Spring Break
Alright, time to plan good friend...
I do not know much what to write here. I suppose it is about time to start thinking about happiness. It is rather dissappointing how slippery happiness is. I do not feel sad but I do not feel happy. It is a strange feeling, and one that I think has been the truth of me since perhaps November.
Currently, it is Spring Break. Currently, I am sitting in a chair thinking of things that seem far too ephemeral. That is about as much thinking as I will elucidate. That is most certainly not the correct word. I think it is about time to at the very least plan out this break. I would like to spend it preparing for the summer. This summer will be a large risk for me, so I would like to up the EV.Jesus. That is very nerd. I apologize.
Happiness
How does one find happiness?
I bought a book a long time ago. While in the midst of a very stressful courseload and a rejection, I saw a PewDiePie video on something-something Greek philosophy. I distinctly remember ordering the book with a certain bit of shame. Philosophy, I feel, has been somewhat merged with the manosphere. Yet, I still ordered the book out of some wanton desire to fix my life. I do not know how to explain it, but I have been lacking fulfillment for a long time. I don’t mean joy, but true fulfillment – like purpose or something deeper. Such a thought may yet be impossible to put into words.
Either way, I remember deciding that I would read a chapter of Epictetus’ Discourses and Selected Writing every day. I would annotate those chapters with these post-it notes, starved of substance but filled with these lengthy quotes. I thought perhaps not enough of what was written in those pages. The spine is a bit faded and there is a bit of that familiar creasing, but I still feel as if everything I gained was surface-level.
Either way, perhaps that was too much rambling. I will begin to read the book again for I again am somewhat lost in this current chapter of my life. I somehow do not quite remember the original result of this book, though I do feel something nostalgic about it. In this current time, perhaps nostalgia is best to fall back on.
Happiness is useless. I believe discipline to be much more filling. Happiness creates too much contrast me thinks.
What I plan to do this Spring Break
sprinad breaskd
Alright, let us now depart from that useless prose to speak on something a little bit more important. In the present, I must plan out some goals for this break. Otherwise, it will simply be lost to all the grand algorithms that people have created. YouTube will grab huge slots of time broken only by those natural urges like eating and… other things, while smaller entities like say Linkedin or Reddit will grasp at the fragments cannibalizing each other over those tiny minutes of engagement. I want no part of this. I want to be free. I want to have control.
Thus, I must form a schedule. Thus, I must form goals.
I think I want to reach 2350 on Lichess rapid games. This means about a net gain of 40 ELO points per day. Frankly this is rather achievable. Thus far, I’ve felt as if every Lichess rapid game has been won with much ease and lost due to rather stupid mistakes. I’ve known myself playing classical, and I know that I can play at that level with a lot less time. Honestly, most of the time in a classical game is spent checking a move that I’ve already decided to play.
I also want to write. I do not know what, but I want to regain that feeling of creating worlds and characters. I do not know how to explain that urge but I do not want to forget it. All the same, I’d like to read something again. I’d like to become immersed in a book like I used to. Man, computer science is a mean major. It makes you forget what you used to love…
In terms of more academically minded pursuits, I need to finish up my math research project as well as plan out what I actually want to do for a bio research project. I think I will ask the professor in charge about any other projects since the current one is not exactly what I had in mind. My math research project is going very well though. I finally found some time and fixed the problem that we had been facing for abotu two or three months. On the bio lab part, the lab is the Hillis lab. I still find that kind of insane. I remember being in high school and hearing about David Hillis, and now I am working in his lab! I want to develop a cool phylogenetics algorithm though which is not exactly what I am working on right now. Oh, also he let me borrow a phylogenetics textbook that I will try to read through this break.
Wow that is a lot.
And yet, there is more. Lastly (I think), I would like to begin some work on my summer project. I will try to start some company. I have ideas on what company though I still need to plan and start reaching out to people. I am also going to vibe code a project that I have been thinking about making for a long time. Well, I guess in this case I will not be making anything since I will have Claude or GPT code it all and just edit if it somehow breaks something. I really hope that I do not have to debug AI code. That sounds horrible. I already hate debugging my own code.
Snuffed out
Dreams Snuffed Out, image is Wei Yi poem I think that I put in my private discord
I have been thinking recently about past dreams. They felt so real, so reachable. Dreams like reaching the pinnacle of piano, of achieving GM in chess, of becoming rich. Looking back, these are rather arrogant and naive desires. Of course though, those dreams felt so achievable. I saw progress, and thought to myself that such was the only result. I thought it was there in just a few years. Time passes though. Now, I feel like all those dreams are snuffed out. I do not know how to phrase it, but I feel like I squandored my youth. Even worse, I feel it is irrevocable and irreplacable time. I know this seems stupid since I am still relatively young, but I feel I have formed addictions that are far too heavy to replace or escape. I mean I do escape YouTube sometimes through force of will or simple impossibility of access, though it is never permanent.
All the same, I find my dreams slipping from my very hands – the threads nearly gone. I am grasping at them but the strand is too small and far too slippery. Before long, it will be completely gone, and I will fall to my knees and weep for the loss. I know the solution all the same. It is simple discipline and hard work I believe. Though, all the same, some dreams have dissappeared already. I think it now impossible to become a pianist, so I will settle for becoming good at piano. I think it now scarcely possible to become a World Champion in chess, so I will settle for a title. And for the rest, I still hope they are possible, though like all things, perhaps learning more will only bring despair.
Diepio
An old game
I am in a nostalgic mood today. Perhaps it is due to the fact that there is nothing to do as it is Spring Break. Perhaps it is just that time. Oh wait, I do actually have work. I have a Real Analysis PSet to finish.
Anyways, I want to talk about an old game that I played during quarantine. I want to revisit a time in my life and tell what I think to be a funny story. Diepio is a video game. It is a video game with some amount of skill to differentiate players with and an ability to achieve high scores in gamemodes. There are team game modes which is mainly what I played. Either way, at some point within Diep’s lifetime, hunters (or people who team up with their friends to kill high score players) began to arise. Now, looking back, it is kind of surprising and stupid how big of a deal hunters were. After all, it is just a game. Either way, at that point, there was a grand fight between players who strongly disliked hunters and hunters themselves. There were all these groups that would log onto servers with high score players and either try to protect them or try to kill them.
Some time passes, and this process begins to slow down. This is where my foray into diep began. During quarantine, I got really good at this game. Instead of doing something fun while in online classes, I would go for high scores or 1v1 people in sandbox modes. I also go really good at 1v1s. The story I want to tell is a pretty standard 1 mil score story.
I log onto a 2 team deathmath server and engage in the standard beginning behavior. I escape the other team’s medieval siege that prevents new players from farming points to get stronger and eventually reach the first real point at which I can kill other players. At around level 22, you gain enough speed to begin to engage in what I call skill diffs. With a high enough movement speed you can outmanuever less technically gifted players to farm points much more quickly. Normally, you kill shapes to gain points, but killing players gives way more points. Eventually I reach the max level and begin engaging in some good ol massacreing. Soon enough, my team is winning and I go AFK. Normally, what I do is wait until the other team has a siege before actually playing the game. Otherwise, there is really no point in playing since all you are doing is just farming really low-level players. Now that I think about it there is not much of a conclusion to this story. Basically, I muck around for a while and eventually, walk into a destroyer bullet from a hunter. Then I get clipped on YouTube and have many obscenities thrown in the comments section. Of course, I am fully anonymous during this time because I will not take the aura loss in 1v1s.
Yep good story. I don’t know. I think diep was cool. I feel like a lot of it can be extrapolated to real life war. I don’t know…
Math
I like math
Alright, so apparently, it is against FERPA to share course materials which makes sense on paper. Of course, when I think about it a little, I think it makes less sense. After all, there are some really cool problems that are posed within classes. Is it not a little bit mean to forbade them from being shared? I mean these are really interesting problems. That being said, I would prefer to continue attending college so I will refrain from anymore words.
On the topic of math, did you now a torus (donut) is really a square or rectangle. That’s kinda crazy no? I don’t really know how it works since I have not learned any topology, but something something universal cover I think. I don’t know…
Ok, I will give an interesting question that I do not think breaks any FERPA thingies since it is not from a class. At least, hopefully it does not break FERPA things. Uh, actually I for some reason do not remember any problems that were not part of a class… Hmmm, I’m sure I can think of something…
Oh right, I for some reason, did not get credit for B4 on the Putnam. I thought my solution was perfect. Oh well. I will give what I remember as my solution. The B4 goes:
B4 For $n \geq 2$, let $A = [a_{i,j}]_{i,j=1}^{n}$ be an $n \times n$ matrix of nonnegative integers such that
(a) $a_{i,j} = 0$ when $i + j \leq n$;
(b) $a_{i+1,j} \in {a_{i,j}, a_{i,j} + 1}$ when $1 \leq i \leq n-1$ and $1 \leq j \leq n$; and
(c) $a_{i,j+1} \in {a_{i,j}, a_{i,j} + 1}$ when $1 \leq i \leq n$ and $1 \leq j \leq n-1$.
Let $S$ be the sum of the entries of $A$, and let $N$ be the number of nonzero entries of $A$. Prove that
\[S \leq \frac{(n+2)N}{3}.\]
Ok, if I remember correctly, what I did to prove this was pull the sum of squares from somewhere. I also did not do induction. Honestly, I do not really want to think about math right now. Ok, I read over the official solutions and I sort of remember my proof. Basically it is just Solution 2 but without the formalizations. I just pull out S = sum of squares and then go that it is always upper bounded as S must be less than that. Actually, it is pretty informal, but I think this proof was one of the best ones I wrote. For some reason, I got credit for B1 but not B4??? B4 was way easier in my opinion. I do not know.
Link to solutions if you are lazy: https://maa.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/2025OfficialSolutions.pdf
To conclude, I will conclude, by saying that in conclusion…
I am quite dissappointed in myself.
Best scammer in all of Texas
I have not played chess in about a month and a half so I have nothing to show here except this. Interesting.