Recent content in About on Thanh's Islet 🏝️
Recently, I’ve been solving more and more complex problems. From working on those, I found a “strategy”/method that worked: to lay out the information needed as a bunch of questions, then answer them. I want to share the idea because I think it’s very useful in these ways: Clarification: creating questions and answers is writing, and it’s commonly known that writing…
I’ve been pursuing a Master of Finance Engineering degree, and also been playing with Rust for a while, so I figured: why don’t I try to combine both by implementing an algotrading (short for algorithmic trading) bot? I eventually implemented some strategies and backtesting from scratch (spoiler: the result is worse than just holding, not counting trading fee). I’m on my way…
In web development and deployment, most software engineers are familiar with either: Separating the built SPA and the backend (Client-Side Rendering), or Return HTML directly from the backend (Server-Side Rendering) I recently (re)discovered 1 that there is a third way: embedding the built SPA into the backend’s binary file, and serving it directly. I think this is an elegant approach, as…
I’ve gone mouseless, or using the computer without a physical mouse, for around 2 months. The supporting tools I used are: Vimium: a browser extension for interaction (mainly navigation/links following) while browsing the web warpd: a program to control the mouse in other cases A drawing tablet: the last resort if warpd cannot make it To be honest, I don’t think there is a huge boost…
I’m going to cover what happened and the technical details of a crypto job scam that I’ve avoided. Let’s hope that it can be both entertaining and informative. It’s my second time encoutering this kind of scam. In the first time, I just ignored it as the sign is too obvious: a non-fitting job (frontend heavy job for a backend guy) where the recruiter is “impressed…
I recently took in a freelancing project, and one particularly interesting task is to convert unstructured-ish DOCX files to structured data, let’s say JSON. Intially, I estimated that it should only take me around 2 days for the implementation. I know what are you thinking. You are right that: […] overconfidence is a slow and insidious killer. 1 In the end, the task took me more than…
I find the problem strikes a balance between tricky (needing specific knowledge of data structure and algorithm) and interesting (solvable with first-principle thinking). However, after understanding the tricky part, and working through the thinking, and implementing working code, I still could not really explain the intuition concisely. Hence this writing. Let’s hope that it helps you as…
Overview Generally, there are two ways of web rendering: the first is SSR, stands for Server-Side Rendering; the second is CSR, stands for Client-Side Rendering. Both come with different trade-offs. Someone has compared that to a cycle, where we first started with SSR, then moved to CSR/SPA as the client-side application state became complex. Because CSR has its problems, we (re)discovered SSR 1…
My career began in Natural Language Processing, and I’ve studied the mathematics and theories behind AI extensively. So when ChatGPT took the world by storm, I approached it with skepticism. I viewed Large Language Models (LLMs) as sophisticated “next word predictors” – black boxes that ingest vast amounts of data and generate plausible word sequences from initial prompts,…
I think everyone who uses NixOS should have encountered this dreaded error (I’m using a “random” binary file that comes from Codeium, which is an code completion extension powered by AI): ./language_server_linux_x64 # zsh: no such file or directory: ./language_server_linux_x64 It is quite elusive on why does this happen. After taking a while searching and reading, I “sort…