my unadulterated thoughts on everything
I started watching the series in April 2023 and just finished episode 1172, for an average rate of ~0.97 episodes a day. What an incredible journey! I originally set out to do watch this when I started diving in to Lawvere’s and Schanuel’s “Conceptual Mathematics”. I wanted to develop a routine for myself, I started […]
Some of my earliest blog posts were about Mesmer theory-crafting in Guild Wars 2. Seeing as how I’m both playing again and blogging again, I figured it might be a fun time to write a guide. The build that follows is what I’d describe as a “Flex Support Rifle Virtuoso” designed for Structured Player vs […]
Today’s post is about something a little taboo: self-diagnosed mental illness. I distinctly remember my Abnormal Psychology professor prefacing the course with the warning we’d see aspects of each diagnosis in ourselves, but they are not classified as disorders until they interfere with our daily lives. Let’s be clear that my goal here is not […]
Hello! Welcome to another installment of “How to get math software working in the Windows Subsystem for Linux”. Last time I set up Lean4 in Emacs using Debian, but this time we’re branching off into using a project called PreTeXt. PreTeXt is basically a system designed explicitly for authoring math papers and textbooks using a […]
It’s been a while since I’ve blogged, and today seemed like a good day to plant some new seeds. Recently, I’ve been trying to move away from VS Code and decided to go back to an old Linux staple: Emacs. It’s a relatively new machine, so I took notes along the way in hopes it […]
I regret to inform you that, as of this post, Ryan Ruff’s Freelance Mathematics and Tutoring Service is effectively closed. I had high hopes that something like this could work, but it’s time for me to except the financial realities of the market. I’ve tentatively accepted an alternative employment opportunity and, contingent on that offer, […]
Lately I’ve started listing my preferred pronouns as “he/they” instead of “he/him” in situations where I have the freedom to do so. I figured that since it’s only a matter of time before people notice, I might as well just be open and forward about what’s going on. Recently I’ve been entertaining the hypothesis that […]
In 2008, I made a major life decision to shift my career path from software development to teaching. After leaving my teaching position in 2022, I’ve been actively searching for a new job that combines these two passions as an “instructional technologist” without much success. Part of the problem is the difficulty of communicating how […]
At the start of the year, I decided I wanted go into business for myself as a “Freelance Mathematician” and begin offering tutoring services to the general public. I’ve been tutoring off and on for decades, but usually it was done pro bono for close friends or students enrolled in a class I was teaching. […]
There’s no ignoring the recent wave of advancement in artificial intelligence or AI. From the near photo-realistic outputs of Stable Diffusion to the pseudo-coherent text produced by ChatGPT, generative machine learning algorithms have taken the world by storm. As someone with a background in mathematics and statistics, these are without doubt fascinating advancements that I’m […]