One year and one month ago I decided to post a technical article / blog post once per week. Still going strong. Some of them are weak, but mostly I’m happy with the results. Apparently I enjoy writing about technical stuff.
For example, recently I told someone about quantum pseudo-telepathy, and promptly realized I didn’t understand the details when I tried to explain it. I decided to spend the time to figure it out, down to at least the level of a quantum logic circuit. The Wikipedia article was zero help, just confusing me even more. So I started reading sources until I understood it well enough to write about how to simulate it. It takes me up to ten seconds per written word (counting every revision) to write a post so it took quite a lot of time to get those ~4.5k words down the way I wanted.
Another post I enjoyed writing, and more in tune with Less Wrong’s subject matter, was Solomonoff’s Mad Scientist. It just talks about a hypothetical machine that picks actions that maximize the prediction entropy of a Solomonoff Inductor (it is definitely not friendly).
In the near future I’m hoping to come up with a nice simple game to demonstrate making something “un-map-hackable” via secure multi party computation. It’s simplest where there’s three players, and I’ve already got the math and the code for the mechanism worked out for that case, but I haven’t come up with something trivial enough to demonstrate it.
Having an end goal of explaining what I did has pushed me to finish more projects, instead of just starting them.
One year and one month ago I decided to post a technical article / blog post once per week. Still going strong. Some of them are weak, but mostly I’m happy with the results. Apparently I enjoy writing about technical stuff.
For example, recently I told someone about quantum pseudo-telepathy, and promptly realized I didn’t understand the details when I tried to explain it. I decided to spend the time to figure it out, down to at least the level of a quantum logic circuit. The Wikipedia article was zero help, just confusing me even more. So I started reading sources until I understood it well enough to write about how to simulate it. It takes me up to ten seconds per written word (counting every revision) to write a post so it took quite a lot of time to get those ~4.5k words down the way I wanted.
Another post I enjoyed writing, and more in tune with Less Wrong’s subject matter, was Solomonoff’s Mad Scientist. It just talks about a hypothetical machine that picks actions that maximize the prediction entropy of a Solomonoff Inductor (it is definitely not friendly).
In the near future I’m hoping to come up with a nice simple game to demonstrate making something “un-map-hackable” via secure multi party computation. It’s simplest where there’s three players, and I’ve already got the math and the code for the mechanism worked out for that case, but I haven’t come up with something trivial enough to demonstrate it.
Having an end goal of explaining what I did has pushed me to finish more projects, instead of just starting them.