Math Major | Daily Diary D0057 I managed to get locked out of my LinkedIn account. To regain access they want me to take photos of myself and upload my pictures of my passport. For LinkedIn?! Please. Never touching that abomination again.

Math Major | Daily Diary D0057 🏁 Finally reached version 1.0 of RailCheck. 🏬 Background: two weeks ago I saw a software demo on the webpage of a company that I'm interested in. I got curious about how the different parts of the demo fit together. 🔨 To understand how the different parts of the demo worked under the hood, I decided to build my own prototype - RailCheck. 🎁 There's clearly room for improvements (lots of things are still broken), but at some point I think that it's more important to take a step and ask - has the prototype achieved what it was created to do? 🔥 If the answer is yes, then there is little point in shoveling more tokens into the furnace. 🚉 So, it's time to say goodbye to you RailCheck - I'm getting off at this stop - other projects await. We had a lot of fun together - and during those early mornings and late nights, I learned a lot. 🚆 "Doors closing! Right away."

Math Major | Daily Diary D0056 🏗️ Added a new section to my webpage - a page where I'll track my (tiny) oss (open source software) contributions. 😂 I realized that my oss contributions, in terms of Pull Requests to other people's projects, is pretty much zero. 🔭 I'd like to change that, so I'll be on the lookout for fun code bases to try and contribute to. ⛩️ I like the idea that you should not contribute for the sake of it, but rather because you use something and find something which could be improved. cryptopatrick.com/oss/

Math Major | Daily Diary D0056 🐶 Just for fun, I gave an online AI application called "Requirement Quality Checker" three requirements sourced from a science fiction story. 🐱 Interestingly, two of the requirement rewrites that the agent suggested, kept phrases it had just flagged. That raises the question - who checks the checker? 🐭 I wrote a post about it here (please keep in mind, I'm just a first year undergrad who's trying to learn new things - not a Ph.D. researcher like everyone else on twitter 🙌😀). cryptopatrick.com/research/r…

Math Major | Daily Diary D0055 🚃 Just for fun, I created a "product sheet" for RailCheck - a prototype of a formal verification pipeline for AI generated output in railway signaling. 🚂 I recently applied to a company, asking for internships and part-time roles, and they had a demo on their webpage. 🚋 I wanted to understand how their demo worked under the hood, so I built my own demo from the ground up. 🚊 Even though a demo like mine is 50,000 miles away from a real professional solution - building a prototype from the ground up like this, is a fun a valuable learning experience. I've learned quite a lot about formal verification of ai generated system constraints. 🚉 I've created a list of features that I'd like to add, and I'll try to make small additions to RailCheck over the coming months. ⚠️ Just want to stress that RailCheck is just a fun prototype and a work in progress - it's very far from anything that should be used in a professional setting.

Math Major | Daily Diary D0055 🎃 Imagine that we ask an AI to sort Halloween trick-or-treaters into two groups; kids who get candy and adults who get a trick. 📐 We give the AI what we believe is a crystal clear rule: “Little monsters get treats.” “Adult monsters get tricks.” 🤔 "What about an adult monster who's a little short?" 👥 There's ambiguity at play here, and neither the AI nor we humans may always perceive it, especially in cases that are much more subtle than this example. ☑️ Just because our AI correctly sorts ten cases, doesn't mean we've established who (we or the AI) it was that provided enough information to reach the performance we wanted. An eleventh, incorrectly sorted case, might surprise us. 🎲 Basically, we don't know if the AI worked out the missing context, or if we were just lucky. 🔬 This highlights the importance of providing the AI with the right context, by carefully choosing words that reduce ambiguity.

Math Major | Daily Diary D0055 Adding some minor fixes to my prototype formal verification project, and learning new things. The concept of "saturation" is really interesting. 🎃 For example, in the context of Halloween, imagine that we're part of an exhausted trick-or-treat squad, having checked "every" house in the neighborhood. But did we? 🏘️ Just because we've knocked on many houses, doesn't prove there's none left to knock on. 🧟 Let's assume that our young squad of professional trick-or-treaters is equipped with a list of 10 houses to visit, making this a bounded search. We also tag each house on the list with a "VISITED" tag as we "process the neighborhood for candy". 🏁 Once we've processed the street, it's easy to draw the conclusion; "That's it. There's no more candy.". We've saturated the search - having exhausted the "search space" for candidates to know on. 🍬 However, just because there's no more candy on our list of 10 houses, doesn't actually answer the question "Is there more candy in the neighborhood." 🍭 What we need is to operate under the assumption that there is an UNKNOWN number of houses with candy... at least until we've established that our search is complete and that no more candy remains to be had. 🧛 The "danger" of bounded search aka "Let's check 10 houses for candy.", is that we might unknowingly bound our search based on our perceived dimensionality of things ("10 houses? That's a lot.") - which may or may stand in stark contrast with reality ("Wait, isn't there like 100 houses in our neighborhood?"). 🧬 A Japanese systems biologist once joked at conference; "Physicists are used to working with a handful of variables. You show them a system with 10,000 variables ...and they panic." 😂

Refactored: Discipline liberates freedom.

Math Major | Daily Diary D0055 🔥 Read about Jon Barron's discovered bug in Softmax, and how "*all existing implementations* of softmax and cross-entropy (that's JAX, PyTorch, textbooks, etc) have" this subtle bug. 😅 Hmm! That would include my naive work in progress implementation of JAX, that I did about a year ago. 🔬 Had Claude check the source, and sure enough👇 🤖 "I've confirmed the bug: log_softmax gives exactly 0.0 like the paper's example, and softplus's naive implementation (0 at -30, inf at 100) is the root cause." 🚒 Me: "Okay. Let's fix that. Read the write-up about the bug and its proposed fix. In a separate branch; apply the fix to the affected areas, run all tests, performance checks, and lints." 🌅 What an exciting time to be a technologist. xitter.cf/cryptopatrick/status/2…

Math Major | Daily Diary D0055 🤷‍♂️ I'm not a content creator - in the sense of trying to grow my account to make money - but I do hope to get a few more followers (500). 📬 I post about things I find interesting, things I'm reading, and I post about my journey; getting a degree in mathematics, and landing a part-time or full-time job. That's it. 🤔 I will never understand how people are able to investment 10+ hours a day, on posting and commenting for traffic and dollars. 🙌 With that said, huge respect for people who are able to do it. 🧗‍♂️ I'm focused on my main career (mathematics). Twitter is just a nice distraction between prompts and pomodoros. 🕺 ✅ Coffee. ⛳️ Now I'm off to the state library for seven hours of studies.

Math Major | Daily Diary D0055 🌅 New day. Lot's of exciting math to study. 📚 I try to read as much as possible. I always have around 10 books going at the same time, and loosely follow the stack reading mindset. I pick a book from the stack, read until I lose interest, put the book at the bottom of the stack. 📺 I'm currently reading a book on Alexander Karp and heard him say something noteworthy in a video someone shared on Twitter. ⛰️ "Every single person who has shared how intelligent they are tells you how stupid they are." 👥 I'm always assuming that people express what's on their mind - in the most Freudian of ways. 🫣 Ironically, Karp may have (unknowingly?) revealed the lasting impression Socrates’ views on epistemic humility left on him as a young philosophy student. 🏛️ The original cognitive flex, expressed by Socrates in Plato’s Apology, goes: 🦉 “Although I do not suppose that either of us knows anything really beautiful and good, I am better off than he is, for he knows nothing, and thinks he knows. I neither know nor think I know.” 🕹️ Wouldn’t surprise me if Alex holds Karl Popper in the highest esteem, as a next level expansion of Socrates' epistemic humility. 🦊 Intelligent people leave clues. ☕️ Time for morning coffee, Linear Algebra, Rust, Lean, Bend, reading up on Formal Verification in Railway, and how to Orchestrate Agents. 🕺

Math Major | Daily Diary D0054 🐍 Confession: I'm not a fan of Python. The transition from Python 2.7 vs Python 3 failed spectacularly - pretty much forking the language. 📚 Anyway, I realize that my opinion might be based on having skill issues, so I'm going to spend considerable time building with Python over the next two months. 🎤What's your favorite language - if you had to pick one PL to build with exclusively, over the next five years?

Math Major | Daily Diary D0054 ⛳️ Finished the chapter on Maryam Mirzakhani. Took notes and got an elementary understanding of: 🦆 Riemann surfaces and the three different classes. 🐦‍⬛ Moduli spaces, and the concept of genus connecting a torus with a coffee cup. 🦅 The challenge of counting the number of simple closed geodesics on hyperbolic surfaces. 🦉 One of Maryam's contributions: creating a "portal" between moduli spaces and the counting problem - enabling the transfer of results from one world to the other. 📚 The book contains 50 portraits of famous mathematicians - I'll try to read one per day. 👤 Now I'm off the the state library to do Python and LA for a few hours.

Math Major | Daily Diary D0054 📚 Kicking off the weekend with lots of reading - got a stack of books that I want to finish before the end of 2026. 🧗‍♂️ My priority is to read a lot, do all my homework on time, and go the extra mile in everything that I do. 📨 Having sent off the job application in Thursday (to the company that I'm hoping to land an internship or part-time with), I now feel that I can do a quick "post-mortem", and then focus on other things (Bend, Lean, Triton, MLX, ROS2, Edge AI, Mandarin, etc). 🕺 Let's Roll!

Math Major | Daily Diary D0053 🕯️ Worked early mornings and late nights (to 3 am) in order to get a prototype working in time - for a part time job application. 🕊️ Sent it. 🛀 Waited. Not one word of confirmation. Just total silence. 🤞 Crossing my fingers that my job application will at least make its way past the ruthless ATS, and be blessed with human processing - even if it's just a... 📢 "Nope. Neeext!" 😂 Anyway, until January 2027, I'm going to focus exclusively on my math studies, and look for internships/part-time jobs. 🧗‍♂️ Onwards!

Math Major | Daily Diary D0053 At Starbucks Couple seated next to me She has been talking about *their* plans nonstop for two hours I'm thinking: <"Is there a way to turn that thing off?"> Lady, I'm trying to do my homework here. Please, show some mercy. 😭 File under: The trials and tribulations of coffeshop students

Math Major | Daily Diary D0053 Is GitHub the next LinkedIn? With AI, the need for long-running PR discussions drop, and the social side of GH is 🦗 . Why not open source projects right here on X? 🤔 @elonmusk

Math Major | Daily Diary D0052 🏖️ Applied to Prover yesterday, asking for par-time and internship 2027. 🎪 Landing an internship is my priority at the moment, but I'm also keeping my fingers crossed to find a company to do part-time hours for. 🧗‍♂️ Just gotta keep showing up and working hard.

Math Major | Daily Diary D0052 🕯️ Having worked extensively over the last two weeks on building my naive reasoner - during early mornings and very late nights - I can honestly say that I really like logic, set theory, group theory, and number theory. 🔷 There's just something incredibly neat about working with absolutes. 🧩 I'm going to spend a lot of time and try to improve my ability to prove things. 📗 This book by Vanden Eynden is really good. I've discovered it when I was reading his paper "Flipping a Coin over the Telephone" - which explores a method for making a fair coin over the telephone.