As part of my final year of undergrad I completed my thesis/final project “Restricted-dimension subgradient descent: asymptotic bounds on error” under the supervision of Dr. Nicholas Harvey. I’m now posting it here: thesis. A write-up will follow soon!
Logs 2020-05-25: The Addition of Comments
There’s not much to update this week, I’ve mostly just been doing lifestyle adjustments in preparation for my remote internship, which starts for me in a week.
Comments are open for the first time on this blog. This was definitely a daunting decision to make, but I found it worthwhile. My social media addiction post last week got a really good response; I have two comments on the post and several other people reaching out to me on private channels, and some good conversations started.
Trying to understand social media addiction
I’ve spent a little bit of time combing through research papers about social media, mostly by using Google Scholar. I didn’t have a particular goal in mind when setting out on this exploration, but I was primarily interested in the links between social media usage and mental health, as well as the analysis of social media addiction (how prevalent it is, its forms, patterns that differ among cultures and are common along cultural lines, etc).
Logs 2020-05-11: Sequences of Sets
Here’s a quick little math one.
In a probability theory class that I was sitting in on, one of the core concepts taught was the limit infimum and limit supremum of a sequence of sets. If \( A_n \) is a sequence of sets (that are all subsets of some larger set \( E \)) then the two constructs are also known as \( A_n \) almost always and \( A_n \) infinitely often respectively.
Update: A Bag of Resistors
Hi all, I’ve been trying to post every Monday the past few weeks; this week I missed it in order to instead spend time on my side project, A Bag of Resistors, now live. It was a lot of fun putting it together and I hope it proves useful to people. I’ll make a writeup about it soon.
Logs 2020-04-27: Learning Kaggle
This past week I tried my hand at the Titanic Kaggle competition. The goal of this contest is to predict whether a given passenger on the Titanic survived the disaster based on data collected about the attributes of passengers. Here I’ll be writing some of my reflections on my experience for those in a similar situation; doing this has made me realize that ML sometimes has some pretty strange nuances.
Quarantine Logs 2020-04-20
I’m going to try to do this weekly. I’m not the kind of person to be able to pull out a full-fledged technical project with a write-up every week (last week was more of a half-finished technical project with a full-fledged write-up, to be honest), so a lot of these weekly posts will be a lot more chill. Tomorrow, I have my very last final exam of my undergrad (go me!
Quarantine Logs 2020-04-13: Circuit-Sim Progress!
Been a week! This is by far the most frequently I’ve ever posted. I’m hoping to keep it up.
I’m happy to update that I made a little progress on the circuit simulator I’ve been working on. Here I’ll get into some of what that’s all about in a little bit more detail. All the relevant code is up on Github, though it’s really bare-bones and without documentation as of the time of writing.
Learning about circuit analysis introduced me to the concept of nodes. A node is a point in a circuit where two or more components meet. This concept is important because of Kirchhoff’s Current Law, which states that the sum of currents leaving a node is 0.
$$ \text{Current leaving node $i$} = \sum_{j \in N(i)} I_{i,j} = 0 $$
Here’s an example:
Quarantine Logs 2020-04-06
This is my first post in a while, and unfortunately I don’t have a new technical project to show off. As of writing, I’ve been in the COVID-19 quarantine for just over three weeks now. I’m set to finish my undergraduate degree this term, and my classes have gone entirely online, including exams.
My graduation ceremony is postponed indefinitely, effectively cancelled for the May term. Perhaps this is apt - this year I was in the middle of learning for myself to put less personal importance and emotional weight on accolades and ceremony.
Moving to Hugo and Netlify
I just moved this website over from my makeshift homemade setup on my self-hosted Digital Ocean box to a more convenient stack. See the very first post here to see what the old stack looked like.
I’m using Hugo with the whiteplain theme, keeping some of the simplicity of the old design. I’m currently hosting on Netlify
It takes a nontrivial amount of work to migrate a website across setups like this.