Posts

I was teaching my partner some mandarin recently and I came to the conclusion that "yes" and "no" are very weird constructs of language.

We were practicing one day, where I'd ask her questions in English and she'd reply in Mandarin. I asked her a yes/no question and she replied 不, to which I surprised myself by pointing out that 不 is ever only used in a negatory manner. People who know some Mandarin would interject and say, but there is 不(bù), 没(méi), and 无(wú) that can be used in stead of "no". Yes, they can, but they're usually not used without context.

Let's look at some concrete examples to understand. [Read More]

On Thursday I decided to do some additional optimization to my Go code. This meant writing some assembly to get some of the AVX goodness into my program (I once gave a talk on the topic of deep learning in Go, where I touched on this issue). I am no stranger to writing assembly in Go, but it’s not something I touch very often, so sometimes things can take longer to remember how to do them. This is one of them. So this blog post is mainly to remind myself of that.

The values in Go slices are 16-byte aligned. They are not 32 byte aligned.

[Read More]

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]