Recent content on Conundrum
Clickbait Title: Lazy evaluation. Background See Part 1 . Interim As previously said, this entire post is mostly motivated by spite. Now, sadly, this can be interpreted as some kind of exceptionalism or superiority complex which I hope to thoroughly avoid. The spite is instead rooted in being misrepresented to a wider audience of people, specifically ones which may be interested in studying…
Clickbait Title: Brevity is the soul of cowards. No, it’s not “so over” for you if you did something differently here. No, this is not accurate for everyone, even my peers. Yes, some details have been changed for reasons. I will forget things and say wrong things, I’m not pulling up my old notes for accuracy’s sake. There will be jokes until morale improves.…
Clickbait Title: The Birth of AI Gambling. We joke around a lot about programmers being awake at impossible times. Not sleeping for a night for a competition or a personal project is casually mentioned. Why is that? Sure sometimes you’ll be fixing up-time or only have 24 hours in a CTF, but come on, we’ve all worked into the night when we could’ve just gone to bed and worked on…
Clickbait Title: My greatest achievement in months. I’ve been writing a bunch of articles. I’m going to talk about what I wrote and how it felt. I’m obviously glad I kept myself more or less to writing an article a day. That is an achievement by itself. Making this something I needed to do greatly reduced me caring about what I wrote and more just that I got something out. This…
Clickbait Title: Gifted Kid Anthem (Remix) As much as I try to fight it, I tend to strive for comparison between myself and my peers. It gives me motivation to not want to fall behind, to not only continue to understand what they are talking about but to be potentially useful (i.e. better) in at least some aspects. On the other hand, it is very advisable to always search out new people who you can…
About a year ago, I took a path through some agricultural pasture. I was exhausted from work, longingly missing my bed and fridge. My 40 minute commute was threatening to turn into a 60 minute one, if I would not hurry to my bus. And as I was passing by a free-standing garage, I saw a bird standing proudly on top. It was a heron, towering over the landscape on its unnaturally elevated position.…
Clickbait title: Being Wrong Twice is more effective than being Wrong Once. So here’s a pattern in bad-faith discussions I’ve seen several times. A : I believe that bananas are fruits. B : No, bananas are not fruits. A : Why not? B : All fruits come from a tree and bananas don’t come from trees. B is obviously wrong here and we can even explain two different ways in which they…
Clickbait title: My OCs are having crazy fights to the best soundtracks. God forbid I know what art actually is, but I would describe myself as a person who has had little artistic training. I have neither learned how to draw, write or play an instrument beyond standard education, in which I was mainly trying to survive art classes. In stark contrast, I harbour impossible respect for the arts,…
Clickbait title: Why do I write like that. This article will lean a bit hard on meta-references and self-analysing. Reader discretion is advised. Having now written more, I think it’s a good time to look back and see what kind of stylistic choices I make consistently when pushing myself to write articles. Looking at the choice of topics, I would argue that I tend to write most about things…
Clickbait title: Don’t argue on the internet. There has a lot of ink been spilled about how to change other people’s minds, some people call it debate, others calls it campaigning, others call it propaganda. Changing other people’s mind is desirable for many, because it is seen as giving you power over them. The natural reaction is of course that you my dear reader should not be…
Clickbait title: Finally someone solved the the age-old question about what is good media and what isn’t? What do you mean the answer is subjective, how am I supposed to feel superior in my taste now. Now obviously, quality is kind of a stupid concept if you look into it. It also obviously exists, but trying to measure or debate it only leads to misery. We still do of course, and this is how…
I like to go exploring sometime. Today I stumbled on a cave in my garden. There’s a rough stone-cut circular staircase leading down a cylindrical well. At the bottom there’s a large bonfire. Curled around it, a large dragon, watching the shadow of the flames play on the wall. Obviously surprised to find a dragon so close to me, I hesitate. Since when has it been here? Why have I never…
Clickbait title: It’s just goddamn text files, how the fuck did you mess up text files. Usual disclaimers Obviously I take notes to remember things. I have sung the praises of Obsidian before and have since not been using it much, although many articles of mine are written in it. Look this article will have immense overlap with the best video on note-taking culture . What do I mean by…
Clickbait title: The SECRET connection between boardgames and theatre that videogames and cinema will never achieve. There’s a lot to be said about how easily we can now find entertainment at the press of a button on our phones. The economics of digital media are truly staggering to the point we can have a somewhat sustainable system of low-cost subscriptions that give us everything we could…
Clickbait title: Tertiary source complains. One of the things which lingers in the background of every social media diet is that the main topics of social media tend to be things not happening on social media. You may talk about your graduation on it, but the graduation is not happening on social media (I hope), it’s happening in real life. You are probably also not going to watch a full…
Clickbait title: Hey when I get inevitably popular for my great writing ability and someone reads out this article on a live-stream and the live-stream gets distilled into a YouTube video, be sure to watch the video at 4x speed. It is no secret that I have chosen YouTube to be a major part of my media diet. Only speaking about video content, I’d say 95% of all I’ve consumed in the last…
Clickbait title: Is Lean about to do the impossible? Some techno-optimism for a change. Disclaimer for people who know more about this than me: I am not a contributor to Lean or MetaRocq and am stepping into these programs as a Computer Science student and primarily a user with some interest in understanding their internals. Depends on what sphere of computer science you are in, but if you are…
Clickbait title: Not to judge, but why are you spending all your time complaining specifically about this? I think we are all aware of the concept of lying by omission. You make a statement that is not technically wrong but is clearly disingenuous in the way it does not mention something quite important. Well, I think the internet has given us a new way to do it. On the internet you tend to exist…
Clickbait title: A simple world with no contradictions. It is no secret I believe the desire for a simple explainable world is responsible for many ills from conspiracy theories to abuse of power. I also believe that the heightened competition in the attention economy is partly to blame for this. Nowadays you need to sell people a good story that instantly fits a comfortable framing. And of the…
Clickbait title: Individualistic fantasy in fantasy. Dragon is a strong word. It is certainly not meaningless, but it is very flexible in what it can be applied to. I do not think we can find some platonic ideal of a dragon, but I want to discuss the complex emotions the concept gives me. Dragons Firstly, dragons are powerful, certainly physically and sometimes also magically-gifted. In basically…
Clickbait title: Games where you lie to your friends. I have been and will continue to be interested in boardgames. I think they are a really fascinating discipline of game design, having completely different limitations that videogames. I think computer scientists tend to be used to stuff like infinite dices you can spawn or complex calculations you can run, whilst being starved for the magic…
Clickbait title: Gifts. Again. I’ve found myself critical of gift-giving on this blog before, but just as then (and with most things) what I’m really seeking is to justify emotional reactions. But introspecting to that has me thinking about this in wider concept. I think I could write this as an introduction or a conclusion: It’s good that people interact with each other. No…
Clickbait title: Not everyone can make good puzzles. I don’t know how common this experience is for other’s who have “always been interested in maths”: All my life, people who wanted to gift me something have defaulted to puzzles. Sudokus were probably the most popular. I don’t think I ever solved a single Sudoku in my life (maybe as homework at age 7?). I do not want…
Clickbait title: Local programmer cannot believe how good Rust is. I’ve taken a crack at learning C++ (again). I’m approaching this the same way someone would approach reading Shakespeare: It’s a classic, you gotta know it. The most I can say about it is that I’m learning a lot about templating and preprocessors. Having stayed optimistic with C++, I’ve tried starting…
Clickbait title: Getting what you want is not what you need. I consider myself to be a very satiated person. I’d say as soon as I was no longer limited on screen-time by my parents, I did not have much to wish for (massive privilege!!). Importantly this does not mean I am happy all the time. And a lot of considerations of adulthood are still sneaking up on me. Not to speak of the state of…
Clickbait title: That one YouTuber who keeps copying from ChatGPT and watching tutorial videos instead of just reading the Arch wiki. This is a discussion mainly informed by online coding forums, communities and open-source projects. The author is not a prolific contributor. I think the stereotype of the elitist tech user does not even need to be mentioned at this point. They think they’re…
Clickbait title: Algorithms are hostile. If you estimate my age or read other articles of mine, you are aware that I have grown up during the awkward transition period between chronological feeds and algorithmic recommendation systems. I know why people bump a thread, but only learned about RSS as a thing old people use. As my free time has decreased and my standards increased, I have come to…
Clickbait title: Why I use KDE. If you have the pleasure of being around Computer Scientists, you will find that they have peculiar ways to go about things. Now some of these things actually make sense, in the logical abstract sense, and everyone agrees on them. This is a myth. Name one such thing and I will find a Computer Scientist that calls it the worst thing. But there’s two other…
Clickbait title: Why nothing will ever come close to text. Is it cynical to praise your own medium or is it just practising what you preach? Everything which I will write here, will already have been said by experts in a more concise and constructive way. The first mass medium There are some clear material reasons why books became the first true mass medium (and for the same reasons architecture…
Clickbait title: Call your trusted parental figure and tell them what you’ve been doing all day. Warning: Autobiographical If previous articles on personal feelings weren’t enough, I’m now writing about a revelation that comes straight out of the self-help section of the book-shop of life. This video is obviously currently going apocalypticly viral. For people who don’t…
Clickbait title: Why YouTube does not feel fun anymore. Warning: Autobiographical My dirty secret One of the articles for this blog which has been in the draft-graveyard for years is one which attempts to enumerate what easily accessible online resources have influenced me. Although said article will probably never see the light of day (for boring reasons), it has helped me organise my media…
Clickbait title: Death by a thousand cuts exists for a reason. Before I can make my argument, I will need to warn of the dangerous confluence of geometry and anecdotal evidence underlying this. In normal words: I’ve noticed, that… and it reminds me of… Rules Compared to informal friendgroups, as soon as one creates some sort of formal setting, often for people who are strangers…
Clickbait title: A Modern Luddite Guidebook to AI Discourse I do not specialise in AI in my research. So what is AI anyway? Artificial Intelligence is an old and very general term. That being said, most people engaged with the internet in the last few years know that the term has taken on a more accelerated meaning. It was arguably birthed from the more measured hype around Machine Learning ever…
Clickbait title: I will fucking piledrive you if you insist on an answer given by ChatGPT again I do not specialise in AI in my research. In high school I wrote a paper on the philosophy of Wittgenstein and how it relates to the concept of a programming language . One central question was if computers would ever be capable of understanding natural language. I cited the GPT-2 paper as state of the…
The compressed row storage (CRS) format is a matrix storage format for sparse matrices, which is most useful for matrices which have a linear number of non-zero elements (compared to dense matrices having a quadratic number of non-zero elements). Storage The format takes a $n \times m$ matrix $A$ and turns it into the following arrays: The val array stores all the values of the non-zero elements…
A framing device for the role of Informatics in our shared world. This is phrased as if it is an objective theory which has found truth in the world. It is not. It is written in that style because that style lends itself to being a heavily abstracted theory. All mistakes are my own. Theory Informatics is principally the study of manipulation of information. This manipulation is typically done…
Motivation Given a complicated fraction, it is often favorable to split it into two separate fractions as such: $$\frac{1}{6x^2 - 5x + 1} = \frac{2}{2x-1} + \frac{-3}{3x-1}$$ But how to do that can be very obtuse, so here is a general guide for the most reliable (but also most time-consuming) method which uses systems of linear equations. Step 1: Factoring the bottom part This is self-explanatory,…
The formula $$ \textrm{Set}(x) = \textrm{Set}(y) \iff \left\lfloor \frac{x}{B} \right\rfloor \equiv_{S} \left\lfloor \frac{y}{B} \right\rfloor $$ where $$B = \textrm{Blocksize}$$ $$S = \frac{\textrm{Cache Size}}{\textrm{Associativity} \cdot \textrm{Blocksize}}$$ Motivation Learning about how caches work can be a very disorienting process to say the least. Worse even, learning theory may not…
This article has been adapted from an earlier PDF I wrote. Motivation Given that several operations in discrete mathematics require one to find the inverse of integers or polynomials in finite fields, it is important to learn an efficient algorithm to do so quickly. The Extended Euclidean Algorithm is the most primitive of these algorithms and essential for students. In this article, I will…
This article may require some additional technical knowledge. This article has been adapted from an earlier PDF I wrote. Motivation Alex wants to send Bernd a secret code $m$ explaining their plan to take over the world. The only problem is that local Iris-agents are jamming their communication, and therefore Alex cannot guarantee that the entire message will arrive unchanged. Is there some way…
About Me I’m a Computer Science Student who is interested in Mathematics, Formal Methods, Philosophy, Proof Assistants, Dependent Type Theory, Compilers, Boardgames, Programming Language Design, Education, Genre Fiction, Combinatorial Game Theory, Game Design and whatever I am up to since the last edit of this page. This vast selection should not highlight expertise but rather a certain lack…