About
Welcome to my hypertext garden on the World Wide Web. There are many like it—but this one is mine. I’m Youwen, and I designed this website myself, by hand, down to the last pixel of margin in paragraph headings. Amongst its pages are a mosaic of scattered thoughts, notes, essays, and fragments of my life.
I currently study math and computer science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Favorite pastimes include watching classic movies and TV shows, playing guitar (poorly), video games, tinkering of all sorts, and long walks along the beach.
I like programming, somewhat. I hold the view of the Wizard Book 1aka the legendary Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs that programming is procedural epistemology—the act of learning and understanding enough about a problem to write code to solve it. The process of writing and iterating on code itself is the valuable portion. In contrast, the final code produced to solve a problem is merely a side effect of the process of discovering enough about the problem to write it in the first place. In that sense, I despise coding, the act of translating a known problem and solution into procedures for a computer. Coding is best left to so-called code monkeys.
I’m an adherent of the nPOV of the nLab: “the observation that homotopy theory/algebraic topology, (homotopy) type theory, (higher) category theory and (higher) categorical algebra have a plethora of useful applications.”
By the way, I use NixOS. See this page to hear all about my neurotic software choices.
History
I’m originally from Shanghai, China. I lived in the state of Utah for a few years as a kid, before moving to the San Francisco Bay Area. I attended 6 different elementary schools, 1 middle school, and 2 high schools.
Math
Broadly speaking the purpose of mathematics is likely to crush the dreams and self-esteem of young undergraduates. Before going to university I mistakenly believed that I was an intelligent entity who could think coherent thoughts and so-on. After a year of studying math I have come to the realization that I am merely a “tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear his shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house.”
Computing
I seek to create more reliable and resilient systems. To that end I contribute to various open source projects that aim to increase reproducibility and determinism in software systems at scale.
I run a purely functional (in the true mathematical sense) computing environment that enables the deterministic deployment of software, configuration, and infrastructure all the way down the stack. This includes both the system itself, which can never mutate state and must be rebuilt for modifications to be made, as well as a purely functional userspace, that keeps programs configured precisely as described and managed transactionally. My text editor is configured in a Lisp called Fennel and deployed in a purely functional fashion by Nix.
Additionally, I prefer to work on and with software that respects my freedom. In fact my M1 Macbook Pro runs an entirely free reverse engineered graphics and driver stack. All of my computers run a free GNU/Linux operating system.
Key benefits of my approach to computing include:
- fearless hacking: as the system is rebuilt each time it is modified, it can simply transactionally rollback to a previous system generation.
- text-based and keyboard driven: by keeping the system entirely deterministic (not just technically, but philosophically), I can ditch unwieldy graphical interfaces and build a text-centered user experience.
- trustless full source bootstrap: secure yourself from malevolent state actors and resist the KTH by bootstrapping the entire system from its free source code and a minimal amount of binary seeds.