#310 — Jul 31, 2026 by Evan Chen

Oh heck apparently fstrim.timer was disabled on my device for years.

$ sudo fstrim -av
/home: 923.6 GiB (991699480576 bytes) trimmed on /dev/nvme0n1p4
/boot: 644.2 MiB (675508224 bytes) trimmed on /dev/nvme0n1p1
/: 419.7 GiB (450605842432 bytes) trimmed on /dev/nvme0n1p3

Okay, sudo systemctl enable fstrim.timer it is. Maybe this will actually fix the hard drive issues now? (I celebrated too early in #266.)

#309 — Jul 31, 2026 by Evan Chen

I had a guest post at Center for Education Progress go out recently. It's a short overview for the US math contest world for people who aren't familiar with the scene.

Want to write more about that on my own blog sometime, but first gotta make sure this year's OTIS is going to run…

#308 — Jul 30, 2026 by Evan Chen

I feel like bar charts don't help me in domains I don't already understand. Like, "number go up", yay?

#307 — Jul 30, 2026 by Evan Chen

Visited the Japanese Tea Garden in San Mateo Central Park toady. It was nice. Surprised I haven't been earlier.

#306 — Jul 28, 2026 by Evan Chen

Extending off #171, I wish people would stop comparing AI to the calculator. Like, no. That analogy is not going to work anymore.

#305 — Jul 26, 2026 by Evan Chen

how is scribd legal

#304 — Jul 25, 2026 by Evan Chen

It should be illegal to be jetlagged and sick at the same time.

#303 — Jul 25, 2026 by Evan Chen

In digital security, offense seems fundamentally easier than defense:

It's not fair. As the designer of a secure system, you have to think of every possible means of attack and protect against them all, but a cryptanalyst only has to find one hole in your security and exploit it. (Bruce Schneier, Applied Cryptography)

I'm always amazed things are still standing.

#302 — Jul 23, 2026 by Evan Chen

It still boggles my mind that some households wear street shoes indoors.

#301 — Jul 22, 2026 by Evan Chen

… as much as I hate Twitter/X, posting a counterexample to the Jacobian conjecture as a tweet is actually pretty funny. gj levent.

#300 — Jul 17, 2026 by Evan Chen

Today's trivia question: there's a unique IMO country code which is also a possible subject distribution for an IMO day ([ACGN][ACGN][ACGN]). Which country is it?

(Update: Actually there's more than one if you include countries that previously attended IMO but not the last five years.)

#299 — Jul 11, 2026 by Evan Chen

On flights I can never finish the provided meals before the flight attendants start collecting the trays.

#298 — Jul 9, 2026 by Evan Chen

i never know how to write the part of rec letters where i need to brag about my own credentials first.

#297 — Jul 9, 2026 by Evan Chen

Stumbled upon 100 Days in Jakarta and now can't stop re-reading it.

#296 — Jul 6, 2026 by Evan Chen

I was asking Claude to proofread something I wrote and it gave me the feedback:

Cosmetic. \opname should resolve to \operatorname — fine if it's defined in your preamble (as in Evan Chen's macros), otherwise it won't compile.

Was a bit startled.

#295 — Jul 5, 2026 by Evan Chen

Compliment of the week: "Evan is so nice, but he always wins."

#294 — Jul 2, 2026 by Evan Chen

Playing a lot of Exploding Kittens recently, surprised how much I'm enjoying it.

#293 — Jun 29, 2026 by Evan Chen

Played my first scored game of Scrabble yesterday and on my second turn I managed to land ZOOMER on a double word square with the Z on a triple letter tile.

The rest of the game went downhill from there.

#292 — Jun 28, 2026 by Evan Chen

I tried to internally reroute web.evanchen.cc to web.evanchen.cc/index.html but accidentally rerouted every domain on my site. (So, e.g., apply.evanchen.cc also got rerouted to apply.evanchen.cc/index.html, and hence 404's.) Sorry about that! Should be back in working order now.

#291 — Jun 28, 2026 by Evan Chen

rclone sync is destructive and i didn't realize (hence didn't use --dry-run). ouch.

good thing i'm still just testing.