Blog
Findings, know-how, essays, and the occasional rant.
Software and systems, cognitive science and AI, and older posts in Chinese from my competitive programming years.
Cognitive load decides whether you multitask or switch
A term essay: multi-object tracking says we attend to several things at once, and the psychological refractory period says we take turns. Both results hold, and the cognitive load of the task is what selects between them.
Four dimensions, same problem
A paper on Sider's four-dimensionalist treatment of the Ship of Theseus. Written as a state and a transition function, the four-dimensional view turns out to need exactly what the three-dimensional causal unity account needs, so it inherits that problem rather than escaping it.
The mathematics physics actually needs
A paper on Field's nominalism: if mathematics is only a conservative shortcut, its axioms could be chosen freely. Quantum mechanics needing complex numbers suggests they cannot, and the consistency the argument rests on cannot be proved.
Causation is contested only at the edges
A paper on Godfrey-Smith's proposal to treat causation as an essentially contested concept. The boundary really is blurry, but the ordinary use is stable enough that courts agree on most of it, which is not how a contested concept behaves.
Truth at the limit of a moving method
A paper on Quine against Peirce: defining truth as what inquiry converges on needs a notion of one theory being nearer than another. Statistics can supply that, and the standards deciding what counts as a method still move underneath it.
Linear algebra speedrun
Cram notes for a first linear algebra course: extracting a maximal independent subset, null space bases, change of basis, rank, determinants and LU, the adjugate, diagonalization, Gram-Schmidt, and quadratic forms.
Calculus speedrun
Cram notes for single-variable calculus: differentiability, equivalent infinitesimals, Taylor remainders, integration technique, the Wallis integrals and product, ordinary differential equations, and curvature.
DASCTF easystream3: recovering an LFSR from four known characters
A writeup for the easystream3 crypto challenge: the keystream hands you the register's state for free, and the mask is small enough to brute force.
转载 | 王开岭：是「国家」错了
转载王开岭文章，借德雷福斯案讨论国家权威与个体尊严的关系。
Blogger × Cloudflare Workers: Easily Solving Blogger's Connectivity Problems in China
Sharing a Cloudflare Workers script that reverse-proxies a Blogger blog and its image domains, fixing direct-connection and image-loading issues for Blogger in mainland China, with a breakdown of its page-rewriting and image-caching logic.
书摘 | 沉默的大多数
摘录王小波杂文随笔集《沉默的大多数》中的若干篇章。
分享 | 乌撒之猫
转载洛夫克拉夫特克苏鲁神话短篇小说《乌撒之猫》的中译本。