Hi! I'm Brian. Many people know me online as betaveros.
Professionally, I do interpretability research on large language models, trying to understand how they work internally. Online, I'm most active in the puzzlehunt community, such as by writing the 2025 Galactic Puzzle Hunt with ✈✈✈ Galactic Trendsetters ✈✈✈; but likely better known for solving Advent of Code problems with a programming language I wrote myself.
In past lives I've been a cryptography engineer, a masters student in computational music, and a contestant in many math and programming competitions. Other things I enjoy: web development / UI design, singing, musical improv, mystery visual novels, and doing weird things with code (code golf, esolangs, etc.) Last but not least, I sometimes write on one of my various blogs.
I'm redoing this website! It's accumulated a lot of cruft. 🐉
Personal Links
Projects and Creations
- noulith, a functional-ish programming language with too much syntax sugar, likely best known for the fact that I topped the Advent of Code 2022 leaderboard with it — here are my solutions
- gph-site and Puzzlord, Django apps for running and writing puzzlehunts, respectively; Puzzlord was built from scratch for the 2021 Mystery Hunt
- DP Puzzle Hunt, a puzzlehunt targeting beginners. All the puzzles are still solvable online, check them out!
Blog highlights
Some combination of popular and personal favorites:
- Designing a Programming Language to Speedrun Advent of Code (2023)
- Introduction to Code Golf and Golflangs (2022)
- Interpreting Some Toy Neural Networks (2022)
- Just Enough Elliptic Curves to Be Dangerous (2021)
- Blogging Advice For People Exactly Like Me (2021)
- Advent of Code: How to Leaderboard (2020)
- C++ Rvalue References: The Unnecessarily Detailed Guide (2020)
- Olympiads: The Infinitely Overdue Retrospective (2019)