Abstract Nonsense

This is the kind of book that’s normally squarely outside my wheelhouse.

I just bought an Xteink X4 Pro e-reader that snaps onto the back of my phone using MagSafe.

I discovered a neat way to derive Stirling’s approximation for the factorial in a succinct manner.

A counter data structure provides an abstract data type for a multiset.

I’ve migrated my static images to use Cloudflare R2 as my object store and image CDN.

TIL that godspeed does not refer to celerity, but rather is derived from the archaic sense of speed: “luck, success, prosperity”.

As of late, I’ve been trying to learn about cryptography more rigorously.

I had the opportunity to contribute another post for the CommBank Technology Medium blog.

I completed reading through Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann.

TIL that the great-great-grandfather of Geoffrey Hinton, “the Godfather of AI”, is none other than George Boole, of boolean algebra fame!

There’s an interview with Simon Peyton Jones*I’m a huge fan of his trademark presentation slides set in Comic Sans I highly recommend watching.

I’ve been accepted to read for a Master of Philosophy in Advanced Computer Science at the University of Cambridge and will be joining Corpus Christi College as a corpuscle!

The Basel problem asks for the solution to the infinite series of the reciprocal squares: $$ \sum_{n=1}^\infty \frac 1 {n^2} = \, ?

Continuing on from my collection of humorous mathematical aphorisms, today’s excerpt is an exercise from Calculus by Michael Spivak (4 ed.).

I’ve been working on a statistics library in Typst recently, distro.

I’ve always been a fan of eclectic words.

Recently I’ve been working on a statistics library in Typst called distro*More to come soon.

I really enjoyed this book, I thought it was an excellent read.

I’ve added an animated favicon to the site:*To avoid becoming distracting, it only plays once, on page load, instead of indefinitely looping.

I’ve added a /blogroll slash page to my blog with the list of blogs I read.

I’ve added a /ai slash page to my blog with my GenAI policy.

TIL that terminal emulators can opt to support hyperlinks via the OSC 8 escape sequence.

This March I read through Real-World Cryptography by David Wong (Manning).

Thank you, work, for lending me a Dell Pro Max with GB10 to hack on.

Up until now, I’ve been using Cloudflare Email Routing to forward all emails sent to the hello@abstractnonsense.xyz email address to my personal iCloud email.

At work, I had the opportunity to contribute a short post on Privacy-preserving machine learning with homomorphic encryption for the CommBank Technology Medium blog.

In deep learning literature, there’s a veritable menagerie of different activation functions that are commonly employed betwixt layers.

I completed reading through Programming Rust by Jim Blandy, Jason Orendorff and Leonora F.

As part of my recent quest to learn Rust, I worked through the Rustlings exercises.

Computer networking always felt like an area in which I was lacking after completing my undergraduate CS education.