Caden

Programmer, computer science instructor, PL researcher, linux (#NixOS) user, and embedded systems enthusiast. In a world of "artificial intelligence" I bring organic stupidity to the table. All opinions my own, blah blah blah

Sometimes my brain feels like an HTTP server serving the same webpage over and over. People tell me I'm probably autistic

I spend most of my time with computers, but I'm still often told I'm "chronically offline"

Proudly raised in Minnesota, now in Boston

Gender is a mess, feel free to use whichever she/he/they pronouns

#NoAI #NoIndex

Profile Picture: A pen drawing of my head with a smile, showing a ponytail with a bow in it
Gender?: I hardly know 'er
Pronouns: she/he/they (any is fine)

Last Notes

2026-04-06 15:03:56 UTC

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try the math section of Wikipedia, lots of those pages go into an awesome level of detail, like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_homology

2026-03-26 21:42:01 UTC

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you may already know this, but on a related note you can tunnel basically any IPv4 traffic over DNS: https://code.kryo.se/iodine/

2026-03-06 05:51:14 UTC

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very interesting!
I've had to brush up on category theory recently as the work I'm doing right now has become very intertwined with it: the research team I'm on is developing a tool that makes functional programming more convenient (especially for beginners) by automatically coercing values to the right types (even when the coercions are nontrivial). This would essentially allow you to define a function to operate on values of some type T, and then automatically be able to apply that same function to any data structure containing values of type T with just a regular function call (among other things).
In order to do such a thing soundly, we're finding category theory to be a nice way to attack it, although we're still ironing out the specifics.

2026-03-04 04:22:34 UTC

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most servers prompt you to write something that a bot probably wouldn't write. Obviously it may possible for LLMs to sneak pass that (it's not a perfect defense), but there's plenty of empirical evidence that it massively cuts down on the amount of moderation work

2026-03-03 22:32:55 UTC

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most instances require literally 1-2 sentences. It's usually just to prove you're human. Some instances go a little farther than that, but it's up to you whether you want to sign up for those. I've had 2 accounts on instances without open registration and I didn't write more than a single sentence for either

2026-01-29 20:11:17 UTC

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it's a shame your CPU doesn't take Registered ECC RAM. For one it may have prevented the issue in the first place, and for another I have 4 16GB sticks of it I bought a year ago for around $80-90 total. Now that's almost the single stick price

2026-01-20 18:44:13 UTC

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hey you know that tool we created that sucks up all of your energy, lies to you, exploits you, and nobody likes? It could fail if people don't use it! Act now!

2025-11-11 15:08:05 UTC

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true that will work for the baseline. I was thinking of Safari specifically, which has some differences. You definitely won't totally break Safari support by only testing on other WebKit browsers, but you can still get styling discrepancies, I ran into some last week. Even MacOS vs iOS Safari can have differences, iirc scrolling behavior is one of them

2025-11-11 14:31:11 UTC

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fair, but it's a lot harder to test for that one given that you either need specific hardware, or you need to get an ISO from someone with specific hardware and run a VM, which is against Apple's EULA

2025-11-05 12:57:11 UTC

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Coming very much from the LaTeX world, Typst is incredible! It's just so much more lightweight and quick, both in terms of compilation and the experience of working with it

2025-11-04 02:08:11 UTC

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sounds perfect for a certain US VP

2025-10-26 00:47:38 UTC

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there may defenses in place against some resource consumption attacks. See here: https://libpng.sourceforge.io/decompression_bombs.html

2025-08-29 01:21:01 UTC

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this will definitely be one of the first things I print with my new 3d printer

2025-05-26 19:34:27 UTC

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ONNX Runtime used by the app [supports Android NNAPI](https://onnxruntime.ai/docs/execution-providers/NNAPI-ExecutionProvider.html ) as an execution provider, but NNAPI was deprecated in Android 15. It does allow new execution providers to be added though, so if someone is able to figure out how to access Pixel hardware acceleration, it shouldn't be *too* hard to update the app to use it

2025-05-07 20:29:10 UTC

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yeah as a college student right now I've seen a few fellow students rapidly lose their ability to understand and do basic things in their field. Once a friend who's a computer science major got the exact same error message that I had dealt with before so I explained what the issue was and how to fix it, and I watched him ignore what I said, copy and paste into ChatGPT, copy and paste the result into his code, and get more errors (rinse and repeat). I truly fear for the future of the world