I just remembered¹ a Cisco employee event my dad took me and my brother to when I was about 8, around 2003.

Former governor of Louisiana. All sorts of stuff wrong with him, but man, he had the quickest wit of any politician ever when it came to retorts.

I’ll use middle school and high school interchangeably.

This only works if your blog is noncommercial.

I had to implement reservoir sampling during an interview and I had no idea how to do that. So I had to figure it out on the spot. This is where all those years of induction paid off, since there’s a nice derivation based on writing down the definitions of everything and noticing that there’s a natural inductive pattern.

This requires Python 3.7+, since I use the handy dataclasses library.

The final disappointment of heroism is to find that a just war was, in the end, just a war.

A feature I enjoy using myself is not known to many users, as I found out last weekend. Besides undo with as many levels as you like, Vim also offers storing the undo information in a file. So you can exit Vim, reboot your computer and still undo changes you made. See the help for undofile.

– Bram Moolenaar (Vim maintainer)

Don’t eat on the plane, even if the journey is 20 hours long (or 36 in one case).

I think that it’s extraordinarily important that we in computer science keep fun in computing. When it started out it was an awful lot of fun. Of course the paying customers got shafted every now and then and after a while we began to take their complaints seriously. We began to feel as if we really were responsible for the successful error-free perfect use of these machines. I don’t think we are. I think we’re responsible for stretching them setting them off in new directions and keeping fun in the house. I hope the field of computer science never loses its sense of fun. Above all I hope we don’t become missionaries. Don’t feel as if you’re Bible sales-men. The world has too many of those already. What you know about computing other people will learn. Don’t feel as if the key to successful computing is only in your hands. What’s in your hands I think and hope is intelligence: the ability to see the machine as more than when you were first led up to it that you can make it more.

Skim this or read Halmos instead.

Just random rambling about Prague.

I really struggled to remember this definition.

This realization blew my mind: the Roman empire lasted long enough that there were Romans who learned about the existence of America.

This is unlikely to help you understand git, but I’ve been surprised before.

This is a Pixar short that played before The Incredibles 2. The Incredibles 2 is a fun movie, but its emotions are not as deep as the first. Bao, on the other hand, will rip out your heartstrings and choke you with them.