Codaholic

This is a short writeup on my cycling experience in Chennai that I sent to a newspaper.

Just some fun working out relativistic rocket physics .. of the kind presented in Project Hail Mary.

Recently I got curious about p-adic numbers and was wondering how to construct them just using lambda calculus.

Damn!

I recently thought-encountered a physics situation in which all charges appear stationary and yet a magnetic field appears.

One day I just happened to wake up thinking of Fermat’s last theorem and an urge to try and get a feel for why it is plausible at all.

Status: Draft (and will likely remain so due to the spirit of the thing) I came across mathematician Timothy Gowers’ youtube video - A strange determinant some time ago.1 In that video, he captures in real time his approach to a maths problem he hadn’t so…

Will Crichton in Evaluating Human Factors Beyond Lines of Code recapped and outlined how programmers are users too and so programming languages need to be looked at through the HCI lens.

Matrix exp and log calculations typically involve eigen-decomposition which is not very GPU friendly.

Sort of a fun “what if?”

Ok, I was nerd-sniped by the problem at https://xkcd.com/356/ .

(Status: draft) I’ve long held a view in my mind that the very well known Pythagorean “theorem” is not a “theorem” – in the sense of being able to be derived from a set of axioms through logical deduction.

I’ve never quite felt that I understood what “measurement” means in quantum mechanics and my recent engagement with quantum computing surfaced this rather starkly.

(This post was originally posted on the Imaginea blog on 27 May 2016.

Constrained randomness is useful in adding a dash of variety to computer composed music.

There is no dearth of explanations of the Fourier transform on the internet.

Kurals are posted in public transport in Chennai - trains as well as buses.

In issues of policy and negotiations between countries on actions to be taken to mitigate climate change, the country-level figures that get discussed are either total emissions or per capita emissions.

(This note on Alain Aspect getting the 2022 Nobel prize was shared by Prof.

Alonzo Church’s insight that lambda is sufficient to express all of computation is a non-intuitive stunning revelation.

THIS IS A DRAFT v1 as of 9 June 2022.

This is a post by my kid, His first post!

My kid’s math teacher recently posted a puzzle for the parents that got me down a rabbit hole of sorts and made me reflect on a number of things.

When talking about vector spaces, the notion of a dual vector space seems to often be introduced via postulates, such as in the excellent theoretical minimum series by eminent physicist Dr.

As a TLA+ newbie, I found the fairness (weak and strong) formulae in TLA+ a bit hard going initially, so sharing the way I managed to wrap my head around it in case it is of help to others.

(originally posted on the Imaginea Labs blog - https://labs.imaginea.com/inai-rest-in-the-small/) The Inai project (forked here) began as a light hearted attempt to explore the consequences of bringing REST principles to organizing components within a sin…

The Matrix Calculus You Need For Deep Learning (MCYNDL) is a great summary of what you need and expands starting from pretty much the basics.

Tools in the “Scientific Machine Learning” (SciML) space have been getting more sophisticated and general purpose.

The async/await facility in ES5 is perhaps the single biggest readability boost to async code in Javascript - both in NodeJS and in client-side JS code.

This is a stub post linking to material presented during my talk titled “I’m LisP.

I gave a talk at the “Mixed Nuts @ Pramati” meetup on 2019-08-24 10am-12pm on WebAssembly.

A prized principle of design is the hiding of unimportant details from the users of a product that enables them to work with it without getting overwhelmed by its possibly complex inner workings.

It’s hard these days to impress kids with stuff computers can do that felt like magic back in the early days.

Collecting a bag of what I think are good ideas in the history of programming, which lead to better thinking about system design, implementation and evolution.

(Status: Draft) We saw how we can try to calculate derivates of a function while evaluating the function in the first and second posts on automatic differentiation.

In the earlier post, we saw how we can calculate the derivative of a function as a function itself.

At Pramati Chennai, we’ve been having a series of sessions on math.

(This was originally written on May 25, 2015.

I gave a talk last evening at a meetup at Navis giving a soft introduction to machine learning for an audience of mostly developers and QA engineers.

ECMAScript’s new async functions and generators simplify working with concurrent I/O code.

My son is learning about integers at school.

I loved Naseeruddin Hodja stories when I was a kid.

I happened to have picked up quantum mechanics from Feynman’s lectures and Dirac’s book before I got around to my main stream theory of linear filters during my B.Tech.

async and await are, I think, the best thing to happen to Javascript, though I’d very much like something like sweet.js so I can invent it when I needed it most.

(Cross posted from Imaginea Labs).

Blockchain tech, especially smart contracts, are the hot new “internet”.

Can we have a signin/signup flow that is email-based and passwordless similar to a “forgot password” flow but where the URL will work only for the initiator, and only once per signin?

Recently, many techies have spilt words against doing the Google interview process.

When asking software engineers for an estimate of the time required to build something, I often find them guessing the time taken instead of doing the work to estimate it.

Traffic in any major Indian city can seem crazy to an outsider.