Welcome to my home page on the World Wide Web. Not my first, that was composed on a SPARC station in 1995, using Emacs and NCSA Mosaic. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
The critical interface between human and machine is, and remains, formal language. These serve to distill the dreamlike raw material of human cognition, hopes, and hunches, into the rapid arithmetic and logical conditions which are all the hardware knows. Notation is, in truth, a tool of thought.
The meteoric rise of generative models, in every modality including that of human language, has made this interface more important than ever. Formal language remains the instrument, and the guardian: standing between the fuzzy, nondeterministic, sometimes-hallucinatory utterances of humans and language models alike, and the rigorous, if sometimes mysterious, resulting program.
I am Sam Atman, a name which is only semi-pseudonymous. I’ve had a colorful life, with various careers, mistakes, triumphs, and loves won and lost. Mainly I’m a hacker, a trade which often, but by no means always, involves the programming of computers.
A recent and lengthy stint had me working with DARPA on the SafeDocs project, advancing the state of the part in parsing theory as applied to langsec, or language-theoretic security.
Recently I’ve focused on Zig, a relatively new language which I am convinced will become the most important language in sofware development. At least it deserves to be. That, and staying abreast of developments in LLM-assisted programming. A sourcerer by nature (like any hacker), the march of these sorcerer’s apprentices is thrilling to witness. As an advocate of language-theoretic security, it’s terrifying.
I’m available to consult or contract, and open to the right full-time position as well. Check out my code page if you’re on the fence about it, read my blog, think it over. I have the luxury of being choosy; my experience has been that those who need my talents recognize that right away, and the feeling is mutual.
You will find no generated text on this site, anywhere. The meaning of prose incorporates the context of who wrote it, and to what end: machine generation of prose makes the answer “no one” and “nothing”.
I mention this because it’s getting harder to tell. Remember: Alan didn’t call it the Turing Test: he called it the Imitation Game. The only winning move, is not to play.