→ 30 VIII 2021

hmmmm idk, this seems like an overgeneralization to me

this whole semester I've been slacking a lot even though I knew I could try harder, but at the same time I felt like even if I give a solid 30% from myself I can still pull it off, so that's what I did. there was no particular reason for it, many times I just didn't feel like studying. I wasn't tired or stressed, if anything I was too relaxed

right now I regret it, while I'm studying for exams I can tell that if I worked more regularly it would be much easier and I would learn much more, but yeah, it seems like I'm going to pass with pretty good grades. however, having had been more systematic I would get better outcomes, especially that I totally had the means to do that. what is this if not pure laziness?

"lazy" is not a negative word in my opinion, or at least it shouldn't be used as such. laziness is when I know I can do better but I choose not to, when I know I can make my future great, but instead I settle for making my future just okay. sometimes there is no underlying reason for it, I simply don't feel like doing more than borderline enough

but that happens sometimes and I think we shouldn't assume that if there is no reason then there must be a hidden reason, because it implies that the natural state of being is working hard and doing your best, which sounds a bit too capitalistic to me. I know for sure that unless there is a reason not to, I will be lazy, and I don't see why this is a bad thing

this was a great read. “Laziness Does Not Exist” by Devon Price

2-3 VIII 2021

it's 4am currently, i woke up after a 5hour nap and i don't plan to sleep anymore, time for topo

sleep: weird but going in the right direction i guess

concentration: fine

phone time: good

i am currently dragging myself through some of the most important theorems in multivar calculus i believe. inverse function theorem, implicit function theorem, diffeomorphisms and stuff. the proofs are quite simple but very long hence exhausting, my least fav kind of proofs. right now i'm doing topo

tomorrow (or rather today) i'm planning to do more topo and possibly finish my notes from that calculus chapter

there are two levels to this I think

the first one is how do you know how much time someone spent mastering a skill? and how do you decide how much time is average, how much must be a talent? both those pieces of information can be known or computed, but I don't think anybody performs such an assesment for someone else in a casual conversation before saying "you're so talented"

the secone thing is psychological. it is much healthier to think of oneself as "alright-talentend, very hard-working" than very talented. that's mostly why I reblogged this post, to deal with anxious thoughts "what if I'm not talented enough?"

sometimes it requires talent to be able to master a skill at a certain level at all, we're talking fields medalists and famous classical soloists, but to be ok-good at something it often suffices to be a bit above average and hard working. in general talent usually allows to work faster. being praised for talent is unhealthy, I believe, even when someone who is obviously talented worked super hard to achieve their results

and yes, those who didn't master any skill can be very discouraged to try when there is a narrative that it's all about talent. thinking of it as "mainly hard work" spares the question of "am I talented enough?" and inspires to just go and try

"Wow you're so naturally talented!" "You truly are gif-" biting you biting you biting you biting you die die die die I didn't work for thousands of hours to get called naturally talented fuck you fuck you fuck you I wasn't a particularly gifted beginner I just didn't stop doing it aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

eigenvalues are just the TLDR for a matrix

Me: *Removes my cat from my lap to do something else.*

My cat: Father is…evil? Father is unyielding? Father is incapable of love? I am running away. I am packing my little rucksack and going out to explore the world as a lone vagabond. I can no longer thrive in this household.

22 VIII 2022

I will have to give a talk soon, in a few days I'll be attending a student conference. I decided to prepare something about my latest interest, which is knot theory. what makes it so cool for me is that the visual representations are super important here, but on top of that there is this huge abstract theory and active research going on

I decided to talk about the Seifert surfaces. this topic allows to turn my whole presentation into an art project

other than that I'm studying euclidean geometry and unfortunately it is not as fun as I thought it'd be

my drawings are pretty, ik. but there is almost no theory

I had a thought that working through a topic with a textbook is a bit like playing a game. doing something like rings and modules, the game has a rich plot (the theory), and quests (exercises) are there to allow me to find out more about the universum. whereas euclidean geometry has almost no plot, consists almost solely of quests. it's funny cause I never played any game aside from chess and mine sweeper

commutative algebra turned out to be very interesting, to my surprise. I was afraid that it would be boring and dry, but actually it feels good, especially when the constructions are motivated by algebraic geometry

commalg and AG answer the question from the first course in abstract algebra: why the fuck am I supposed to care about prime and maximal ideals?

oh and I became the president of the machine learning club. this is an honor but I'm understandably aftaid that I won't do well enough

I'm stressed about the amount of responsibilities, that's what I wanted to run away from by having the holiday. good thing is I gathered so many study resources for this year that I probably won't have to worry about it anytime soon, or at least I hope so

omg so that's why so many empty blogs follow me. I've been blocking them at first assuming that they were bots, but at some point the usernames started sounding way too normal-human-like, so I stopped, my instinct told me something else was going on. lemme just unblock all the empty blogs now, damn, I'm so sorry to everyone who wanted to follow me but was blocked out of habit!!

fun fact!! it turns out that now when u make a new blog, tumblr forces you to follow 3-4 people before you can change your icon or modify your blog in any way!! this, of course, means that, yes, some of the "potential bots" many of us have been automatically blocking could have possibly been genuine new users who were only just seconds in to having an account!!! tumblr is literally screwing new users over!!!!

12 XII 2022

I have a test at the end of this week so I am mostly grinding for that, kinda ignoring other things along the way, planning to catch up with them during the christmas break

the new update for my tablet's OS brought the option to insert pictures into the notes, so now I can paste the problem statements directly from the book. I am not sure if this is actually efficient but it surely looks better and the notes are more readable

(I can't vouch for the correctness of those tho lol I just started learning about the Rouché's theorem)

I have been trying to keep up with the material discussed in lectures on commutative algebra and agebraic methods. with each lecture there is a set of homework problems to solve and I predefined a standard for myself that this week it's alright if I don't do the homework because grinding for the test is more important

I made some pretty notes on valuation rings

during the break I need to study finite and integral ring maps and valuation rings for commutative algebra course; resolutions, derived functors and universal coefficients theorem for algebraic methods course. I feel pretty good about the test that's coming up. sure, you can never be too prepared but so far I've been able to solve a good part of the problems I tried, so I should be ok

Weaving Stereographic Projection

I made a stereographic projection by weaving paper strips!

Here's a Julia package for the computation of the shapes of the paper strips.

GitHub

GitHub - hyrodium/ElasticSurfaceEmbedding.jl: The weaving paper strips: shape optimization by geometric elasticity

The weaving paper strips: shape optimization by geometric elasticity - GitHub - hyrodium/ElasticSurfaceEmbedding.jl: The weaving paper strip

Japanese blog post about this: https://note.com/hyrodium/n/n7b7cf03a7d91