First time I've had my name misspelled as "Professor Loh".
Hi Professor Loh,
My name is $NAME, and I am working on a project called $APP under my
company $COMPANY.
I've been following vEnhance for years, and I deeply admire the clarity,
creativity, and rigor you bring to mathematical explanations. Your approach
to problem solving and mathematical thinking has inspired countless
students preparing for Olympiad-style contests.
Because $APP's mission is closely aligned with empowering students to
think more deeply and develop strong reasoning skills, I wanted to reach
out about a possible collaboration.
$APP is a math Olympiad practice app for Grades 1--12 (currently 1--8). It
features problem sets designed around competition-style thinking, with
progressive difficulty, logical reasoning challenges, XP-based progression,
badges, streaks, and topic-level performance tracking.
Students use $APP while preparing for contests such as the AMC, AIME, IMO,
Math Kangaroo, and many school-level Olympiads.
...The NearlyFreeSpech FAQ is actually really addicting to read. Has a lot of personality.
I can't take people who use the word "democratize" seriously.
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.