the latest and greatest ramblings
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reasons i think that having a personal website is a good idea like minded people can quickly vibe check and learn a lot about you easy way to share ideas and send them to friends written log of your thoughts and posts, adds credibility when someone has been writing about something for x amount of years can show off your taste, you control how every part of the website functions and looks (if you…
i'm currently taking knowledge representation at university, a core part of this unit is logic programming for which we use Prolog . i seriously dislike Prolog as a programming language. i find it unnatural to work with and it's quirks irritate me. but this definitely a skill issue (see below image) in an attempt to try to mend my broken relationship with the language i decided to build a data…
How I set goals My goals for the rest of the year, when I like to set goals I prefer to set goals for systems not results, if I set a goal like "I want to get an A in x unit" this is a bad goal, since there are things about this goal I can't control. I could study super hard, do everything perfectly, all for my professor to crack the shits and fail the entire class with an impossible exam. Instead…
Inspired by alexey lot's of alpha in low status go first assume that everyone is a friend indifference there's no speed limit risks are less risky than you think. take as many as you can. spend 10-20% of your time reorienting everything is power-law distributed you can make yourself more lucky lot's of roi in being a good person you can learn anything everything is figure-out-able suffering is…
On a recent plane ride I read Chasing Excellence by Ben Bergon. I really liked the book and resonated with a lot of ideas discussed. It was one of those reads that manages to articulate some of your intuitions and then build on top of them in ways you hadn't managed to get to by yourself. Here's some of my favorite excerpts and quotes, I like collecting words so see this as a collection of words…
Simulation Link I was watching this video when the guest started talking about Cellular Automata . Earlier in the year I wasted quite a few hours on this site playing around with gliders, spaceships, ladders and other kinds of automata. With more time on my hands I decided I wanted to play around and learn more about cellular automata. I have no idea why I find them so fascinating but I could…
Recently this video came up on my YouTube, I liked the idea of making satisfying simulations with code and had some post-exams free time on my hands so I thought I would try it for myself. This was far more tricky that I thought it was going to be and also ended up being the first time I ever used high school maths in real life. I really enjoyed the project and learning, so here's a post to share…
I was studying for an exam and came upon this question Design an algorithm for finding the k-th smallest element in an unsorted array of length n that is faster than O(n log n) amortized. Analyse the complexity of your algorithm assuming k as a constant. (5 marks) This really stumped me, I couldn't figure out how do this in less than O(n * log(n)) time. But now after researching, I know. And I…
Something I have come to realise in my athletic career that is an important north star to keep in mind is that opportunities come to you when you deserve them the least. They increase on an exponential level in response to the opportunities you have gotten beforehand (granted that you made the most of them). Getting your first super-fight is hard but have a good performance and then the next one…
Quick little post to consolidate knowledge and quickly talk about a new algorithm and data-structure that I think is really cool. Disjoint set's are set's in which the union of said set's results in the empty set. Or in more normal speak, if you take all the common element's from both sets and try to create a new set then this set will be empty (the set's have no common elements). We can use…
Lately I've been doing a lot of dsa in preparation for technical interviews. My favorite algorithm and solution at the moment is using bfs (breadth first search) to find the optimal amount of steps to get from point A to point B following a specific rule or sequence. Examples of good problems where this solution is applicable are the coin change problem and the classic Min Knights which I'll…
Today I absolutely bombed a technical interview. We are talking about levels of stuttering and brain-fog that I didn't know I was capable of. But determined to make this a learning experience and not something that happens ever again I thought I would write down the experience and what I've learnt. About the interview The interview was for a summer internship (software dev) at a pretty large…
Stumbled upon this guy when doing some research into the origins of catch-wrestling and thought he was awesome. Ad Santel or his real name Adolph Ernst was one of the greatest practitioners of catch wrestling. The coolest aspects of his life can be summarised as World Light Heavyweight Catch Wrestling Champion Wants to challenge himself more Decides to challenge the best judoka in the world in…
Grappling is my obsession and has been for the last few years. I’m also very interested in software, especially in how software can be used to improve human performance . I am convinced that there are numerous ways that software can improve human performance in combat sports, since my focus is grappling sports such as wrestling, submission grappling and Judo I’ll focus my scope on these rule-sets.…
One of the things I've found trying to train like an elite athlete and still grind personal projects and code cocurrently is sometimes I'm dead tired which leads me to be less productive behind my keyboard. One of the ways I've worked around this is by allocating tasks based on my mental energy, this assures that there is always "something to do" and no time that could be spent programming is…
Today I was watching this video from Alex Hormozi, Alex is a bit of a "business guru" on YouTube but personally I see him more of a philosopher and see his advice as beneficial to general life instead of to the specific endeavor of Business. I thought the video had some great ideas. Since I don't want to forget these good ideas I started taking notes on some of the ones that stuck out to me the…
Post content clarity Short summary of a framework from Chris Willaims that's been super useful in my day to day life. I all too often find myself consuming content that I don't actually want to be consuming or that I regret watching afterwards. Chris explains that the reason this happens is because the heuristic most people use when deciding what content to consume is "is this captivating or not".…
To be totally honest, at the moment, I don't really know what I'm doing. I've got a rough version working, but it's far from optimal. I thought I would write this to try to figure it out for myself, consolidate my knowledge and see if anyone else has any ideas. What is spaced repetition ? If you've ever used anki. That's spaced repetition. If you've never used anki, think of spaced repetition as…
This post is intended to talk about what kenku.org offers; it also acts as an onboarding guide for new beta-users. I expect this to change over time as I continue working on the project. For those who don't know what kenku.org is, it's my current project that intends to be a kind of smart-journal for grappling sports. Helping athletes keep track of, and manage their training sessions. It's…
I miss coding pre-chatpgt. It's an amazing technology but I’ve realized that using it over the last year has severely negatively impacted my skills as a programmer. Moreso, it seems like we’re heading into a future where the large majority of code is AI generated. To me this seems like going from artisans making pots by hand to Ikea making thousands of (almost) indistinguishable pots at the same…
For context: I drink a lot of caffeine and like a lot of people have developed a bit of a tolerance. I estimate my daily intake is anywhere from 120-300mg everyday. There were a couple things that started to annoy me about developing a tolerance. Caffeine was less effective I needed a certain amount of caffeine to hit my “baseline” I realized that if I need something to hit baseline then it’s not…
I wanted to write a post about what I've been doing in my first week of university break. Kenku (Currently Beta testers only) is an application that I'm busy developing that hopes to help combat sports athletes better manage their training sessions and streamline their learning and skill acquisition. I see it as a mobile app in the future but for now I'm building it on the web with the SuKit stack…
Epistemology is fucked. Knowing things, and knowing that you know things is really hard. After learning about philosophical skepticism , induction and other brain-breaking epistemological problems in university. I adamantly decided that since knowing things was impossible I was just going to start believing in whatever I thought was cooler. I quickly became a flat earther just because I thought…
Most people look at being bored as wasted time, time that could have been spent experiencing, making memories or learning. Sure. Sometimes that’s true but by embracing and seeking intentional boredom I believe that boredom can become a high ROI activity. When you don’t give your brain any stimulation it starts to create its own. This often manifests as either organizational or creative thought…
These two posts pushed me over the edge when i was tossing up about whether or not to start a blog Ben khun Alex Guzey And also great writing advice from Scott Alexander here
I've finally decided to go ahead and start a blog. "Blog" is probably pushing it, to be honest. You can think of this as a collective home for all of my ramblings that won't get me canceled. I've been blog-curious ever since I found Alex Guzey, but what finally pushed me over the edge was Ben Kuhn's, Why and how to write things on the Internet. (Both amazing writers. You should check them both…