This World and Me

In June 2020, I published a post on this blog that discusses onion routing , a method in computer networking whereby computers can send anonymous messages to one another. If I were an instructor at a school or university teaching about onion routing in some computer science class, I would demonstrate it to the class in the following way. Items needed Post-it notes or sheets of paper, one for every student in the class Envelopes, four for every student in the class The more students in the class, the better, but at minimum there needs to be five students . Goal Each student in the class, using the method demonstrated here, will be able to write an anonymous note to someone else in the class. The recipient of the note will not be able to determine who wrote them the note without convincing at least two other students in the room to reveal information. Procedure Preparation ( Optional ) Have every student in the class draw a name from a hat that has every student's name in it. The ...

Suppose you wake up in the morning one day, look at the clock, and see that it reads 7:00 AM—for this reason, you believe it is 7:00 AM. As a matter of fact, the time is 7:00 AM. Do you therefore know that the time is 7:00 AM? For millennia, philosophers have toyed with the question of what it means to know something: at what point do you not simply believe a proposition to be true, but also know it? One convincing answer used to be "justified true belief" (JTB). Here, the clock was a convincing justification for your belief that the time was 7:00 AM, and the belief was true because the time was indeed 7:00 AM. Because you had a justified true belief that the time was 7:00 AM, most philosophers before the 1960s would have probably agreed that you also knew that the time was 7:00 AM. In 1963, however, a man by the name of Edmund Gettier changed everything. Suppose that, unbeknownst to you, the clock is broken. It just happens to be stopped at 7:00 AM. However, by sheer ...

Applying for jobs is one of my least favorite activities, especially as a college student. The process forces you to confront failure, go outside of your comfort zone, and reflect on your strengths and weaknesses. It is not easy. Having been through the process a few times now, I would like to share what I think are the five most common mistakes that computer science students make when applying for entry-level software engineering roles (e.g. internships, new-grade full-time roles) and how to avoid them. #0: Underestimating the value of internships Before I proceed with explaining the five most common mistakes in the job application process, I should first mention that some students make the mistake of not applying to jobs at all while in college (e.g. thinking that they will have time to apply for jobs after they graduate). They are underestimating the value of jobs, especially internships. The easiest way to secure your first full-time tech-related job after college is to convert a j...

When you are a child, one year feels like a lifetime because it is your lifetime. When you are five years old, waiting one year for something means waiting a period of time equal to 20% of your entire life thus far. As we get older, this fraction shrinks. When you're twenty, waiting a year means waiting another 5% of your life so far. When you're forty, waiting another year means waiting another 2.5% of your life so far. Suddenly, the years seem to be whizzing by, and you wonder where all the time went. This simple mathematical thought process provides only a partial explanation for the common feeling among humans that time seems to be speeding up as we grow older. Another factor is memory. Children are constantly learning new things about the world they live in: how to talk, how to make friends, how to play games, how the world works. Our developing brains process all of this information and store it in the form of memories. When we become adults, we start to settle into a ro...

A few weeks ago, I moved to Seattle, Washington, where I now work a full-time job as a software engineer. This was the first time I ever moved somewhere permanently. Sure, I had technically moved to California in order to attend college, but while I was there, all of my important identity-related documents still had my Ohio address on file: my driver license, my vehicle registrations, my bank accounts, my credit cards, my voter registration. For the first time, I am now in the process of switching all of that between two different states. My experience has not been smooth. Although I didn't know it at the time, the trouble began on June 23, 2021—about six weeks before my arrival in Seattle. My parents had decided that they would gift me one of their cars, a gray 2016 Nissan Rogue, to use in Seattle. In order to reduce costs for my parents, they would split me off their auto insurance policy so that I could get my own, and we would transfer the car's title under my name, giving ...

One sunny day in 2018, I was walking home from class at UC Berkeley when I received a notification on my phone that almost made me trip on the sidewalk in surprise: it was a news article announcing that a federal judge had decided that the entirety of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (often shortened to just "the Affordable Care Act" or "ACA" or "Obamacare") was unconstitutional. How could this have happened? The Supreme Court of the United States had previously upheld the constitutionality of the ACA in 2012 in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sibelius , 567 U.S. 519 (often abbreviated to NFIB ), so it was unthinkable to me that some federal district judge six years later could decide otherwise. I was wrong. The Affordable Care Act is a complex piece of legislation that includes a plethora of different healthcare reforms. In my view, there are three key elements of the Act: Firstly, it required individual insuran...

maybe it's a gift that i couldn't recognize maybe i don't really need to feel satisfied —Porter Robinson, "Trying to Feel Alive", Nurture , 2021 This song, "Trying to Feel Alive", is the last song on Porter Robinson's album Nurture , which came out April 23, 2021. I have written about Robinson's music three times on this blog before: check out my posts about "Shelter" , "Fresh Static Snow" , and "Look at the Sky" . It has since grown to be among my top two favorite songs from Nurture . (It is quite possibly my favorite song from Nurture . I can't decide between this and "Look at the Sky".) In addition to being the last song on the track list, "Trying to Feel Alive" is also chronologically the last song that Robinson wrote for Nurture . For Robinson, Nurture was an immense effort that took seven years of creative struggle to materialize. (See my post on "Look at the Sky" for addition...

At 6:00 pm CST on February 11, 2021, a man named Willie Smith was scheduled to be executed by the state of Alabama for the 1991 murder of Sharma Ruth Johnson. Less than 24 hours before this time, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit ordered the state of Alabama not to execute Smith "unless it allows Smith’s outside spiritual advisor, Pastor Robert Paul Wiley, Jr., into the execution chamber". Citing "security reasons", the state of Alabama refuses to allow any non-prison staff in the execution chamber and has stated that it will not execute Smith because of the Eleventh Circuit's order. On the morning of February 11, Alabama filed an emergency application with the Supreme Court of the United States, asking it to vacate the Eleventh Circuit's injunction of execution immediately so that the execution may proceed as originally planned. A few hours later, the Court denied the application , and Smith was not executed . This case, called Dunn v. Smi...

Video game retailer GameStop (ticker: GME) made national headlines after its stock soared from a price of $17.25 on January 4, 2021, to an intraday high of $483 on January 28, 2021—a 2800% gain. Some fortunate speculators, most notably a 34-year-old Boston man named Keith Gill, profited immensely from this rise. Others bought in too late to the hype and experienced significant losses—on Thursday, February 4, the stock ended the trading day at $53.50 , an 88.9% drop from the January 28 high. In this post, I would like to discuss my view on why this happened, as well as some of the other views I've seen on the Internet and why I think some are a little unjustified.  For disclosure, I have an account at Robinhood, but I have not done any trading on GameStop's stock (or any other meme stock). Background Short selling When most people invest in the stock market, they buy shares of a particular company's stock, hoping that later on, they will be able to sell their shares to some...