About
I grew up in Taiwan doing a lot of math and programming competitions. I studied at MIT; spent a lot of time in ESP and SIPB; TA'ed 6.004 (now 6.191(0)), the introductory "logic gates to operating systems" class, as they transitioned to a hardware description language; and concluded with a masters in computational music. I mostly did frontend stuff during internships (e.g., a database query visualizer at SingleStore), I worked as a cryptography engineer for a few years after graduating (e.g., Rotatable Zero Knowledge Sets, ASIACRYPT 2022), and now I study interpretability. My main hobby is puzzlehunt puzzles, but you maybe already knew that.
A few high-level passions:
- I like understanding things deeply, seeing how they all fit together, learning new perspectives for seeing the world. It's a cliché, but learning Haskell and the functional-programming way of thinking in high school was one of those events I view as dividing my life into before and after phases. Many of my blog posts from the last decade or so are obsessive deep dives into obscure topics.
- I think a bunch about human-computer interaction, in some expansive sense that includes both nailing the basics by ensuring my colors' contrast ratios meet accessibility standards, and trading off conventionality for ergonomics in programming languages (which are a form of user interface, after all) — think fish shell or Svelte.
- I care about doing good in the world. I'm not particularly innovative about this, but I've been donating to GiveWell for a few years.
A few hyperspecific passions:
- My favorite theorem is Cayley's formula for the number of trees. Have you seen the proof by generating functions?
- Another all-time banger math puzzle, via Martin Gardner: You are playing a game called Say Red. A normal deck of 52 cards is shuffled face down, then you flip over the cards one by one. At some point, you can choose to say "Red!"; then, if the next card you flip over is red (diamonds or hearts), you win, otherwise you lose. (If you don't say "Red!" before the first 51 cards, you have to say it before the last card.) What are the optimal strategies?
- I started doing Final Fantasy XIV savage raids in Endwalker. I'm a healer main, but have flexed phys ranged at points.
- I play Magic: the Gathering a bunch, but spend more time watching videos of people playing or explaining arcane rules interactions.
- I'm still holding out for Ace Attorney 7 🤞
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