#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.

#290 — Jun 28, 2026 by Evan Chen

Trying to transition web.evanchen.cc from Google Cloud to CloudFlare R2. Let's see how it goes!

#289 — Jun 27, 2026 by Evan Chen

Editing a file not under Git version control kind of gives me the heebie-jeebies. It's like there's no one supervising my changes to save me if I need to revert.

#288 — Jun 24, 2026 by Evan Chen

Still makes me happy when I see deer walk by me in the parking lot.

#287 — Jun 21, 2026 by Evan Chen

i tried watercolor painting today and i now retract all my complaints in 283. like, as hard as it was for me to remember how to do certain tasks in procreate, having to do them with physical paint is a gazillion times worse.

#286 — Jun 20, 2026 by Evan Chen

Happy (and mortified) to report that the "Claude proofreads the 18.02 book" campaign uncovered an embarrassingly large number of typos:

42 files changed, 165 insertions(+), 163 deletions(-)

I'm a bit scared but maybe should release Claude on the Napkin as well.

#285 — Jun 19, 2026 by Evan Chen

Excited for Keychain 3 to be out of beta so I can be less confused about what my ssh-agent and gpg-agent are doing.