#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.