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About

This blog aims to document my experiences with and understandings of various topics either related directly to my work or my interests. I aim to propose novel ideas in each post. Thus, the posts will tend to be either about things I have a good familiarity with or a strong interest in, such as:

• Computer science
• Math
• Statistics
• Economics
• Finance
• Philosophy
• Psychology
• Music
• Chess

I provide much more detail on what specifically interests me below.

Most of my interests are technical in nature. In order to make these materials more accessible to others (among further reasons), for every technical blog post I write, I aim to provide an 'in a nutshell' version — a non-technical post which assumes no prerequisite knowledge, and keeps things to the point.

Check out my technical blog posts here, and my 'in a nutshell' blog posts here. These can also be accessed from this website's menu (icon in top-left).

What Specifically Interests Me

I consider myself to be a rationalist. The source of reason is the (assumed) underlying causal model. Thus, understanding these models intimately brings me satisfaction. Understanding is best gathered and tested with unfamiliar applications. For example, applying theoretical computer science and linguistic theory to music.

So many fields have so many models to offer. As a result, my interests aren't really bound to one field. Nevertheless, here is an attempt at a list:

• Topics in computer science
  • Mathematical foundations
    • Coding theory, especially in relation to:
      • Compression, and the idea of intelligence being a lossless compression algorithm (see the Hutter Prize, Solomonoff's theory of inductive inference, also described nicely here)
      • Cryptography (from Caesar's cipher to one-time pad, zero-knowledge proofs, side-channel attacks) and steganography (see my mini-project on embedding text in an image)
    • Game theory, especially in relation to:
      • Chess, with game-tree analysis, alpha-beta pruning,
      • Economics, especially say analysis of economic systems based on perceived incentives of agents. The analysis showcased in the Bitcoin white paper is a great example of this
  • Theory of computation
  • General cybersecurity
  • Malware analysis and reverse engineering
  • Operating systems
  • Distributed systems
  • Computer networks
  • Compiler design
  • Artificial intelligence
  • Natural language processing
  • Cryptography
  • Data science
  • User interface design
  • Algorithms and Optimization
• Chess
• Finance theory
• Economic theory
• Music theory
• Statistics and probability theory
• Philosophy

Sources

Main image: By Patrick Tomasso, hosted by Unsplash, license