rust.
• Volunteered as the Treasurer for the Waterloo CS Club again, also helped organize events like TerribleHack.
• Wrote a compiler for a substantial subset of Java in Rust along with 2 teammates for UWaterloo’s compilers course.

2018

• Gave a talk at the Bay Area Rust Meetup about 100 interesting Rust crates
• Added support for Haskell GHC profiles to the speedscope profiler.
• Went through the tutorials for the Lean theorem prover and proved some things with it.
• Released v3.0 of my syntect syntax highlighting library.
• Redesigned the home page of my website to include more and better information.
• I competed in the DEF CON CTF Finals at DC26 with team Samurai, I worked on a number of problems which I wrote up here.
• I took Waterloo’s CS488 graphics course and spent a full time month of effort on making a fancy photorealistic path tracing rendering engine for my final project.
• Attended TerribleHack XI and made a “game” that renders directly from UDP packet buffers to the screen.
• Gave a short talk for the Waterloo CS Club on rendering with signed distance fields.
• Rigged up my Sublime Text to automatically maximize the current pane when I make its window small.
• Played with Samurai when we won the DEF CON CTF Quals, I solved a few problems which I wrote up here.
• Volunteered as the Treasurer for the Waterloo CS Club, also helped organize events like a CTF and TerribleHack.
• Played with Samurai in the Plaid CTF and helped with a few problems including reverse engineering a long APL program.
• Wrote scripts for auto-converting my bank and Splitwise CSVs into Ledger accounting files, with smart guessing of expense categories.
• Gave a talk at the Bay Area Rust Meetup about tips and tools for writing algorithms in Rust.
• Watched through the full fast.ai deep learning course, it’s really excellent, I recommend it for the great up-to-date tips even if you’re already familiar with deep learning.
• I built and programmed a box that uses a Teensy LC to allow me to connect $5 tattoo machine foot pedals to my computer to scroll and perform shortcuts.

2017

• Implemented a combined head tracking and eye tracking mouse replacement in Rust using a TrackIR 5 and a Tobii 4C.
• Attended TerribleHack X and made a super-fast emoji rendering engine with WebGL.
• Organized a short talks event for the Waterloo CS Club and gave a talk version of my article on dynamic programming as path finding.
• Wrote Enfasten, a tool that transforms a static site into one that uses optimized responsive images.
• Helped reverse engineer the protocol of a commercial eye tracker, wrote a Wireshark dissector for their custom data format to aid understanding USB pcaps.
• Attended Hack The North 2017, where I made Quickdown, a fast lightweight markdown renderer from scratch using Rust and Webrender.
• Made a web app that creates an RSS feed of interesting Hacker News comments.
• Fixed some bugs and reviewed PRs for syntect.
• Made an example of integrating WebRender with the new glutin with live resizing windows on macOS.
• Fixed some bugs in nvAlt involving indented lists.
• Added an API to Hammerspoon for counting and switching macOS tabs.
• Wrote an example program of using my A*-based approach to diffing.
• Developed a Sublime Text command for folding all function bodies in a file so that you can read the type signatures and doc comments like generated documentation or a header file.
• Made a small web app for doing common normal distribution related calculations.
• Worked on the the Xi text editor for my internship at Google.
• Helped start NeoVintageous, a fork of the abandoned Sublime Vim emulation package, and contributed some fixes and updates.
• Fixed a whole bunch of parsing bugs in syntect found by running the Sublime Text syntax tests with it.
• Gave a talk on advanced Unix commands, programs and scripting for a CS Club “Unix 201” event I ran.
• Gave a talk on how text editors do syntax highlighting for “Alt+Tab”, a short talks event I ran for the CS Club.
• Volunteered as the Vice President of the Waterloo Computer Science Club. Organized and ran a number of events for them.
• Experimentally ported syntect to fancy-regex, a pure Rust regex library that avoids catastrophic backtracking.
• Implemented a bunch of operating system features like pids, forking, exec, allocation and paging for the UWaterloo CS350 class

2016

• Completed the Shenzhen I/O programming game. Okay, it’s a stretch to say I “worked” on this, but it was super fun and I highly recommend it.
• Contributed some UI upgrades to the hledger-iadd entry system for Ledger accounting files.
• Packaged a Hammerspoon Module that uses my custom low-latency audio recognizer to let me scroll down hands-free by saying “ssss”.
• Wrote a Rust library for high quality syntax highlighting using Sublime Text’s grammar format.
• Wrote a project source code visualizer that renders all the code in a project using Rust and gfx-rs.
• Optimized Dayder to quickly handle the full 380,000+ data sets of FRED by using caching and optimized server side filtering. Also deployed it with NixOS.
• Participated in the Google Code Jam qualification round and the 2016 Waterloo Google Games.
• Wrote a high speed & accuracy webcam marker tracker with OpenCV and Halide. Done as part of a research term in the UWaterloo HCI lab.
• Gave a talk at a UWaterloo CS Club event on simple binary formats.
• Made Dayder, a spurious correlation finding web app, at TerribleHack III with Marc Mailhot.
• Made a new resume using Jekyll to generate multiple different versions from YAML, with a nice design using CSS flexbox.
• Reverse engineered the USB commands of my Eye Tribe eye tracker and used it to make part of a prototype eye tracking system.
• Wrote low latency high accuracy audio recognition algorithms for various mouth noises. Done as part of a research term in the UWaterloo HCI lab.
• Wrote a simple bond trading and arbitrage bot in a day with a team for a competition, in D, a language which my team members didn’t know and I had very little practice in.
• Scraped and generated a Dash docset for Vibe.d.
• Rewrote Rate With Science in the D language. See the Github release.
• Prototyped a pointing method fusing eye tracking and head pose tracking in order to compete with both the speed and accuracy of a standard mouse while not requiring a user’s hands. Done as part of a research term in the UWaterloo HCI lab.

2015

• Started developing a prototype editor control scheme based around palm keys on fancy keyboards.
• Deployed Rate With Science deterministically using NixOS to a VPS using a Nix-based Heroku-like workflow.
• Wrote a facial key point tracking based program that overlays different faces on videos with OpenCV for TerribleHack.
• Wrote an election simulator game for Hack The North 2015.
• Built a head tracking mouse using a microcontroller and a headset-mounted IMU.
• Contributed OSX support and velocity control for the Mickey head tracking mouse project.
• Set up a VPS using NixOS for deterministic deployment
• Generated a Dash docset for D and contributed it to Dash.
• Wrote a D library for DBus called ddbus
• Rewrote Rate With Science in the Nim language. See the Github release.
• Made Rate With Science for the UWaterloo Terrible Hacks hackathon.
• Wrote a series of scripts to transform Wikipedia dumps into a compact binary link graph format that allows efficient graph searches.
• Wrote a JS Canvas app that makes some LCD monitors emit a tone. This made the front page of Reddit from /r/InternetIsBeautiful.
• Designed and built a series of one key keyboards with RGB leds that emulate blink(1) USB devices.
• Processed a Wikipedia dump into a Neo4j database using graphipedia on a DigitalOcean VPS droplet. Getting the data ready for use at a hackathon someday.
• Wrote a DBus service for finding the locations of interactive objects on the screen, part of a bigger eye tracking project.
• Became the #1 contributor to Spacemacs and did lots of issue management and triage
• Wrote a program in Qt that uses image processing on your screen to detect any text and allow you to select it using vim keybindings.

2014

• Wrote a program that allows overlaying dots anywhere on the screen, intended to be used to provide hints for use with an eye tracker.
• Developed an algorithm for detecting the noise of lips popping fairly accurately, intended for UI control uses.
• Wrote a window hints module for Mjolnir for SE hack day.
• Started using Spacemacs and contributing many PRs, making me the #2 contributor.
• Finished the VeloType implementation for my keyboard, started practicing.
• Started learning Emacs and contributing daily to open source Emacs projects like Spacemacs.
• Participated in Hack The North and developed Handquake.
• Wrote a command line tool for Waterloo Watcard info.
• Started attending the University of Waterloo.
• Built the electronics and firmware for my DIY keyboard.
• Released IndexView on Mr. Money Mustache.
• Designed and built a custom keyboard case out of layered acrylic.
• Wrote a tool for graphing and analyzing long term market returns.
• Gave a talk at Ottawa Ruby on the Ruby Standard Library
• Used 3D printing to prototype a concept for magnetic levitation hall effect keyboard switches.
• Forked the ranger file manager to work better with OSX, creating MacRanger.
• Extended ranger file manager to support images and file icons on OSX.
• Went to the ECOO programming contest finals and came 4th (1st in region).
• Spent most of the winter finishing up and releasing my app StashLine
• Wrote a graphing program that follows all the school science rules.

2013

• Made a program to generate function art for my math summative.
• Started work on a personal finance iPad app.
• Gave a lightning talk at Ottawa Ruby about writing Ruby Gems.
• Worked at Shopify over the summer.
• Integrated Pro into the Sublime Text editor via a plugin.
• Wrote Pro, a tool for managing Git repos.
• Won the Ottawa AppJam for my Turing Compiler and IDE, which I polished and linked together.
• Went to the ECOO programming contest finals and came 5th.

2012

• Gave a lightning talk at Ottawa Ruby about scripting.
• Developed new website based on Jekyll and Github Pages.
• Started work on the eyeLike eye tracker.
• Wrote the Improsent presentation tool.
• Went to the Shad Valley summer program at Waterloo University.
• Worked on the new editor for Open Turing
• Wrote a web service that makes cool word gardens: http://treeeees.herokuapp.com
• Wrote a ruby gem that creates magic PNG images called doubleVision
• Participated in the 2012 ECOO Programming contest finals
• Released the PathSpan iPad app.
• Wrote a compiler for Turing using the LLVM framework.
• Wrote a new editor for Open Turing in Qt
• Wrote a Sublime Text plugin that inserts snippets from Rosetta Code

2011

• Created an open source fork of Turing for Windows with many improvements.
• Wrote a second iPad app for psychological research. Based on the number line task.
• Competed in the DWITE programming contest.
• Wrote a question answering machine for the programming club at Bell.
• Wrote a tron AI to compete against my friend Tony’s tron AI.
• Ported SquareGame to use data URLs to render to a favicon.
• Made a AJAX app that uses html5 drag and drop and the ideone API to run programs dropped on it.
• Put a bunch of my code on github.
• Made an iPhone game. A port of Kiran Rao’s square game to IOS.

2010

• Porting the linux program to interface with my watch (Timex DataLink) to the mac.
• Object tracking using the webcam in haxe
• Ruby data analysis framework for use in programming contests.
• Turing browser for programming class assignement.
• Google Code Jam 2011 Qualification Round.
• 3D engine in Turing for programming class.
• Bell HS map
• Base for a neural network based AI for ultimate tic-tac-toe
• Psychological research iPad app for a professor at Carleton University
• Partial data-analysis program for my EEG

2009 (Grade 8)

• iPhone app for my XML-based personal data sync and organization system.
• Ruby framework for my XML-based personal data sync and organization system.
• Ultimate tic-tac-toe Java applet.
• My science fair project on building an EEG. Won gold medal and a trip to the national science fair. http://tristan.hume.ca/distribute/Brainwaves%20(Tristan%20Hume).pdf
• Ajax and php web app for my XML-based personal data sync and organization system.

2008

• Science fair project on Galvanic Skin Response. Won gold medal in regional science fair.
• Flash platformer with procedurally generated levels.
• Redesign of tristan.hume.ca
• Bob escape platformer, a tiling platformer written based on a flash tutorial on tiling game engines.
• Taught small course on creating web pages to Grade 4-6 kids at my school.

2005

• Started learning to program by writing crappy websites with HTML and JS.