Bigger on the Inside

Over the years I have come up with some fun ideas of binary classifying people. They say “those who can’t do, teach”. That’s a binary classification – teachers and doers. I once did something like that, with a longer elaboration: Hackers and Engineers Abstract Thinking Capabilities Some people have better abstract thinking capabilities than others. I’ll use an example that makes this a particularly dangerous thought. Consider two young girls, A and B, who are playing with Barbie dolls. [Read More]

This morning I woke up with Hungarian Dance No. 5 by Brahms stuck in my head. In my head, it’s a superiorly orchestrated, super high definition audio – much like sitting in the concert hall and being enveloped by the music of a live orchestra. I also have a very high quality copy of Hungarian Dance on my hard drive. I woke up at 5.45 am, went to gym, and returned at 7am and showered. [Read More]

I watched BvS today. I don’t know what to think about it. Overall, I think the movie was a bit of a mess. But I can’t seem to pinpoint why. Breaking it down by the standard things that people use to judge movies, there doesn’t seem to be anything wrong. Characters Character-wise, I liked it quite a bit. Superman is at his Superman-est. Batman is also amongst the most Batmanest Batman I’ve encountered. [Read More]

Do you sometimes feel like you’re not smart enough, not strong enough… not _ enough to do your pursuits?

At what point do you give up? I am so tired. The alternative – not pursuing what I want to do… is worse.

Argh,.

computer scientists have a very unfortunate way of naming things. Take S-expressions for example. They’re pretty a fundamental notation method for functional programming. I was re-implementing a variant of it recently, and obviously I named the package sexp Part of the implementation I wrote was that I had a “shortcut” way of representing the S-expressions internally – as slice (called List) and atoms, instead of actually making a linked-list (because child node access was faster, given that most of the trees are static). [Read More]

In the span of a year, I went from looking like the picture on the left to looking like the picture on the right.

This blog post is what I did to get there.

I went from 80kg at about 24% body fat to 65kg at about 14-15% body fat. Most of this blog post will indicate a much higher start point (of which I didn't have a photo of), at 87kg and about 30% body fat. [Read More]

This morning my computer crashed. So I rebooted it. I was in the midst of a project that had a lot of git branches (as I was working on competitive ideas to see which version would work best), and I couldn’t recall which branch I was on. I thought it would be a good time to update my .bashrc file to perhaps add a git status to my bash prompt. Afterall, there are some pretty nice prompt string hacks for git out there. [Read More]

I made a mistake in posting a women-hostile picture on Twitter yesterday. This is an apology. But first, let’s start with a recap.

Yesterday I posted this tweet:

This: http://t.co/wo4gsU5NCT (By now you should know that I think gender/identity politics is a waste of society's time)

— Chewxy (@chewxy) September 25, 2015

I first saw the picture on /r/funny. And I tweeted the picture after a brief view. I mainly tweeted the comic because I believe that politicking identity issues is generally a waste of time* Politicking of any issue is generally a waste of time, in my opinion. . I had neglected to notice that it came from @AntiFemComics.

This morning, a shitstorm ensued. I woke up and the first notification was from Nick Coghlan:

@chewxy Seriously, dude? You're going to blithely ignore all the evidence of structural biases and claim women just aren't interested?

— Nick Coghlan (@ncoghlan_dev) September 25, 2015

Upon reading that, I went and re-read the comic. I realize the horror that I have in fact misread the comic. And the issue snowballed on. This blog post will stand as an official apology from me.

[Read More]

Just a quick one. I was working on improving performance for a certain method of mine. I had found the hot loop * pprof is an amazing godsend. The days of dicking around in valgrind or cProfile are long a memory of the past , and I wrote a few benchmark methods to test some ideas. I was using the testing package’s benchmark function to benchmark the methods, and for a method, I had abstracted out some code so that it can run in a goroutine. [Read More]