https://micjm.com/Recent content in Blog on micjmHugoen-USMon, 31 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0700https://micjm.com/blog/sloprouter/Mon, 31 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0700https://micjm.com/blog/sloprouter/<p><strong>Learning about benchmark saturation - the hard way</strong></p> <p>It’s 2026, so I built an LLM product that aimed to improve performance. I had a problem, though: how to show that I was actually making an improvement? A benchmark, of course! Unfortunately, no matter how hard I tried, I could not get the benchmark I chose to move. I eventually gave up.</p> <p>I kept my eye on the leaderboard, though, and noticed strange things start to happen. First, a tiny open weight model nearly matched the frontier for pennies per question. Weird, but maybe AI was advancing that fast. Next, Fable scored worse than Opus.</p>https://micjm.com/about/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://micjm.com/about/<h2 id="about-me">About me</h2> <p>I&rsquo;m Michael Mayer.</p> <p>I taught myself to code at night while working as a dishwasher during the day.</p> <p>I hold an Economics degree and like to read history, memoir, narrative nonfiction and occasionally literature and philosophy.</p> <p>I worked briefly as a professional developer but always considered myself more of a rapid prototype hacker.</p> <p>Together with a co-founder, I founded Bottomless, a company that makes automatic re-ordering systems for e-commerce that use weight sensors.</p>