because adulthood is lonely

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#51 — Mon 22 September 2025 by Evan Chen

After all these years, there are some MO problems for which I don't remember anymore how I came up with the solution, and others for which I definitely do. I like it when my students ask me about the latter and not the former, because I'm lazy and it's less work for me to answer their question.

Wouldn't it be convenient if those also turned out to be the more instructive problems? I'm secretly hoping that this laziness happens to causes me to have better taste in problems, but I don't think I'd be able to test that.


#50 — Mon 22 September 2025 by Evan Chen

So Claude Code actually outputted reasonably good Asymptote code for me today, which is a surprise to me, because usually the LLM's are really bad at Asymptote.

I was trying to convert the following into Asymptote:

\begin{circuitikz}[american]
    \node (P) at (0,0) [left] {$P$};
    \node (Q) at (13,0) [right] {$Q$};
    \draw (P) to[short] (1,0);
    \draw (1,0) to[short] (1,1) to[R=$x\,\Omega$] (3,1) to[short] (3,0);
    \draw (1,0) to[short] (1,-1) to[R=$\frac{1}{3}\,\Omega$] (3,-1) to[short] (3,0);
    \draw (3,0) to[short] (4,0);
    \draw (4,0) to[short] (4,1) to[R=$y\,\Omega$] (8,1) to[short] (8,0);
    \draw (4,0) to[short] (4,-1) to[R=$\frac{1}{3}\,\Omega$] (6,-1) to[R=$\frac{1}{3}\,\Omega$] (8,-1) to[short] (8,0);
    \draw (8,0) to[short] (9,0);
    \draw (9,0) to[short] (9,1) to[R=$z\,\Omega$] (11,1) to[short] (11,0);
    \draw (9,0) to[short] (9,-1) to[short] (9,-2) to[R=$\frac{1}{3}\,\Omega$] (11,-2) to[short] (11,0);
    \draw (9,-1) to[R=$\frac{1}{3}\,\Omega$] (11,-1);
    \draw (11,0) to[short] (13,0);
\end{circuitikz}

The output from Claude actually worked. Though the most jarring part is probably the presence of import olympiad; at the top. A lot of Asymptote users from the AoPS math contest community... it shows.

I cleaned up the output and posted it here.


#49 — Sun 21 September 2025 by Evan Chen

Some real Ace Attorney material here:

In one of nature’s most remarkable convergent evolutions, koalas have developed fingerprints that are virtually indistinguishable from human fingerprints, even under electron microscopes. ... Each koala possesses unique fingerprints, just as humans do, with distinctive whorls, loops, and arches.

Snopes says this doesn't seem to have happened yet.


#48 — Sun 21 September 2025 by Evan Chen

I kind of think "irregular conjugation" was a poor choice of name for the verb conjugations that follow one of several rules depending on the ending, because they're still mostly following a fixed rule.

To me "irregular" should be edge cases like 돕다 becoming 도와 which are actually edge cases (irregular irregulars, anyone?).


#47 — Fri 19 September 2025 by Evan Chen

Made me laugh:

One thing you have to be careful about, though, is that duct tape programmers are the software world equivalent of pretty boys… those breathtakingly good-looking young men who can roll out of bed, without shaving, without combing their hair, and without brushing their teeth, and get on the subway in yesterday’s dirty clothes and look beautiful, because that’s who they are. You, my friend, cannot go out in public without combing your hair. It will frighten the children. Because you’re just not that pretty.


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