Tag: algorithms
The nearest hospital to every place on Earth, in a single S2 range query
For every locality on Earth, how far is the nearest hospital? Naively, that's 437 billion great-circle distances. S2 cell indexing reduces it to a single integer range-join: build the index once, and the answer for every place on Earth comes back in seconds. The same primitive also resolves which country, region, and locality each hospital belongs to, in a single pass over one index.
Social media’s dirty secret: they don’t use it
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ebMm8stexM "But when you frame it that way, you understand that social media isn't the problem: the extractive profit motive is the problem. And then, banning under-16s is like putting a plaster on a bullet wound. Sure, maybe it helps a bit, but you're still bleeding out. The real question is, how do you stop...
Visualizing Ukkonen's Suffix Tree Algorithm
I learned algorithms from textbooks and papers, building mental models from pseudocode and hand-drawn sketches. The hardest part was never reading the algorithm: it was seeing what it was actually doing to the data structure in memory. This post is the tool I wish I had back then.
AI isn’t people
"Treating people as things can begin in many ways, but I think one of them is the idea that things can be people. The motivated muddling of categories so prevalent in writing and thinking about AI, beginning with the very name 'artificial intelligence', is intentional and serves the narrative that this software can and will...
We Need More Data Centers
One function. Four implementations. A 173-million-times performance difference.
Time and Space Complexity Refresher
Refresher on Big O time and space complexity with interview questions
The quiet narrative that algorithms can’t touch
Reading Naval's post about being 'incompressible' got me thinking about the quiet stories we tell ourselves—and how they might be our best defense against algorithms
The Curation Comeback: Why Human Taste Beats Algorithms Every Time
Algorithms manufacture mediocrity. As AI makes polished content cheap, authentic human taste becomes your only unfair advantage.
Shitposting Towards a Pizza Oven
Automated YouTube Shorts about pizza lead viewers to shouldibuyagozney.com with its one-word answer: "yes." The algorithm grows daily.
Shitposting Towards a Pizza Oven
Automated YouTube Shorts about pizza lead viewers to shouldibuyagozney.com with its one-word answer: \"yes.\" The algorithm grows daily.
Robot Hand is the Future
What I learned about YouTube’s algorithm from creating an account that only watched videos related to Elliott Smith. I fought hard, but the algorithm won.
Find Visible Segments by Sweeping Lines
After two months of classes and two weeks of exams, the first quarter of my Master's is finally complete. I can say that 1/8th of my degree is complete. With a new quarter comes new courses. It's been just a week but there is one specific topic that I found quite intriguing: geometric algorithms, specifically sweep line algorithms.
Double Trouble
How a court battle involving groundbreaking disk-compression software foreshadowed Microsoft’s status as an antitrust darling.
Fundamentals of Programming #1: Beginning
This is the first article of The Fundamentals of Programming Using C series. In this article, we are going to show you some useful concepts about the programming world. We will start by using pseudocode (explained below), advancing gradually until we reach the desired language: C.