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Michael Bacarella

@michael.bacarella.com
642 followers 131 following 263 posts

Founder GPShopper (successful exit) ex-Jane Street (pre-SBF) ex-Google (pre-Sundar) occasional shitpoaster

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Michael Bacarella @michael.bacarella.com · 24/09/2026
The interesting part of this article for me was the disabled community wasn't big enough to keep the bar economically viable and during a 3 1/2 conversation, the remaining owner shared how hard it was to keep the lights on and she was met with hostility and brought to tears. Is that part not true?
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Michael Bacarella @michael.bacarella.com · 29/04/2026
Sorry but I just had to ask Claude to produce a C++Now presentation in the voice of Matt Godbolt. I think it nailed it.
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Michael Bacarella @michael.bacarella.com · 09/02/2026
We had a good thing you stupid son of a bitch. We had COBOL, mainframes, a steady paycheck. Everything we needed. Ran like clockwork. But no, you had to be the man. Too good for unions. Now a model does your job. You and your pride and your '10x engineer' ego.
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Michael Bacarella @michael.bacarella.com · 17/01/2026
ChatGPT and I have a very positive relationship
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Michael Bacarella @michael.bacarella.com · 03/01/2026
Capturing a dictator whose legitimacy collapsed to the point that his opposition won a Nobel Peace Prize is good, actually
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Michael Bacarella @michael.bacarella.com · 12/12/2025
Advent of OCaml, day 12 👹 **SPOILERS** This ended up being a troll problem. You could get to work like a sap, do some best-fit bin packing heuristic and it'll take 1000 CPU minutes (✋) Or you can ignore geometry entirely and pick trees whose area >= max-present-size * number-of-presents 🤦‍♂️
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Michael Bacarella @michael.bacarella.com · 11/12/2025
from r/adventofcode
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Michael Bacarella @michael.bacarella.com · 11/12/2025
Advent of OCaml, day 11, solved! 😼 A welcome reprieve from yesterday. Today's solution can be solved quickly with "merely" coding interview level DFS graph search with memoization.
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Michael Bacarella @michael.bacarella.com · 10/12/2025
nobody says you have to limit yourself to one CPU right?
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Michael Bacarella @michael.bacarella.com · 10/12/2025
Advent of OCaml, day 10, part 1 😩 You know it's getting grim when people are posting just their part 1 solutions. Took about 4 minutes of CPU to brute force. I'm sure someone has a cute number theory solution on r/adventofcode that takes 1ms for the whole thing.
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Michael Bacarella @michael.bacarella.com · 09/12/2025
Advent of OCaml, day 9 These are starting to take too long to solve! 😅 Part 1 done (after a fun misstep trying to allocate a 100M element array...) Part 2 seems... non-trivial. Might have to throw in the towel so I can do, like, other stuff today.
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Michael Bacarella @michael.bacarella.com · 08/12/2025
the awkwardness of the separate add_circuit and join_circuits code was weighing heavily on me so I combined them. reduces runtime from 2s to 300ms! 99% of the time is now spent sorting 1000² pairs by distance and that seems fine
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Michael Bacarella @michael.bacarella.com · 08/12/2025
Advent of OCaml. day 8 By far the hardest yet. Both in terms of time to code but also it pegged my CPU for about 2 seconds to compute the answer 😱
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Michael Bacarella @michael.bacarella.com · 07/12/2025
Advent of OCaml, day 7, solved 🥵 This one threw me for a bit but once I drew the path finding out on paper and stared at it for ... uhm, 40 minutes I got it. Even though this is mostly imperative, I contend you still have edge using OCaml when it comes to understanding state machine transitions.
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Michael Bacarella @michael.bacarella.com · 07/12/2025
@heathhenley.dev you inspired me to code golf an imperative solution (in OCaml this time @c-cube.bsky.social!) based on your approach
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Michael Bacarella @michael.bacarella.com · 06/12/2025
Advent of OCaml, day 6, done (🙀) This one was quite mind numbing. It reminds me of processing those nasty "grid oriented" EDI order/sales formats that were popular as late as the 1990s I'm sure COBOL programmers would feel right at home with this one.
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Michael Bacarella @michael.bacarella.com · 05/12/2025
At the risk of getting myself excommunicated from the OCaml community, day 5 is an example where imperative solution is easier to grok because there's no ready-made higher order function for the pattern you're employing. That is, IMO, this imperative C++ solution is clearer 🦆
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Michael Bacarella @michael.bacarella.com · 05/12/2025
Advent of OCaml, day 5 done Whew. Getting the details right on this one took forever. Happy that the naive brute force solution (just construct a set in memory of the ingredients) couldn't be done and it required a bit more thinking.
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Michael Bacarella @michael.bacarella.com · 04/12/2025
Advent of OCaml, day 4, solved wasted about 20 minutes trying to understand what "eight adjacent positions" meant, squinting at only the row instead of realizing it meant also the cells above and below of course
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Michael Bacarella @michael.bacarella.com · 03/12/2025
Advent of OCaml day 3 solution: donezo Pleasantly, part 1 and part 2 have similar enough algorithms that you can get away with tweaking only one variable (digits_needed). github.com/mbacarella/o...
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Michael Bacarella @michael.bacarella.com · 02/12/2025
Advent of OCaml day 2 solution in the bank! Spent about an extra hour spinning my wheels because I skimmed the requirements and I kneejerk thought it wanted the part 2 style digits scheme. Which it does, but that doesn't get you past part 1! All solutions here github.com/mbacarella/ocaml-aoc2025
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Michael Bacarella @michael.bacarella.com · 01/12/2025
Got day one done. Will be posting all of my solutions at github.com/mbacarella/o...
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Michael Bacarella @michael.bacarella.com · 01/07/2025
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Michael Bacarella @michael.bacarella.com · 06/06/2025
Your kid comes back from his first semester of CS101. First it was Python, you let that slide. Then came Go. "At least it compiles" you told yourself. But now... C++? Your own flesh and blood, wearing that shirt under your roof. This is what happens when you let the universities get to them.
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Michael Bacarella @michael.bacarella.com · 17/05/2025
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Michael Bacarella @michael.bacarella.com · 13/05/2025
if the net result of an earthquake destroying TSMC/Taiwan is that every LLM gets repurposed towards rewriting Java, C#, Python and Javascript into C++ or Rust ASAP, that'd be pretty cool
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Michael Bacarella @michael.bacarella.com · 16/03/2025
Thank you OCaml
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Michael Bacarella @michael.bacarella.com · 03/12/2024
I may be misreading your requirements but the big thing I'd change here is using zip so you can create a staggered list of dates
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Michael Bacarella @michael.bacarella.com · 30/11/2024
ackshually
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Michael Bacarella @michael.bacarella.com · 26/11/2024
I've been getting random segfaults doing things I know should work. according to dmesg, they were all happening on a single core maybe that one core is broken? I turned it off with: echo 0 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu4/online and it shows as offline in htop and now everything is fine(!)
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Michael Bacarella @michael.bacarella.com · 25/11/2024
holy shit I'm never going back to jupyter, thanks man!
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Michael Bacarella @michael.bacarella.com · 17/11/2024
I've been doing vinyl wraps these days
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