Now

This is my now page. A now page is a detailed answer to the question “what have you been up to lately?”

Whereabouts

I’m studying at ucsb for the foreseeable future.

Done and still doing

• Recently I decided to switch to pure math, from applied math. I think the coding and numerical methods in applied math are not that interesting.
• In a somewhat dissonant move I also picked up a double major in computer science, mainly to study programming languages and formal verification, among other things. I am not particularly interested in software engineering as a career, however. Most commercial software built by companies these days is, as Linus Torvalds would say, “utter crap.” But I am open to writing commercial software if and when it would benefit the public good.

Future

• I’m thinking of starting a project called “How posix can you get in 31 days?” where I try to write as much of a posix compliant operating system as possible, from scratch, with a 1 month time limit. Probably using Rust or Zig. I’m fleshing the idea out right now.

Fun

• Lately I’ve been playing/replaying Disco Elysium.
• In lieu of Monster Hunter Wilds (which is impossible to run without a supercomputer), I’ve been playing Monster Hunter World and Iceborne instead.

Prose

Some stuff I’ve been reading lately.

Nonfiction

• Lectures on the Hyperreals — an introduction to nonstandard analysis
• Progress and Poverty — Henry George’s classic

Fiction

• There is No Antimemetics Division (also available as a tale on the SCP wiki)
• Coding Machines — a story based on the Ken Thompson Hack