Recent content on Abstract Nonsense
A counter data structure provides an abstract data type for a multiset . A multiset is much like a classic set, but augmented to track the multiplicity of each of its member elements. For example, $[1, 1, 1, 2, 3]$ is a multiset consisting of $1$ repeated thrice, and each of $2$ and $3$ once. If you define $A$ and $B$ to be multisets in a universe of objects $U$, and $m_A, m_B$ their respective…
I’ve migrated my static images to use Cloudflare R2 as my object store and image CDN. R2 exposes an S3-compatible API , which makes it nice and easy to use the aws CLI to interact with the bucket. Previously I was (ab)using GitHub’s free image CDN via their user media upload support in Issues ( https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/<hash> ). However, this is slow and not very…
TIL that godspeed does not refer to celerity, but rather is derived from the archaic sense of speed : “luck, success, prosperity” . Which makes the phrase “Good luck and godspeed” a pleonasm! Felix Felicis?
As of late, I’ve been trying to learn about cryptography more rigorously. I quite enjoyed Real-World Cryptography by David Wong, but there’s a lot of group theory and low-level machinery to continue learning. Martin Kleppmann has an exemplary tutorial on Implementing Curve25519/X25519: A Tutorial on Elliptic Curve Cryptography that I worked through. I think I mostly understood the…
I had the opportunity to contribute another post for the CommBank Technology Medium blog . This time around on something a little less speculative: Preserving CommBank’s Archives with AI: From VHS to Vision Models . Amidst the recent spate of AI-powered engineering initiatives, it felt nice to work on something that felt ethically aligned with my values. There’s a pretty severe AI-instigated…
TIL that the great-great-grandfather of Geoffrey Hinton , “the Godfather of AI”, is none other than George Boole , of bool ean algebra fame! Reference : Bits with Soul Darwin College Lecture by Professor Simon Peyton Jones
There’s an interview with Simon Peyton Jones * I’m a huge fan of his trademark presentation slides set in Comic Sans I highly recommend watching. It’s full of interesting observations on type theory, Haskell, functional programming, and the future of programming. One quote at the end stood out to me in particular: If you could go back to when you just graduated from college and…
I’ve been accepted to read for a Master of Philosophy in Advanced Computer Science at the University of Cambridge and will be joining Corpus Christi College as a corpuscle ! I’ve been wanting to return to study for a good while now and it’s very exciting to see it materialise! At all inflection points, it’s nice to pause for a moment of reflection on the trajectory.…
The Basel problem asks for the solution to the infinite series of the reciprocal squares: $$ \sum_{n=1}^\infty \frac 1 {n^2} = \, ? $$ As many other things in mathematics, it was first solved by Euler, who found that the solution was, incredibly, the transcendental value: $$ \frac{\pi^2}{6} $$ If you read through the linked Wikipedia page, you’ll see many (quite beautiful) proofs, but they…
Continuing on from my collection of humorous mathematical aphorisms, today’s excerpt is an exercise from Calculus by Michael Spivak (4 ed.). Chapter 10, Question 2 . Find $f'(x)$ for each of the following functions $f$. (It took the author 20 minutes to compute the derivatives for the answer section, and it should not take you much longer: Although rapid calculation is not the goal of…
I’ve been working on a statistics library in Typst recently, distro . One fun outcome of this has been the chance to revisit some special functions in mathematics, and explore how to implement them in a numerically safe way. For instance, Typst uses i64 under the hood when implementing the calc.binom function, and it overflows for moderately large n ( Issue #4993 ). Now, the factorial…
I’ve always been a fan of eclectic words . So, inspired by The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows , I thought I’d coin my own neologism: keyslip The sudden, sinking pang of anxiety that accompanies the realisation that one has been typing into the wrong buffer, particularly after a protracted sequence of keystrokes: Always ls a path before you rm it, otherwise you might suffer from a…
Recently I’ve been working on a statistics library in Typst called distro * More to come soon . Typst is architected with an incremental compiler , and pairs it with pure functions * Almost all functions in Typst are pure, with a few exceptions to facilitate snappy real-time compilation. The problem is, what to do about random number generation when your functions are supposed to be…
I really enjoyed this book, I thought it was an excellent read. I found the quality of the writing to be a bit haphazard at the start, but the Haldeman-esque humour and storyline more than make up for that. Weir does a superb job of capturing the pure joy in experimental and theoretical physics without detracting from the pacing or science-fiction nature of the book. The “vaguely-crustacean…
I’ve added an animated favicon to the site: * To avoid becoming distracting, it only plays once, on page load, instead of indefinitely looping. The design has a few motifs: An upper case $\Lambda$ symbol: a nod to both the Lambda Calculus and the A in Abstract . That morphs into an uppercase blackboard bold $\mathbb{N}$ symbol: the set of natural numbers and the N in Nonsense . All of which…
I’ve added a /blogroll slash page to my blog with the list of blogs I read. The feed URLs are automatically extracted from an OPML extract from my RSS reader of choice, NetNewsWire . The OPML file is stored in the data directory of the Hugo project, and the list is rendered using a shortcode, opmlblogroll . Credit to Publishing an OPML Blogroll With Hugo for the inspiration!
I’ve added a /ai slash page to my blog with my GenAI policy. I’ve excerpted the current contents below: “Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.” – Dune by Frank Herbert. Every word on this blog is handcrafted by me, often painstakingly. I think of…
TIL that terminal emulators can opt to support hyperlinks via the OSC 8 escape sequence. In terminals that support it , the following snippet should produce a clickable link: shell $ printf '\e]8;;https://abstractnonsense.xyz\e\\This is a link to this blog\e]8;;\e\\\n' This is a link to this blog I tested this to work in iTerm and VS Code’s terminal, but not in the native macOS Terminal.…
This March I read through Real-World Cryptography by David Wong ( Manning ). I’ve been trying to learn more about homomorphic encryption, but I don’t have any formal background in cryptography. This was the perfect introduction to a wide range of cryptographic primitives (hashing, signatures, authentication, key generation and derivation, encryption…) and the delicate…
Thank you, work, for lending me a Dell Pro Max with GB10 to hack on. The Pro Max is effectively a twin for the NVIDIA DGX Spark, and it comes with: NVIDIA GB10 Blackwell GPU 128GB LPDDR5X unified memory 4TB PCIe SSD storage # First impressions # Hardware My Pro Max had already been setup by a teammate, so I had to go buy a cheap wired keyboard and mouse to connect before I could connect to Wifi.…
Up until now, I’ve been using Cloudflare Email Routing to forward all emails sent to the hello@abstractnonsense.xyz email address to my personal iCloud email. This is seamless to configure, as Cloudflare is my domain registrar and keeper of my DNS fiefdom. However, this service is a one-way pipe: if I want to respond to emails, I have to do so from my personal email. I’ve now migrated…
At work, I had the opportunity to contribute a short post on Privacy-preserving machine learning with homomorphic encryption for the CommBank Technology Medium blog . Many thanks to Brendan Hopper and Anna Leontjeva for reviewing and approving it.
In deep learning literature, there’s a veritable menagerie of different activation functions that are commonly employed betwixt layers. Proponents of one or another class of functions will usually proffer up some rationalisation for what makes their choice grounded: differentiability, smoothness, computational complexity, numerical stability, concision… Today I was reading through GLU…
I completed reading through Programming Rust by Jim Blandy, Jason Orendorff and Leonora F. S. Tindall ( Amazon ). I feel like I spent too much of 2025 flitting between new concepts, and I missed the structured and concerted learning from university. A goal for 2026 was to switch from breadth-first to depth-first learning; and to be honest, I miss reading textbooks! I read this cover to cover, and…
As part of my recent quest to learn Rust, I worked through the Rustlings exercises. You’re given a series of ~100 problems, and your goal is to fix the code to make it compile with passing tests. It was a pretty quick whirl-through, and I don’t think the examples are the most interesting, but as a short introduction to the syntax and rudiments of the semantics, it does the trick with…
Computer networking always felt like an area in which I was lacking after completing my undergraduate CS education. A good while ago I stumbled across the excellent and freely accessible Beej’s Guide to Networking Concepts and worked through it, tracking my solutions in this solutions-guide-to-networking-concepts repository. All solutions herein were produced without any LLM assistance.…
I like to keep a word list of any new and interesting words I come across day-to-day. Today I was curious how many entries were in my list and went to search the YAML file on GitHub. To my delight, I discover that GitHub has hijacked the native Cmd-F browser search. To top it off, seems the maximum number of matches GitHub’s search returns is limited to 200 . I’ll excuse a search…
I recently stumbled across the Gershgorin Circle Theorem and thought it was perfectly suited to an interactive visualisation: The problem is I’m no web developer, and I don’t really like JavaScript. So, the eigenvalue computation in the interactive component above is written in Rust, compiled to WebAssembly, and wrapped up with some HTML and JavaScript. As the old mathematics adage…
Today ( 11/11 Pepero Day in Korea), I had the pleasure of attending a fascinating talk on Implementing Efficient Language Models under Homomorphic Encryption by Donghwan Rho (노동환) at the Seoul National University Research Institute of Mathematics’ 2025 11.11 Symposium . I am on holiday in Korea and didn’t want to miss this opportunity to learn more about homomorphic encryption - an…
Disclaimer : This blog post is a recap of exploration I did as part of the undergraduate Mathematics and Statistics Vacation Scholarship program at the University of Melbourne in January 2021. It’s been a while since then, so please forgive any inaccuracies that are almost assuredly present. The poster I presented at the conclusion of the program was hosted on the School of…