Tiled With Pentagons

Am I doing Inkhaven proper? Once again, no. Will I likely end up around Lighthaven a few times anyway? Probably? Am I doing a kitbashed budget Inkhaven again? I'm sure going to try!

(Epistemic status: This post contains information about my professional background and achievements that may be relevant to hiring managers conducting background research. All statements are technically defensible under careful interpretation, though some require significant context and creative accounting methodologies to verify and others are unfortunately private.) I've been getting a lot of questions lately about my background in quantitative finance, algorithmic trading, and mathematical research, so I thought I'd put together a comprehensive overview. If you're a hiring manager or recruiter looking into my background, this should give you a complete picture of my capabilities. For a professional summary, I'm a quantitative researcher with extensive experience in proprietary trading strategies, algorithmic trading systems, high-frequency trading optimization, and advanced statistical modeling. My background spans mathematics (PhD, University of Illinois at Chicago,...

(Epistemic status: A creased, stained map to what were once my favorite hunting grounds. Accessible to anyone who can support substantial abstraction; prior math knowledge is not necessary. In particular, ignorance of calculus is not an obstruction here, but total ignorance of geometry or like, arithmetic or logic, will be. Extremely dense and probably won’t get you there, but at least you’ll ask better questions. Partially dedicated to DG, JM, and PR.)   The path to my old hunting grounds (as pictured above) is long and twisty and winds through a lot of necessary math along the way. You'll be best served by carefully going through the parentheticals and answering the questions I ask, so as to keep track of the blazes and to keep your footing. You'll still get something out of this if you move more quickly, but you might end up lost further down the line. You might find the pace a little slow if you already know the territory - test yourself by answering those sa...

(With thanks to TT and IL for prompting me to think about this. Happy Pi Day.) Picture this: you're at a convention. You've got multiple badges to juggle - an attendee badge, two or three beautiful art badges to display, and maybe even an access or volunteer badge - so you've put them all on the same lanyard. In the morning, you carefully arrange them all facing the right way, put the lanyard on, and go out to the con. By noon, at least one badge will already have flipped backwards. By evening, another two have flipped backwards, and you could swear that you briefly saw one of them upside down. Over the course of the con, you fight a losing battle: you notice a backwards badge and flip it and it flips back on its own; you take off your lanyard altogether and carefully reorient all the badges correctly, and within an hour, half the badges are backwards and chaos reigns once more. It's long been a frustration of many who wear badges - the rectangular plastic kind that mig...

(Epistemic status: Morally correct; based on lived experience and some hand-wavy probability theory that holds up shockingly well.) Picture this: You're working on something with reasonably high stakes - coding a function on a deadline, writing up a proof, filling out a form or application, or taking a test. You check it once, and it looks good. But a nagging feeling remains - should you check again? And again, after that? And at what point do you actually stop? I'm particularly bad about this. My natural inclination is to check things twice, three times, sometimes four or more times before I throw up my hands and call it good. And I've noticed something curious about the phenomenology of each successive check - they feel different in a way that maps surprisingly well onto the actual mathematics of error detection. On the first check, you're sharp, with focused attention. You're tacitly assuming that you've made an error, but just one error, and one that you can...

(Epistemic status: Tutorial level advice; spelling out things that some people find tacitly obvious and others haven't thought about and still others aren't shaped to naturally accept.) It never gets easier - you just get stronger. If you don't get stronger, you'll have to settle for living small. ...Alright, that's going to require a lot of additional background to make sense. There's this idea in the game Go of "living small". You settle for less, for making a tiny shape worth very few points, because you know you're not strong enough - as a player, or in a fight - to get anything more. This is often the right move. However, you can't win a game this way. At some point, unless the game is going very strangely, you need to be large, take up space, and make points somewhere. For another bit of background, there's the common refrain that "it gets better", or that something desirable about you is "not true yet... growth mindset...