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Entries from September 2025

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And now I am 46 (30 Sep at 23:56)

Hmm! Yes! I turned 46 years old, which was predictable. Also predictable, and predicted, is that I finished that darned video:

Rupert's Snub Cube

I also updated the project site with more data and links. I should have just posted this blog-post earlier in the month when I uploaded it; I don't know why I always save it to the last minute and risk losing 1,000 points. I guess I figure I might get several more projects done in the month. I did not: Instead I played Silksong (which is excellent, and you don't need me to tell you about this game) as a reward for finishing project, and since that is sometimes too hard to be relaxing (I do love how hard it is!), I also installed Cult of the Lamb which I bought at some point. The latter is charming and has great art and music, but I don't think it's a must-play. For some reason I expected it to be more like an action roguelike (a la Hades, say) but it's a bit more like a tech-tree resource-management farm-sim. The combat in the main loop is just not quite interesting enough yet. But I will finish it, I'm sure.

I have begun on my next projects, several of which involve cryptography.

I also made this 3D-printed file handle:

stderr

stderr

This began as a purely practical thing (I needed a handle for a file), and I actually assembled the original file before realizing my missed opportunity for a pun, and then decided that the right solution was to buy a second file!

Category: videos

(2 comments — 2 days ago) [ comment ]

Entries from August 2025

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Scoopert! (31 Aug at 22:34)

OK! I am better now. Let's strive to keep it that way.

I spent my free time this month continuing work on the proof described in the previous post, basically a big custom numerical search which was a neat blend of geometry (a little bit outside my comfort zone but I can wrap my head around it) and high-performance systems stuff (rational interval arithmetic) which is up my alley. It was actually going quite well (and maybe we will try to finish it, or an improvement upon it) but a couple days ago we found out that somebody beat us to it! A convex polyhedron without Rupert's property just went up on arxiv.org last week, and it demonstrates a synthetic convex polyhedron that is not Rupert (cannot fit through a proper hole in itself). Ah! I proved plenty of things for my Ph.D., but nothing that anybody but me cared about, so I was getting fond of the idea that we might crack an open problem. But at the same time I am happy for the authors (they emailed me about my paper in April; I probably should have written back! Do you know how bad I am at e-mail? If you have ever e-mailed me then you probably do know!) and happy that we have a resolution to this problem.

The other thing I'm happy about is that I finally know how the video ends (😵‍💫 but 😂) and I feel motivated to finish it forthwith. It's up to 45 minutes now, but the end is in sight! I'm in the phase now where even my procrastination is high-productivity (e.g. I have been repointing and repainting my house) instead of something like anxiously reformatting source code, so that is a good sign.

While I was sick I started DOOM: The Dark Ages, which is pretty fun. They did a good job with the combat, which is good because that's all there is, and it is quite hard (mostly fair). It's incredible how incoherent the "plot" is, though, almost like it's satire. I also played through Shantae and the Seven Sirens. It is very silly, as expected, but has great music and the writing was pretty funny. I've liked all the Shantae games that I've played, but this one was not my favorite; I think just too much of it took place inside underwater tunnels for my tastes.

(10 comments — 2 weeks ago) [ comment ]

Entries from July 2025

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I got sick, but my computer was fine (31 Jul at 23:24)

Hi,

Dammit! I got sick again. This time it was definitely Covid-2025 and it was pretty rough (I had a very bad sore throat, which I hear is characteristic of this strain) and it knocked me out of commission for a week during which I was expecting to have quiet time to myself to finish off this video! Instead the things that felt right to do were (a) play the new Donkey Claus for Switch II and (b) keep trying to prove that the one shape can't go through the other shape. I have One Last Approach here that I'm currently feeling pretty hopeful about, but also I wrote a lot of that code with Covid brain so who knows. (The real goal would be to produce some machine-checkable proof; no need to worry about virus-induced fallibility!) I'll talk about this in the video with some other results; I've got like 25 minutes finished at this point. On the upside, the computer has been completely healthy this whole time, almost like the problem was simply a bad driver 25 year-old webcam driver and it cannot actually be sympathetically infected when I fall ill.

I probably got Covid-2025 in JFK International Shithole, or maybe the humid undergrounds of New York City's Subterranean "Way" system, or in crowded comedy club, or etc. when I went to hang out with my YouTube buddies and also go to work. It's been 3 years since I got it last, so that's not a bad MTBF I guess.

Speaking of work: Exciting for me is that I am switching to "part time" (4 days a week) for the sole reason that I like my job but I also like having time for my gonzo programming projects and math holes, and would all else equal like to have more time for the latter. So starting this monday I will be 50% more funemployed and 20% less employal!!

I vow not to use my additional "free" time to just play video games, but I did play video games when I was sick especially. I am enjoying the Donkey Kong Bananza more than I expected. It is a very easy game, but also very fun. I am almost done with Tevi, by the same people who made Rabi-Ribi, which I enjoyed many years ago. It's a solid exploration platformer that I would definitely recommend to genre fans who are sick with Covid-25. For observant game design connoisseurs who have played the Metroidvania genre a lot, or too much (e.g., me), there are some subtle and smart mechanics to appreciate. Probably next... DOOM?

(6 comments — almost 2 months ago) [ comment ]

Entries from June 2025

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I got sick, and my computer got sick (30 Jun at 23:26)

Ugh! I did make a lot of progress on this darned video (I have about 10 minutes of high quality content baked in now) and was hoping to keep up the momentum this weekend but I got pretty sick. I thought all week I was just suffering headaches from this medium-severe heat wave we've been having, but I think it was also me starting to get ill. It does not appear to be COVID or Flu-A or Flu-B (it is cool that you can get a combo test for all three of these now) but it has kept me with minimal energy. The other, perhaps worse drain on my ability to finish my projects is that my computer also got sick. It has been struggling to install "Windows 11 24H2" for as long as that sounds from the name (24 is 2024, like COVID-19 is 2020), rebooting every week or two (interrupting valuable computational geometry) to give it one more try and then rolling back, which is annoying, so I was rooting for it to one day succeed. Last week it finally decided to stay on my computer, but right away I started to get kernel panics, which on Windows 11 are illustrated as ":(". I spent all weekend trying to improve the situation, upgrading every driver and firmware I could find, deleting everything old I didn't need, and all stuff that I hate. This was a machine that was extremely solid before this update, by the way; like I would regularly running a Premiere encode while compressing a directory full of files and playing Call of Duty Black Ops 6 and 100 Chrome tabs including more than one concurrent instance of gmail and Photoshop has been open since the last windows update reboot as well and 16 cores of computational geometry also happening at idle priority with 100GB of resident allocations. So this is a stark difference. I am reaching the end of my troubleshooting wits (a few steps down the list is I renounce Computing and go live in a cave with my polyhedra) but at least nothing has crashed since the last thing I tried (force remove some drivers I may not need so that I can enable Core Isolation) so I'm going to at least try to go to bed optimistic tonight.

I did make some actual progress on this geometry problem (not covered in paper) so now I'm actually looking forward to talking about that in the video. There's hope yet.

Speaking of idle priority, I actually finished Call of Duty Black Ops 6 for real now (I had done this previously, but then they released new crap, and while I was unlocking that I "decided" that I "should" also unlock the dark matter camo for every item in the game) and I think I've successfully put it behind me. I tried going for the polar opposite, which may be the game Crimson Diamond (it does involve murder but that may be the only thing they have in common). This is a cute old-school (~CGA graphics) text-parser adventure game, which reminds me of my Sierra youth, and may have been directly inspired by the Colonel's Bequest. Not sure how far I am into it, but I do enjoy it and so far it has been possible without any hints. Really for genre fans though. I'm also nearing the end of Stuck In Time (which may have previously been called "Loop Hero"? Something like that; they got cease-and-desisted and had to change it), which is a pretty clever idle/adventure game. The game has "idle" mechanics (lots of permanent upgrades; needs to run for some time in order to complete) but the core mechanism is designing the path that your guy follows through the world, and it's pretty active as a result. I liked that it didn't lean too much into the tower of exponent stuff; it's really mostly about exploration and making a good loop to let idle overnight. Pretty good pixel art and music, too. It is good if you are sick and working on a busted computer but want to be able to switch to another window to forget about that for a few minutes sometimes. Like writing a blog post!

(7 comments — almost 3 months ago) [ comment ]

Entries from May 2025

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Technically it is on a stovetop (31 May at 23:15)

Heya,

Earlier this month I spoke at the Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science's PhD hooding ceremony! The "distinguished" "speaker." I feel that that was quite an honor, and hopefully I did it justice. I'm certainly comfortable giving a talk but usually it's because I have something I want to talk about. These students are very talented and privileged and will do okay, but it's also a really precarious time to be starting your career (in the US especially). I don't just mean the chronic problems (out of control climate change, growing economic inequality, unenlightenment, and too many Star Wars movies) but acute problems like the US "government" trashing our research institutions, and technological monsters of our own creation. So I tried to give them some advice about how to maybe survive and maybe save the world. Alas, I don't believe it was recorded, and I just now tried to find any photos of it online and instead got sidetracked for an hour into reading old chess articles, so you'll just have to take my word that it happened. (If you happen to have photos, please send them; my mom would be happy!)

That was a proper distraction from putting together this darned video that I'm still working on. I finished my "big math" cloud analysis, and then running it again when I came to discover that I had incorrectly written "min" instead of "max" when trying to interpret the results. So that was an expensive cube. But the fixed results do look cool and I figured out how to render it in Blender (which information I'm very confident I will not retain). I really just need to sit down and narrate this thing with a screen recording at this point, but I keep procrastinating that for some reason.

A less justifiable form of procrastination: My 3D printer's site for sharing models is currently running a coffee-themed contest, and I noticed a conspicuous lack of coffee makers among the entries. So I made one. It looks like this:

Technically it is on a stovetop

You can see the project page for "instructions" (which abruptly end before any flame). It has all the internal parts and would work except for the fact that it's made from plastic; this is satire! Some people have tried to argue with me that you could boil water in it (referring to some possibly real demonstrations where you boil water through a paper cup), but keep in mind: A proper moka pot would need to generate steam pressure to force steam through the grinds; the walls here are a mesh filled with air bubbles and so they are a good insulator; although the melting point of PLA is higher than water's boiling point, its glass transition temperature is only like 65°C, so it would quickly deform. Also I turned the flame on to make a short video and it immediately scorched the bottom. I used glow-in-the-dark PLA for bonus points in the contest!

Also this month I started and finished Tunic, which was an excellent Zelda game. I think probably they could have done a little more with the combat (or just make you not have to do it so much), but everything else about it was great. The instruction manual thing is just a brilliant way to do the "Metroidvania" progression, and I was extremely impressed with the art/design work in the manual itself (from the half-width forms to the halftone screens). I definitely recommend this one if you like an adventure Zeldoidvania.

(7 comments — almost 4 months ago) [ comment ]

... May 2025 continued

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