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

Reinventing Catalan numbers

Counting binary trees I was thinking about of the problem of balancing a binary tree, and my mind stumbled across to the question “How many different binary trees with labelled nodes can you make without changing the traversal order?”. After figuring out the answer myself I realized that the numbers of such binary trees are just Catalan numebrs (I was not really into combinatorics - now I am). For example, the following has traversal order 1->2->3->4->5->6->7...

August 10, 2024 · updated December 28, 2024 · 3 min ·  mathematics

From casual description of Turing Machine to the density of uncomputable functions

Defining the machine by describing it In Sipser’s Introduction to the theory of computation, a alternative way of defining a Turing machine (other than defining the formal 7-tuple, which is a PITA) - by its “description”. Example (from the proof of $A_{TM}$ is deciable): M = “On input <B, w>, where B is a DFA and w is a string: 1. Simulate B on input w. 2. If the simulation ends in an accept state, accept ....

Why do I hate using chatGPT to replace search engines

My pc is overheated how do i cool it down because it is my life1 Someone said that chatGPT will replace Google. Some kids/ early teenagers do often ask chatGPT for things that could have been found by Googling. I really hate the idea of replacing search engines by chatGPT. The problem I have with it is not really about AI, but about how do we interact with it. When we were kids and learnt how to use search engines, we acquired the skills of capturing important parts of the questions in our minds and turn them into keywords....

July 30, 2024 · updated August 13, 2024 · 3 min ·  thoughts