Link blog

I have come to understand that I really enjoy learning about parses, compilers, VMs, and other things along these lines. For example, I really like implementing parsers. (I'm not sure why, though...)

I have very limited knowledge of C but it looks like the final program is simple and short enough (250 lines of code) that I'd be able to follow the full tutorial and implement it in C. I started reading it and the prose looks quite accessible, so if you're into lower-level stuff, give this a read!

The TL;DR is that this is a friendly challenge to get you to write computer programs that create generative art. They give you a guiding prompt for each day of January – which you are free to ignore – and then you share your creations online. I'm “pinning” it here as something I'd love to do but at the same time I don't consider essential enough to actually carve out the time to do it during January... Maybe I'll get to one or two...

With 2025 almost starting, I've seen a number of people talking about the fact that \(2025 = 45^2\), and since \(45\) is a triangular number, that gives rise to two fun formulas to compute \(2025\). First, since \(45\) is a triangular number, you get

\[ 2025 = 45^2 = (1 + 2 + 3 + \cdots + 8 + 9)^2 ~ .\]

The link to the Wikipedia page about squared triangular numbers also gives a beautiful geometrical demonstration that the formula above is equal to the sum of the cubes of the same integers:

\[ 2025 = 1^3 + 2^3 + 3^3 + \cdots + 8^3 + 9^3 ~ .\]

I've been using a Macbook for 2 or 3 years and there are things in this guide I'm doing/using already, but there are also other tips that I want to take a better look at and ponder about. In particular, the list of apps recommended and the customisation of iTerm2 look like sections I want to devote some time to.

This year I've been solving Advent of Code consistently and for day 23 I had to implement a small algorithm that finds clicks in a graph. My recursive function isn't particularly clever but stands at 5 lines of code:

def find_clicks(click, nodes, edges):
    for idx, node in enumerate(nodes):
        if click <= edges[node]:
            yield from find_clicks(click | {node}, nodes[idx + 1 :], edges)

    yield click

nodes is a list of all the vertices in the graph and edges is a mapping from vertex to set of neighoubrs. Initially, call it with find_clicks(set(), nodes, edges). The generator yields sub-maximal clicks but this was good enough for my purposes. I was pleasantly surprised (but not too surprised) to find later that there is an algorithm that finds maximal clicks in a graph.

Keeping in line with the “meta” link blogging, this link should point to a series of interactions I had with ChatGPT to help me set up a new type of page that was suitable for link blogging.

I enjoy the stuff that Simon writes and in his newsletter he introduced me to a concept I didn't even know: “link blogging”. I decided to give it a try and so I thought it was only fitting to start by blogging about this link of his.

At least for now, I think I'll stick to a simpler workflow to see if I enjoy link blogging and in the future I might extend the way I go about this...