Bounded-Error Log

Many people know that you shouldn’t do decimal calculations, such as those involving U.S. dollars and cents, with the floating-point numbers in most programming languages.

Here I go quoting song lyrics to myself again I have to confess I almost forgot to write a year-end post until today, New Year’s Eve.

(Background/disclaimer: I work at Anthropic, far from any efforts related to math reasoning or evaluations; opinions are my own.

In Vim, in Insert mode, if you type Ctrl-K followed by two characters, you can insert a special Unicode character corresponding to those two characters.

I’m still doing interpretability at Anthropic.

If you’ve dabbled in data visualization, there’s a good chance you’ve encountered the colormap viridis, which was created for matplotlib in ~2015.

In theory, the idea here is similar to when I was learning React/Redux and diving into SQL selects.

…it’s still you.

I want to add a second word in the title, something like “Koans” or “Vignettes”, but I don’t know a word with the right connotations.

Passwords.

“shouldn’t this have been published a few months ago?”

My seventh year doing Mystery Hunt with ✈✈✈ Galactic Trendsetters ✈✈✈, and after a hiatus it was in person again!

One day I’m going to run out of the energy to find barely adequate allusions for the titles and thematic music videos for the openings of these end-of-year posts, and they’ll just be called “2095 in Review” or whatever.

Code golf is the recreational activity1 of trying to write programs that are as short as possible.2 Golfed programs still have to be correct, but brevity is prioritized above every other concern — e.g., robustness, performance, or legibility — which usual…

This post is brought to you by “I am procrastinating other stuff by doing some long overdue maintenance on my blog”.

Don’t you hate it when CTFs happen faster than you can write them up?

Don’t forget to wear your mask… nc challs.actf.co 31501 If I had a nickel for every CTF challenge I’ve done that involves understanding the internal structure of a QR code, I would have two nickels.

Now that kmh is gone, clam’s been going through pickle withdrawal.

It’s clam’s newest javascript Calculator-as-a-Service: the CaaSio Please Stop Edition!

I participated in the AGI Safety Fundamentals program recently.

Last weekend Galhacktic Trendsetters sort of spontaneously decided to do DiceCTF 2022, months or years after most of us had done another CTF.

Last weekend Galhacktic Trendsetters sort of spontaneously decided to do DiceCTF 2022, months or years after most of us had done another CTF.

Sixth year hunting with ✈✈✈ Galactic Trendsetters ✈✈✈!

It’s another year, huh. 2021 is the first year during which I held a full-time job continuously.

A famous Trail of Bits post says to stop using RSA: it’s simple enough to make people think they can implement it correctly, but full of invisible traps.

Imagine you had a button you could press whenever you saw or heard something you wanted to remember.

I subscribed to Discord Nitro a month ago, but only recently did I start thinking about the full range of powers the subscription granted me.

This post is motivated by reasons very similar to the ones that motivated my React and Redux “tutorial”.

Did you know that it’s harder to become an MIT admissions blogger as an MIT student than it is to get into MIT as an applicant?

Note: if you are viewing this shortly after it’s published and somehow don’t want to be spoiled on Mystery Hunt, make sure this spoiler formatting shows up: this text should be spoilered; if it doesn’t, try shift-refreshing.

It’s a strange and darkly funny story — Tim Minchin wrote the album this is from, Apart Together, well before the pandemic hit and social distancing became the norm, and I assume I am not alone in finding that the song resonates unusually strongly as a re…

Advent of Code (briefly, “AoC”) is a series of 25 festive programming puzzles1 released daily December 1–25.

By a strange quirk of fate, I have started writing C++ for a living.

Not a very completionist run.

One thing many mathematically-inclined programmers run into when implementing mathematical algorithms, particularly number-theoretic ones, is that the modulo operation doesn’t behave how they expect or prefer.

Fifth year with ✈✈✈ Galactic Trendsetters ✈✈✈ (previously: 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016; writing with Random in 2015).

This is a weird song choice — I have not even watched the movie.

It’s December, so it’s time for a lot of things, including Advent of Code.

Call me maybe?

come get me http://web.chal.csaw.io:1003 This was a web challenge with a few pages.

Welcome to pwn. nc pwn.chal.csaw.io 1005 Ahhh, CSAW CTF.

not part of the ongoing series, but you can almost pretend it is.

part of the “what I learned after four years at MIT” series, I guess?

part of the “what I learned after four years at MIT” series, I guess?

part of the “what I learned after four years at MIT” series, I guess?

We interrupt the irregularly scheduled philosophical posts for some programming memes: Over the last few days, the Internet has divided itself over what the value of the expression 8÷2(2+2) should be.

part of the “what I learned after four years at MIT” series, I guess?

Part of a series of posts about what I learned after four years at MIT.

I wanted to write a post after two years at college about everything I had learned.

http://111.186.63.17/perf.data.gz Environment: Ubuntu 16.04+latex In this challenge, we get a gzipped file called perf.data and a minimal description of an environment.