Illusion Slopes

If you’re reading this, I finally updated the backend of the site to use a new framework—from Jekyll to Hugo.

I read a comment stating that git (a tool programmers use to collaborate on code, sort of like Word’s Track Changes) is not a version control system but a “system for creating a version control system.”

I recently learned about PageRank, the original Google algorithm for ranking webpages.

Owen Lacey blogged about a reality game show called Are You the One?

There is a pytest-ruff plugin for Pytest (a Python testing framework) that will automatically run ruff format --check and ruff check as part of your test suite.

If you need a fun fact for a corporate icebreaker activity, you can always say, “I was Time magazine’s Person of the Year in 2006,” then stand around awkwardly waiting for someone to Google it.

My team at work recently got to host a Career Pathways Takeover at Urban Arts, a nonprofit based in New York that teaches programming, animation, and storytelling education to high schoolers to prepare them for success in college and beyond.

This year’s application for Critical Language Scholarship from the US State Department is now open.

I cleaned up a few utility Python scripts for the GitHub: fetch_python_docs.py sets up a local mirror of docs.python.org on http://localhost:8004 for offline reference.

GitHub has a tool called Dependabot that automatically finds outdated package versions pinned in project configuration files and issues a pull request to update them.

Suppose we have data DD and a model that expresses DD as a noisy function of a parameter vector θ\theta.

I’m obsessed with this essay “Raising a person in a culture full of types” by Dan Brooks.

I wrote my first plugin for the Jekyll static website builder: a tool that recommends related posts at the end of each page.

Kagi Search: It’s a paid search engine that promises to give better results than Google and friends.

Awesome people occasionally reach out to ask me about the US State Department’s Critical Language Scholarship (CLS) program.

I remember taking mild offense when my middle school language arts teacher introduced our class to the thesaurus.

The target audience for this post is myself.

I still play the guitar like a piano.

Honey, baby, etc.

I didn’t realize I had a system for this until I did.

A side effect of my refusal to subscribe to Spotify (I just buy albums on Bandcamp or used CDs) is that when someone sends me a song to listen to, I usually look it up on YouTube and end up watching the music video.

Reasons (excuses?)

This Stack Exchange answer reminded me of a useful data science trick.

Many Rust projects, such as Topgrade, also publish themselves on PyPI.

I attached my real name to this site.

Why is the burden on me to prove that I’m not a robot instead of on the server to prove I am?

Phone (Android): Long press the hyphen button Desktop (Linux): Compose key sequence --- Work computer (Windows): If in Word or Office: Type two hyphens and let it autocorrect If Markdown: Use the HTML character entity — Otherwise: ⊞ Win + . character

Here is a local mirror of my interview on Manuel Moreale’s People and Blogs series.

Manuel Moreale, a tireless indie web advocate, recently had me as a guest on his People and Blogs series (local mirror).

Using a tip from Travis Hathaway, here is a shell one-liner to check if a Conda environment is up to date: conda update --all --dry-run --json | jq -e '.success and (.actions | length) == 0' It exits (-e) with 0 if the environment is already updated and 1

IndieWebCamp wiki: A colophon … describes how the site is made, with what tools, supporting what technologies.

IndieWebCamp wiki: You should make a “chipotle” page so when a friend is picking up Chipotle for you, you can send them a link instead of having to redescribe/retype your Chipotle order.

When I migrated from Blogger to Jekyll a few years ago, I left a bunch of posts behind, with the vague resolution of importing them at some point.

This post explains how I set up server-side KaTeX rendering to improve the load time on pages that include mathematical notation.

On Tuesday night, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol imposed martial law across the country for six hours.

I recently transitioned this blog to self-host its fonts (IBM Plex Sans, Sans KR, and Mono) from within the GitHub Pages artifact instead of calling the Google Fonts API.

Illusion Slopes is a personal blog.

Professional projects I’ve given a lot of thought to how to organize this projects page now that I work for a private company.

Why I am using conda instead of rbenv to install Ruby inside of the CI job that builds this static site.

I wanted to follow up on my previous post about the CLS alumni seminar in Gwangju to spotlight my favorite excursion of the week: our visit to the 88.9 Gwangju FM community radio station.

I had the honor this week of participating in the first ever Critical Language Scholarship Alumni Seminar (archive.org mirror) at Chonnam National University in Gwangju, South Korea.

These lecture notes (PDF) from Asu Ozdaglar give a bilinear program whose solution is the mixed-strategy equilibrium for a two-player, non-zero-sum game with finite action spaces—also known as a bimatrix game.

Most cafés have separate lines for placing your order and picking it up.

I live near a one-way street, and drivers keep turning into it the wrong way by mistake.

A footrace, but the objective is to run as far as possible in a fixed amount of time rather than speeding through a fixed distance.

I created a new logo for the site today: The old one was just a square with my initials, MK, which seemed a little too self-indulgent (not to mention that I share these initials with half of my extended family, so I can hardly claim them as my own): The n…

The best thing about fish is probably the lateral line, which sort of like ears for underwater that enable fish to sense and locate predators even in dark or murky conditions.

I am one of those obnoxious people who begins his filenames with an ISO date, like 2024-03-06_blog_post_idea.md.

On a recent visit home, I dug this 2007 Sansa Clip out of a box.

Mostly novels this time: 조남주, «82년생 김지영», a 2016 novel about (I have struggled to phrase this in a way that isn’t too dead-on) why it is so hard to be a woman in contemporary Korean society.