Why is it that when I'm paid per hour, I'm suddenly rushing to finish tasks as quickly as possible? Naively I would have expected the opposite.
I guess my "spend as little money as possible" habit applies even when it's not my money being spent.
i wrote this lecture as a teenager and now in my 30's people are still emailing me for solutions.
I should have moved to a real static site generator for
blog.evanchen.cc years ago.
Feels so much better to have everything being generated by a Git repository.
From the preface to An Introduction to Automorphic Representations:
The student should not be overly discouraged, however, because there is no person currently alive who has the necessary prerequisites to really understand the entire subject.
Yeah, sounds about right.
So when everyone says that the way LLM's work is just by predicting the next word, is that actually an accurate description of what's going on? Or is that just what everyone repeats because it's easy to relate to?
i hit a claude code session limit while writing django and now feel like a lazy bum.
Me running /init in Claude Code with just a pyproject.toml:
This is a Django application for handling OTIS (Online Training Information System) applications. The project is in early development stages.
... Nice guess for the meaning of OTIS.
I opened Stephen's Sausage Roll today on a whim and started a new save file. I have no idea how I managed to play this game before holy crap it's so hard.
Literally was trying to find a tutorial level to remember how the rules worked and instead wandered around looking for any level I could do at all.
Found the following poem that compiles in Perl 5.6.1:
BEFOREHAND: close door, each window & exit; wait until time;
open spell book; study; read (spell, $scan, select); tell us;
write it, print the hex while each watches,
reverse length, write again;
kill spiders, pop them, chop, split, kill them.
unlink arms, shift, wait and listen (listening, wait).
sort the flock (then, warn "the goats", kill "the sheep");
kill them, dump qualms, shift moralities,
values aside, each one;
die sheep; die (to, reverse the => system
you accept (reject, respect));
next step,
kill next sacrifice, each sacrifice,
wait, redo ritual until "all the spirits are pleased";
do it ("as they say").
do it(*everyone***must***participate***in***forbidden**s*e*x*).
return last victim; package body;
exit crypt (time, times & "half a time") & close it.
select (quickly) and warn next victim;
AFTERWARDS: tell nobody.
wait, wait until time;
wait until next year, next decade;
sleep, sleep, die yourself,
die @lastSpent part of yesterday getting a local Hanabi-Live working again so I could help bring some of the recent pull requests to the finish line.
This is super weird, but I think there's something about the jankiness of the code that I find charming. The website is feature-rich and has a lot of thought put into it, but you can also tell it's done by hobbyists and not a corporate entity. Gives it a bit of soul.
Someone told me that $$\left( \frac{1+\sqrt5}{2} \right)^3 = 2 + \sqrt 5$$ and I feel kind of spooked. Doesn't feel right that the denominator disappears.
Well, $\mathbb Z[\sqrt 5]$ isn't integrally closed. Maybe that's a good way to drive that point home.
I've reached the point where seeing Romanization of Korean words is annoying and I wish people would use 한글 so I can actually tell what the words are.
I've gotten used to using pre-push hooks but I feel like most other people I know are using pre-commit. Makes me wonder if I should switch.
Do I drink too much French vanilla?
Played Aperture Desk Job on my most recent plane ride and had a good laugh, it was so entertaining. Should've played this when I first got the Deck.
Recent in-flight movie review: The Nightmare Before Christmas was a bit slow but I can see some of the charm. More importantly, now I understand the context behind the the 2019 Mystery Hunt a lot better.
Actually, it shouldn't be a surprise to me that I don't like most parents, because I don't like most people, and parents are people.
It tangentially reminded me of a Calvin and Hobbes comic where Dad says:
It's funny... when I was a kid, I thought grown-ups never worried about anything. I trusted my parents to take care of everything, and it never occurred to me that they might not know how.
That was definitely my childhood too.
I realized when playing The Farmer Was Replaced how I've gotten used to not optimizing my code in real life.
For me, the most important thing with my Python code is that it's easy to read and obviously correct. For my applications a runtime of 1 millisecond vs 10 milliseconds doesn't matter. (If runtime did matter, I might not be using Python anyway.)
Man, whoever wrote this comment would be such a good teacher.
This was a response to "what is the difference between 긴습, 응급, 비상" which all can be translated into English as "emergency".
You'll hear terms like "긴급뉴스" for like "breaking/urgent news"
You'll hear the term "응급실" for hospital emergency room.
You'll see "비상구" if you fly on an airplane on a Korean based airline.
But the important part is the "teach how to fish":
I used to constantly ask questions like this, so instead of answering the simple questions, let's teach you how to answer them yourself. The first thing I would do is check up all the examples on Naver dictionary. Then look at all of the example sentences to get a feel for how they are used.
Next , since all of these words are all Chinese roots, the next thing I would do is see what other words the various roots are in.
급 (急) seems to have a "urgent, rapid" feel in all of the words that it is in, so for the first two, this is the same. So what about 응 and 긴, how are they different?
응 (應) seems to have a feeling of "responding". Since 응답 is a fairly beginner word, you can now connect the two 응's in your mind.
긴 (緊) seems to be more "tense", and is the same 긴 in 긴장. So this makes sense.
Then there is 비상.
The 비 (非) is a negative
Then 상 (常) is frequent or common.
When you put the word 비상 together you get the true sense of the word which is like "not normal" so when I look at a 비상구 I think "this is NOT the REGULAR exit, but the one i use in special circumstances, such as an EMERGENCY".
tl;dr - If you want to get a feel for "how is this word different than that", then definitely use Naver dictionary, get some example sentences, idioms, fan subs, etc, then get the Chinese chars and pop them into hanjadic and build your vocab web and know the differences between words better than most Koreans :P.
The power of concrete examples cannot be overstated.
Recent in-flight movie reviews:
How to Train Your Dragon (2010) is really cute, and I was disappointed the sequel wasn't available on my return flight.
A Minecraft Movie (2025) is super derpy but makes me want to try playing Minecraft, so I guess it's doing its job as an advertisement.