I started journalling when I was twelve. Blame the Stoics, or blame whatever it is that makes some kids turn inward instead of outward. I’ve been reading back over things I’ve written lately and I can’t always tell anymore whether it sounds like me. Or whether ‘sounds like me’ even means anything when so much of what I’ve absorbed, what we’ve all absorbed, has been shaped in some way, shape or form by the same LLMs we’re now comparing ourselves against. And with that, here’s a post on the difference between using a tool to say something and having a tool say it for you, and how I think we’re getting worse at knowing which one we’re doing.
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The Missing First Page of Most Maths Notes
A lot of maths notes feel like they start on page two. You see a theorem, then a proof, then an example. But mathematics didn’t descend from the heavens in perfect notation. It was made slowly, and often painfully, by people who couldn’t leave a problem alone. So here’s a post on why I think every maths topic should begin with four things: the problem it was invented to solve, the person behind it, the core intuition, and only then, the formal theorem.
On the Joy of Problem Solving
One of the things I didn’t expect to miss at university was doing school maths challenges. There is something very strange about sitting in front of a problem that does not immediately make sense. No obvious method, or a nice worked example hiding in the back of the book. Just your brain, a question that … Continue reading On the Joy of Problem Solving
The Case for Side Projects
I used to think (and honestly, I still do sometimes) that I needed to “learn everything first” before starting a programming project. I’d spent hours reading textbooks or watching YouTube videos feeling like I was “being productive”. But I’ve never actually code. Part of me was scared of getting it wrong, of producing something “rubbish”. … Continue reading The Case for Side Projects