Welcome to Rambletown! I think the core problem I have when I am creative writing, is that sometimes I feel like I wax poetic too much, or I feel the pressure to wax poetic too much, and then I am not driven by the whims of the mind but instead a ghoul on my shoulder constantly nudging my hands off the wheel to pull a fucking Gymkhana maneuver. I wonder why I like creative writing. I know for a…
I was talking with a new friend Angela yesterday, and during our email conversation she mentioned her art taking a side seat to the tech-y stuff. It got me thinking about art again, and in particular the seemingly random but firm belief I have that knowing about, caring about, and engaging with art is important (more important than ever before? Who’s to say, really). I initially thought up a large…
Written by Joseph Nguyen This book, I thought, would be similar in spirit to Naval's Almanack. I was wrong about that, and I think that was a very good thing. I really liked the cadence and style of this book, it felt inviting and grounded, and helped me more calmly re-evaluate how I thought and the difference between thoughts and thinking, non-thinking, control, the PAUSE acronym, intuition,…
Written by Sarah Thornton This was the first book about art that I'd properly read in years, and I have it to thank for kickstarting an interest in both art and the art of critiquing art (lol). The culture surrounding the art world is a curious one, whether you're at an auction like Christie's or la Biennale di Venizia (Venice Biennale), or even at a crit at CalArts, and learning…
Written by Jim Holt My musings on this shall be brief, I'd wager. First, I want to thank Daniel Huang for recommending this book to me, it was a pretty fun read! It goes over a series of essays and stories wherein Jim Holt collates curious chronicles of central chaps in the world of math, the sciences, and technology. There were lots of fun tidbits, some challenging of the status quo with…
Written by Dava Sobel This was a very cool book detailing the journey and eventual success of John Harrison, the man who invented a clock that could work at sea, which helped solve the problem of keeping track of longitude. This was crucial for navigation, especially in the 17th and 18th centuries, when naval travel was tantamount for both military and trade prowess. What I think this book did a…
Written by Eric Jorgenson This was an interesting read, in part because I disagreed with about a third of the book sort of fundamentally, but as a whole it made me think quite a bit. The book is about Naval Ravikant, an angel investor who now preaches philosophy as well. The first half of the book was on wealth and judgement, in particular about compounding effects, leverage, doing things…
let nani_house = "The doors open, and it is basically all the same. The speaker as you enter is the same, a slow, dimpled white dome capping a dish shaped structure on a tripod. We blasted all the coolest songs back then. The sofas, chairs, and tables on the right are the same, the girl playing guitar in charcoal opposite the TV is the same. Some of the tables’ books are the same, and most of the…
I don't want to be optimal. I am not a process, I don't need to be streamlined. I don’t want enough money to waive every single hassle a person experiences. I don't need to remove all distractions, to utilize every second of the day, even though it haunts me that I'm not productive all the time. My days are not always fruitful, and full of wasted potential; an optimized me, a…
This will probably be short, but I wanted to talk a little bit about making things, and the barriers I seem to have to making things. I used to (and sometimes still) find it pointless to try making something when it already exists, especially in a nontrivial capacity, and there's no utility involved. On the flipside, there is the notion of writing something or making something to learn, which…
As a part of Georgia Tech's Compiler Design course, the last sliver of HW1 was to implement part of the trace and compression algorithm from James Larus' "Whole Program Paths" paper. I wanted to take some time today to go through the paper's ideas, my implementation, and some realizations/jumps I had to make along the way, partly because it's interesting and partly because…
For a given graph G = (V, E) , a cut C is a set of edges such that there is a partition V = (A, B) where all edges e ∈ C have one vertex in A and the other in B . MaxCut is a very famous combinatorial optimization problem wherein we want to find the largest such cut. This is useful in scheduling, partitioning, financial portfolio optimization, and more! While the problem itself is NP-Complete,…
Art is a conversation. It is weird to say without some faux-profundity that I think the goal of art is twofold; for an artist to express their emotions, ideas, reactions to something, and to create an opportunity for dialogue. It seems to me that the most successful artists, or at least the ones we know or perceive the strongest/most/best, tend to be successful at creating opportunities…
Why are we here? Long ago, when the primates split from mammals, and then yielded apes, which resulted in hominids, then hominens, then the genus Homo, giving us, well, us, there were simple, clear objectives. Survive and reproduce. Feed yourself, so you do not die. Save your kin, so they may find their mate. Wake up. Eat. Sleep. Repeat. As we evolved, flying from phylum Chordata down through the…
I've been wondering about this for a fair few months now, ever since I heard it mentioned in a Vergecast episode, or perhaps a video before that on computational photography, or perhaps even before that, when I was writing that joyous exposé into my thoughts on memory. Because that's what it is for, isn't it? We take photos largely to remember. Of course, there are those that take…
Today was interesting, an unassuming sort of day which walks past you on the trail, chirping up with a short “Hi” and a modest wave of the digits, ambling about at an average pace, not a care. He has places to be, to be sure, a being of righteous purpose and poise most days, but on this day his work is largely done, and he moves with the calm of the mid-afternoon lull that befits a job reasonably…
I gaze outside, my eyes reflecting the clouds’ tears; The grass is bright green Branches bow and bend at the behest of bygone winds – thunder rumbles My eyes open – “Shit!” I exclaim, for I forgot my damn bike outside
…is all you need, all you want, all you can eat, oh wait now there’s a discount, it’s cheap, and suddenly you’re transported into a world where you have it, a future image where you enjoy this thing, where its presence envelops you and comforts you and then the moment is lost and you’re back. back to where you were before, thumbs up and down on the screen, eyes glazed over, and you continue; those…
It’s there, barely, but it’s there. A maple seed, drifting through the air, floating aimlessly as it swirls by my eyes. In that moment, I see what it could become; a tree with strong roots, quintessentially unique leaves, a beautiful rouge come fall. Brilliant, bountiful branches, each with their own special stories to tell, holding their own weight, an ecosystem of thought supported. And it…
In another instance of joyous self-therapizing, and because I am too busy to properly nerd out about a paper review or a fun, bite-sized project or topic, today I will be talking about doing things because they are hard. (I think I started the last foray into my psyche in medias res , but sometimes it’s fun to switch it up; maybe one day I’ll write creatively, and you’ll see my propensity for…
Section 1: Impermanence A couple days ago, I was in Dallas with my family, visiting family friends for a series of birthdays and Christmas celebrations. At the end of this day, my cousin’s grandmother wanted to play the Saraswati veena for us all, a stringed instrument typically used in Carnatic Indian classical music. She started playing when she was nine years old, and when she played for us…
Betwixt all of the Marvel Rivals and drumming I've been doing since I finished my fall semester, I thought it'd be a good idea to try rewriting std::iter::zip ; in the past, I've followed along with Jon Gjengset's Crust of Rust on Iterators (to make Flatten ) and tried my hand at FlatMap as well (see Elton Pinto's blog as a nice insight). This article is inspired by his,…
As before with Day 3 , I won't be redescribing the puzzles in full; please check out Advent of Code for more. This problem was fun to solve, and allows me to do a quick explainer on topological sorting (see part 2), hope you enjoy! Part 1: OSHA would be very mad The pages of the safety manuals are out of order, oh fie! Whatever shall we do to verify their validity??? (Tragic, I know.)…
So I'm doing Advent of Code this year, and hopefully we can stick through all 25 days. Day 3's problem was particularly interesting to me, and I did some silly (and hopefully somewhat clever) stuff that I think would be fun to write about. Here we are. I likely won't redescribe the puzzles in full - for that, just head over to Advent of Code - but I will summarize the parts briefly.…
As my first actual blog post, I feel like it's fitting to discuss why I want to write a blog at all, as well as some expectations for content going forward (if I ever get around to it, that is). I think what initially inspired me was joining GT’s programming languages and compilers club, dependently-typed. The first few talks I attended were fascinating, and the club chairs pointed me to…