kmod’s blog

I see it mentioned as a fact that the universe is expanding. But I was thinking — how do we know the relative ratios of distance to time? I don’t quite understand how this all works, but it seems like roughly we have an equation distance = time * speed_of_light and we know that the […]

I was cheerfully living my life a couple weeks ago when suddenly I started wondering: do the real numbers actually exist? (I might not have been fully sober.) I spent some time researching this question and found the results to be remarkable, so I’m sharing what I went through and what I learned in the […]

tldr: there’s a financial instrument in the crypto world that is worth one price if you are fiat-denominated and another price if you are crypto-denominated, and this instrument trades at the fiat-denominated price. The crypto world continues to redefine its value proposition, so it’s a bit hard to try to argue against a shifting goalpost, […]

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how to improve my programming efficiency. I’m also trying to improve my productivity, but I don’t have much to add there. (I’m using “efficiency” to mean “output per unit time” and “productivity” to mean “amount of time spent working”, though I haven’t seen a consistent way of naming […]

Avid readers of my blog (which I like to pretend are out there somewhere) will notice that the theme has changed. This is because I migrated my blog from self-hosted WordPress to the hosted wordpress.com service and the theme was not available. The process left me with some thoughts about WordPress and self-hosting. Background I […]

I recently bought a webcam from Amazon (late to the party, I know), and when it came it was fine but not amazing. When I went through the packaging I saw a little card saying “send us a screenshot of your 5-star review and we’ll give you a $10 Amazon gift card”: I thought that […]

I’ve been looking into accelerating NumPy using TensorFlow, and the results have been pretty interesting.  Here’s a quick update. tldr: TensorFlow adds a lot of overhead and doesn’t speed up CPU execution, making converting NumPy->TensorFlow less promising.  TensorFlow’s ability to target GPUs, though, makes up for the overheads, but not all NumPy programs are GPU-friendly. […]

I’ve gotten a new problem in my life: my monitor has started crashing.  To be fair, the steps that cause it are fairly esoteric (using the USB ports, then switch the video input), but the failure mode is pretty remarkable: the monitor becomes completely unresponsive.  As in, I can’t switch the video mode again.  And […]