Added tikzjax support

Just added support for tikzjax since I received some feedback about my hand-drawn diagrams are hard to read…now I can use nice graphs like these: source: https://tikzjax.com/ source: https://tikzjax.com/ source: https://tikz.net/ source: https://tikz.net/

January 25, 2025 · updated January 26, 2025 · 1 min ·  meta

Our legal (and moral) system flavors the jerks

Disclaimer: The author’s knowledge about the legal system by no means applies to anywhere outside of his homeland. But what is legal or illegal should be similar enough for the discussion below - at least for first world countries, I guess. That said, the author is not a lawyer and does not have accurate knowledge of any concrete laws. But one does not need to know (too many of) them for this article....

January 3, 2025 · updated January 5, 2025 · 8 min ·  thoughts

Why use binary search when you can guess where it should be

Why ignore 50% of what we know about the data1 Everyone learnt binary search in Algo 101. It is the fastest way (among comparison based searches) to find an element in a sorted array. All you need to carry out the algorithms is the comparison between the target element and the element at the current position. It is widely applicable because it assumes so little from the data. But for many real life problems, we do often know something apart from merely the comparison between the two numbers....

Work at the level of abstraction that works for you

Ladder of abstraction Well the title is obviously a tweak of the “ladder of abstraction”. For those who does not know, “ladder of abstraction” refers to the classic essay by Bret Victor. I am kind of stealing this terminilogy for the reader to visualize climbing up and down on the ladder of abstraction to make it easier to explain the nature of different jobs. The main question this blog post deals with is:...

October 29, 2024 · updated October 29, 2024 · 4 min ·  thoughts

Relaxation is the result of mastery. With thoughts about problem solving

Relaxation as a result of mastery, instead of a prerequisites In many sports/ crafts that I have experienced, relaxation is considered by many the prerequisites of mastery: In playing piano, your fingers, wrists, arms and shoulders have to be relax or you will find it extremely hard to press the right keys fluently; In online games that require fast reactions, rookies hands are stiff and they press buttons with unnecessary strength and range of motion, which stops them from pressing right buttons at the right time smoothly; In jiujitsu, being reasonably relax helps you to perform efficient moves, saving your energy and gives you more choices in different situations in which you have to adapt and react quickly....

September 1, 2024 · updated September 1, 2024 · 4 min ·  thoughts