It was a glorious spring day, the kind of day when all the pent-up loneliness of the night dissipates into the beautiful blue vastness of the desert sky, when the mind is free to wander or dream or think of nothing at all, when one is happy just to be alive.

In my last post, I talked about using Vim conceal to create my own little syntax.

Whenever someone sees my editor, this is always the first thing they ask about.

A lot of the time, users are discouraged from making feature requests to a project because the developers don’t want extra work. See here, here, and here.

Paul Hilfinger is famous for answering student emails in the middle of the night. No one seemed to know why he was awake that late.

A couple days ago, I decided to read OpenAI’s REPTILE paper. I decided to see how the algorithm worked in practice by implementing it for the simple case of a sine curve.

Working on Introduction to Smooth Manifolds by Loring Tu (AKA \(L^2\)) with Charles.

Sometimes good advice fails and you need a dramatic example. So here’s mine.

All this time spent reading about distraction thankfully proved to be more than just another distraction.

Today I grasped the difference between the differential and the derivative (only took 6 years -_-), lost my fear of \(dx\) as a single symbol (until learning the exterior derivative changes that into 2 symbols again), and finally got a hint as to why transposes pop up in weird places in “matrix calculus”.

(This is not meant to show you how to solve the problem, just what the solution does in the most important special case).

TLDR:

No need to build OpenCV from scratch, a task almost as hard as getting the projector dongles to work when you plug them in.

(I sat on this post for a while, but rather than let it rot in my drafts, I decided to publish it even though it’s lacking something.)

This is for anyone trying to be more than just good.

Spent another fun afternoon on the BART.