Abstract Nonsense

Activation functions and empiricism

hello@abstractnonsense.xyz (Yossi Frenkel) — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In deep learning literature, there’s a veritable menagerie of different activation functions that are commonly employed betwixt layers. Proponents of one or another class of functions will usually proffer up some rationalisation for what makes their choice grounded: differentiability, smoothness, computational complexity, numerical stability, concision…

Today I was reading through GLU Variants Improve Transformer by Noam Shazeer (also of Attention is all you need fame) and came across this gem of empiricism:

Rustlings

hello@abstractnonsense.xyz (Yossi Frenkel) — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

As part of my recent quest to learn Rust, I worked through the Rustlings exercises. You’re given a series of ~100 problems, and your goal is to fix the code to make it compile with passing tests. It was a pretty quick whirl-through, and I don’t think the examples are the most interesting, but as a short introduction to the syntax and rudiments of the semantics, it does the trick with aplomb. I did quite enjoy the interactive problem-solving CLI interface, though.

Networking Concepts by Beej

hello@abstractnonsense.xyz (Yossi Frenkel) — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Computer networking always felt like an area in which I was lacking after completing my undergraduate CS education. A good while ago I stumbled across the excellent and freely accessible Beej’s Guide to Networking Concepts and worked through it, tracking my solutions in this solutions-guide-to-networking-concepts repository.

All solutions herein were produced without any LLM assistance. Where any cloze-style template is provided by the textbook for the project, I’ve adopted that as the basis for my solution. Any errors or lapses of understanding are solely my own.

GitHub hijacks and breaks browser search

hello@abstractnonsense.xyz (Yossi Frenkel) — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I like to keep a word list of any new and interesting words I come across day-to-day. Today I was curious how many entries were in my list and went to search the YAML file on GitHub.

To my delight, I discover that GitHub has hijacked the native Cmd-F browser search. To top it off, seems the maximum number of matches GitHub’s search returns is limited to 200.

I’ll excuse a search function that at least reports > 200 results matched, but there is no indication in the UI that this is the case. Even if you navigate to the 200th result and can see additional matches in the viewport, GitHub’s UI steadfastly refuses their existence.

Writing an eigenvalue solver in Rust for WebAssembly

hello@abstractnonsense.xyz (Yossi Frenkel) — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I recently stumbled across the Gershgorin Circle Theorem and thought it was perfectly suited to an interactive visualisation:

The problem is I’m no web developer, and I don’t really like JavaScript. So, the eigenvalue computation in the interactive component above is written in Rust, compiled to WebAssembly, and wrapped up with some HTML and JavaScript. As the old mathematics adage goes: if you can’t solve the base problem, turn it into multiple problems.

Talk: Implementing Efficient Language Models under Homomorphic Encryption

hello@abstractnonsense.xyz (Yossi Frenkel) — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Today (11/11 Pepero Day in Korea), I had the pleasure of attending a fascinating talk on Implementing Efficient Language Models under Homomorphic Encryption by Donghwan Rho (노동환) at the Seoul National University Research Institute of Mathematics’ 2025 11.11 Symposium.

I am on holiday in Korea and didn’t want to miss this opportunity to learn more about homomorphic encryption - an area I’ve been been increasingly fascinated by as of late!

# Talk Abstract

As large language models (LLMs) become ubiquitous, users routinely share sensitive information with them, raising pressing privacy concerns. Homomorphic encryption (HE) is a promising solution to privacy-preserving machine learning (PPML), enabling computations on encrypted data. However, many core components of LLMs are not HE-friendly, limiting practical deployments. In this talk, we investigate the main bottleneck - softmax, matrix multiplications, and next-token prediction - and how we address them, moving toward the practical implementation of LLMs under HE.

Heuristics for Minimum Euclidean Skeletons

hello@abstractnonsense.xyz (Yossi Frenkel) — Sun, 09 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Disclaimer: This blog post is a recap of exploration I did as part of the undergraduate Mathematics and Statistics Vacation Scholarship program at the University of Melbourne in January 2021. It’s been a while since then, so please forgive any inaccuracies that are almost assuredly present.

The poster I presented at the conclusion of the program was hosted on the School of Mathematics’ website but has suffered the demise of linkrot. For posterity, I’m hosting my poster PDF and an HTML version on my blog here.

Welcome to the Hyunam-Dong Bookshop by Hwang Bo-Reum

hello@abstractnonsense.xyz (Yossi Frenkel) — Sun, 05 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I really enjoyed this book! The original is in Korean, but the version I read was impeccably translated by someone with a masterful command of idiomatic English.

The book charts the life of a burnt-out Korean worker, Yeongju, as she embarks on a new venture by opening a bookshop. Seeing the stereotypes of Korean working culture explored through the interactions of Yeongju with her customers was both concerning and illuminating.

Euclidea: An interactive geometric theorem prover

hello@abstractnonsense.xyz (Yossi Frenkel) — Sun, 28 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

After watching the excellent piece of exposition on mathematical exploration by 3Blue1Brown guest Ben Syversen: “What was Euclid really doing?”, I discovered the fantastic web and mobile game Euclidea.

Geometry was never my favourite branch of mathematics, I always felt more drawn to algebra and more symbolic and abstract forms of reasoning. But Euclidea really does a masterful job of capturing the joy of exploration and problem solving through the lens of scaffolded puzzles of compass-and-straightedge geometric constructions.

Recursive problem solving with DNS

hello@abstractnonsense.xyz (Yossi Frenkel) — Tue, 16 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I really enjoyed this Learning DNS in 10 years talk by Julia Evans. Not only does it present a great, lightweight walkthrough on DNS, but it espouses a maxim for learning I really appreciate: keep digging, and when you get stuck, keep digging.

Rust for everyone [video]

hello@abstractnonsense.xyz (Yossi Frenkel) — Mon, 08 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A while ago I mentioned that I thought that Rust was a fiendishly complex language at first glance. Well, that hasn’t changed. Don’t get me wrong, I love Rust, and I wish I had the time to dive deeper into it, but it has a steep learning curve.

That said, I recently came across a fantastic video, “Rust for Everyone”, presented by Will Crichton at Jane Street that explores the various tools he’s built to make Rust more accessible to newcomers. It’s not in the video description, but here’s an outline of the tools Will discusses:

The font of all knowledge

hello@abstractnonsense.xyz (Yossi Frenkel) — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

TIL that Google Search has a font-based Easter Egg. If you search for “Georgia font”, the results page will change the typeface to Georgia. I initially thought it was limited to System-fonts, but Wikipedia shows that it works for Roboto too!

I discovered this when looking up various fonts for this blog. I initially specified the default browser sans-serif font in my CSS, but ended up switching to Georgia for the text-body as I find it more readable for longer posts. There are some beautiful fonts in Google Font I’d love to use, but for now I’m going to stick with the System Font Stack to avoid loading more external resources on page-load.

Can a regex match valid card numbers?

hello@abstractnonsense.xyz (Yossi Frenkel) — Sun, 31 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Sometimes the mere existence of a question is dangerous. A colleague recently asked me whether it’s possible to validate credit card numbers in regex using the Luhn algorithm, and, well, I was thoroughly nerd-sniped. I’ll outline the problem briefly and we’ll try to explicate a solution together.

For what follows, it’ll be helpful if you’ve encountered concepts such as Deterministic Finite Automata (DFA), Regular languages and modular arithmetic before. If you haven’t, I think a quick skim through the Wikipedia pages should be sufficient to follow. I’ll also pair the mathematical formalisms with Python code in the exposition to make it easier to follow.

From Lambda Calculus to Lifelong Learning

hello@abstractnonsense.xyz (Yossi Frenkel) — Mon, 18 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

About a decade ago, whilst meandering through a late-night Wikipedia rabbit hole*Some things haven’t changed at all, I stumbled across the page for the Lambda Calculus.

A small footnote linked to An Introduction to Lambda Calculus and Scheme, a transcript of a short talk presented by Jim Larson, and, well, I fell in love. I loved the fact that there was this beautiful correspondence between foundational mathematics and models of computation; and that you could describe it through these symbolic wrappers called Lambda terms. There was something deep and abstract about it that I felt immensely drawn to.

The endless procrastination of meta-blogging

hello@abstractnonsense.xyz (Yossi Frenkel) — Sun, 17 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I came across this great piece on the act of blogging. Since I started pursuing blogging as a practice, it’s been a very rewarding experience. But my drafts and ideas list is ever growing and my output of substantive content is decreasing proportionately.

I’ve learnt a lot from the simple act of setting up my blog in the first instance: from quality learnings about internet networking through to the dreaded menagerie of tooling that frontend developers call ’the web’. But I can’t deny I spend far too much time blogging about blogging than I do actually blogging (this post is no exception).

The Illusion of ... the Illusion of Thinking

hello@abstractnonsense.xyz (Yossi Frenkel) — Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

As of late there’s been a lot of thinking engendered by Apple’s The Illusion of Thinking paper.

I propose we get ahead of this sequence of paper-rebuttal-paper and define the iterated function sequence $\{ n \ge 1: \textsf{(The Illusion of)}^{n} \textsf{(Thinking)} \}$. Whether this series of thoughts will converge to any fixed point is left as a conjecture for the reader.

A new post by Sean Godecke, commenting on a recent publication Is chain-of-thought AI reasoning a mirage? includes this incisive critique:

Writing collapsible inline footnotes in Hugo with Markdown

hello@abstractnonsense.xyz (Yossi Frenkel) — Mon, 11 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I use Hugo as the static site builder for my blog. I love it because it’s fast (blisteringly fast) and for the most part it just gets out of the way.

However, Hugo’s support for customising the rendering of Markdown into HTML is … lacking, to say the least. Hugo uses Goldmark under the hood, which supports Extensions, but Hugo doesn’t natively plug in to those. I’d previously been using a Hugo shortcode to wrap around some arbitrary Markdown and convert it into a footnote HTML:

A neat CSS trick to add favicons to website links

hello@abstractnonsense.xyz (Yossi Frenkel) — Sun, 10 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I discovered a neat CSS trick that automatically lets you prepend an SVG ‘favicon’ before URLs linking to a particular domain. For example, for links to github.com, you can embed an octocat SVG using an attribute selector:

css

a[href*="github.com"]::before {
 content: "";
 display: inline-block;
 width: 1em;
 height: 1em;
 margin-right: 0.35em;
 vertical-align: -0.15em;
 background: currentColor;
 mask: url('data:image/svg+xml;utf8,<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" viewBox="0 0 16 16"><path fill="currentColor" d="M8 0C3.58 0 0 3.58 0 8c0 3.54 2.29 6.53 5.47 7.59.4.07.55-.17.55-.38 0-.19-.01-.82-.01-1.49-2.01.37-2.53-.49-2.69-.94-.09-.23-.48-.94-.82-1.13-.28-.15-.68-.52-.01-.53.63-.01 1.08.58 1.23.82.72 1.21 1.87.87 2.33.66.07-.52.28-.87.51-1.07-1.78-.2-3.64-.89-3.64-3.95 0-.87.31-1.59.82-2.15-.08-.2-.36-1.02.08-2.12 0 0 .67-.21 2.2.82a7.62 7.62 0 0 1 2-.27c.68 0 1.36.09 2 .27 1.53-1.04 2.2-.82 2.2-.82.44 1.1.16 1.92.08 2.12.51.56.82 1.27.82 2.15 0 3.07-1.87 3.75-3.65 3.95.29.25.54.73.54 1.48 0 1.07-.01 1.93-.01 2.2 0 .21.15.46.55.38A8.013 8.013 0 0 0 16 8c0-4.42-3.58-8-8-8Z"/></svg>') center/contain no-repeat;
}

We apply the favicon as a CSS mask to properly render the transparent components of the logo against the background.

An Afternoon Reading the Dictionary

hello@abstractnonsense.xyz (Yossi Frenkel) — Sat, 09 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I’m a heavy user of Apple’s Look Up for words on macOS. With a quick force click you can instantly summon the dictionary or thesaurus for a selected word, which removes the friction of pursuing “hmm, that’s a new word - what does it mean?”

I’ve been collecting new words I discover in an Apple Note for years and recently started migrating my list to a living blog page. Rather than manually collecting the macOS built-in Oxford Dictionary definition for each word (of which I have hundreds), I thought I’d script it. It turns out that Oxford Dictionaries has a very neat API, but unfortunately it’s exorbitantly expensive.

Hard problems: the Hadamard matrix problem

hello@abstractnonsense.xyz (Yossi Frenkel) — Sat, 09 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

There’s a lot of unsolved problems in mathematics. A lot. It’d be a bit imprecise to define a measure on the set of open problems, but I’d wager that it is much larger than the set of solved problems. In fact, for every solved problem, I’d conjecture that the process of solving it simply creates more open problems.

One such open problem that I find deeply unsettling is the Hadamard conjecture. Let’s define a Hadamard matrix and explain the conjecture:

MathJax v4.0 released

hello@abstractnonsense.xyz (Yossi Frenkel) — Tue, 05 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

MathJax v4.0 has been released!

I just integrated MathJax v3 with Hugo last night for this blog to start writing some maths posts, and v4 is released today…

I’m hoping it improves rendering though, I was seeing some issues with SVG output for inline formulae in Safari. KaTeX is neat and fast, but I find the quality of the typesetting to be quite sub-par compared to MathJax.

A Living Log of Lexical Learnings

hello@abstractnonsense.xyz (Yossi Frenkel) — Fri, 01 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This is a living document in which I collect new words I encounter in my reading and daily life. All definitions herein are from the Oxford Dictionary of English unless otherwise stated.

aposiopesis: the device of suddenly breaking off in speech:: in coping with the unsaid and unsayable, oral history is impelled towards aposiopesis.

aetiology: the investigation or attribution of the cause or reason for something, often expressed in terms of historical or mythical explanation.

A Character Study in Alliteration

hello@abstractnonsense.xyz (Yossi Frenkel) — Thu, 24 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I came across a short alliterative poem about Rorschach I wrote a good while back after reading The Watchmen:

Manic milieu meets maimed mien,
moralising meandering misanthropic menace,
metes most morbid measures masked,
macabre murmurs marry much moribund musings,
massacring measly men mirthlessly

I don’t know why I decided to pick ’m’ here for the alliteration, but I often enjoy writing such whimsical snippets. I’m not sure what you’d call this, but I suppose ’extreme alliteration’ or reverse lipogram would suffice. I quite like the whole field of constrained writing, it’s quite fun thinking about how to slot words into constraints just-so. Apparently there was (is?) a group of French mathematicians and writers who similarly delighted in such pursuits… the Oulipo (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle).

Learning from LLMs ethically by practising code minimisation as a discipline

hello@abstractnonsense.xyz (Yossi Frenkel) — Sun, 13 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Like many people nowadays, I find LLMs an invaluable tool for learning new concepts or vibecoding in unfamiliar stacks and langauages. It’s undeniably a massive accelerator when it comes to quickly iterating and learning.

But it has its downsides. There’s a strong argument to be said that by offloading the challenge of learning something new, your core critical thinking atrophies and your ability to focus slides down the slippery slope of instant gratification.

Better Python path handling with Pathlib and Git

hello@abstractnonsense.xyz (Yossi Frenkel) — Fri, 11 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

One of the most frustrating problems in ad-hoc data science projects is broken file paths.

You write a script that loads a model, grabs data, or instantiates a config from your local disk. It works perfectly on your machine, then someone else runs it and… catastrophe: FileNotFoundError: No such file or directory. Uh oh, looks like someone just got bit by hard-coded paths or assumptions about where the script is being run from.

Haptics at 300kph

hello@abstractnonsense.xyz (Yossi Frenkel) — Fri, 11 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Apple released a new “Haptic Trailer” for their new F1 movie - you can check it out in the Apple TV app. It’s a pretty neat experience, I’d never thought about adding haptics to a playback experience, but it really does add another dimension of immersion.

I was curious on how it was implemented, and stumbled across a great blog post that really shook it out for me… I’m sure it’d get horrifically overused, but it’d be interesting to see whether this gets adopted into more media streams in the future.

Building animations in Manim with LLMs

hello@abstractnonsense.xyz (Yossi Frenkel) — Thu, 03 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Manim is a Python animation engine designed to build animated mathematical explainer videos (examples here) created by Grant Sanderson of the superb YouTube channel 3Blue1Brown.

A couple years ago I wanted to write my own mathematics explainer videos with Manim, but found the learning curve to be pretty steep at the outset.

The user experience has since improved dramatically - in large part because of the Manim Community Edition, but also because there’s now enough samples in recent LLM training runs that they can produce workable Manim code!

An aside on retro gaming on Mac

hello@abstractnonsense.xyz (Yossi Frenkel) — Mon, 30 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I’m not much of a gamer. In fact, I don’t think I’ve played any games in the past decade.

But I do have very fond memories of playing a couple games on an old translucent iMac G3 in the school computer room in primary.

On some late night Wikipedia rabbit hole I ended up on the page for Antz and was reminded of the old-school-cool games I’d played: Bugdom and Nanosaur.

It turns out, they’re been immortalised and ported to run on macOS with Apple Silicon. You can download them (for free): Nanosaur and Bugdom2. They run like a charm and with beautiful graphics scaling to boot!

Meditations by Marcus Aurelius

hello@abstractnonsense.xyz (Yossi Frenkel) — Mon, 30 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I picked up a beautiful copy of Meditations by Marcus Aurelius in a cute bookstore in Korea (Chiltern Publishing, translated by A.S.L Farquharson).

I purchased it mostly on a whim - it’d been a while since I’d read any true classics, and the bind was truly delightful (it’s this beautifully embossed, textured cover with a gilt silver coating across the paper edges).

The book overall? It’s filled with Stoic aphorisms and pithy existential ruminations. How ‘meditative’ that is to modern sensibilities is up to the individual. Though you do get the occasional good nugget of advice like:

Mapbox documentation uses real tokens

hello@abstractnonsense.xyz (Yossi Frenkel) — Tue, 10 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been working on a small side project that requires embedding an interactive map. I spent some time evaluating different mapping providers - initially OpenStreetMap with leaflet for annotations. OpenStreetMap is great for rapid prototyping since it’s free and doesn’t require any API key, but it doesn’t look great (by default, at least) and it doesn’t have the same rich POI data integration.

I dabbled with Mapbox next and was really impressed. It has end-to-end API coverage for heaps of mapping use cases, and provides lots of examples of how to integrate Mapbox into your choice of language/platform/framework. However, the thing that really stood out to was their onboarding design. Once you create an account and login, Mapbox injects your API keys directly into the example code on the webpage. They literally inject your personal API key into the standard examples for logged in users so that you can copy/paste and immediately start working.

Internationali(z|a)tion is hard

hello@abstractnonsense.xyz (Yossi Frenkel) — Mon, 09 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I came across a UI glitch today in my Uber app. At first glance it appears to be a preposterous oversight, the s in Favourites has been orphaned!

I live in Australia, where we closely follow British English spelling - meaning it’s “Favourites” and not “Favorites”. In the world of UI/UX, it’s common to use localisation dictionaries to map strings to locale-appropriate versions. I suspect some UI designer carefully crafted this screen for US English and mapped over to AU English, accidentally committing a tiny typographic crime.

Gitting things done

hello@abstractnonsense.xyz (Yossi Frenkel) — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

GitHub has a fascinating interview with Linus Torvalds, the inventor of both git and Linux for the 20th anniversary of git.

This blog has been featured by GitHub!

hello@abstractnonsense.xyz (Yossi Frenkel) — Tue, 03 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This blog has been featured by GitHub!*

Well, sort of.

To publish posts to this blog, I’m abusing GitHub’s excellent Issue tracking capability. I have a GitHub Issue Form Template at .github/ISSUE_TEMPLATE/new-blog-post.yml which gives me a nice template to complete with fields like blog title, date, section etc.

The form template automatically labels the issue as a new-blog-post which triggers a GitHub Actions workflow to (very hackily) dump the contents of the Issue into a Markdown file and commit.

Writing in Future Tense: Machine Time

hello@abstractnonsense.xyz (Yossi Frenkel) — Tue, 03 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I published a blog post last night but it never appeared on the site. My GitHub Actions workflow kicked in, my commit hit the server, my Cloudflare build completed with no warnings or errors - everything looked good.

The culprit? Timezone mismatch. I’m writing from AEST (+10, I’m in Melbourne), but Cloudflare Pages Workers builds in UTC (“server time”). Hugo saw my future timestamp and politely ignored the post.

The fix: Use hugo --buildFuture as the build command in Cloudflare Pages settings to include posts “in the future”. I’ll consider this a cautionary tale … it’s not the first time timezones have caused me havoc in production.

⚡️Apache Spark 4.0 released

hello@abstractnonsense.xyz (Yossi Frenkel) — Thu, 29 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Apache Spark 4.0 has been released. It’s the first major version update since Spark 3.0 in 2020.

Here’s some of the highlights I’m excited about:

A new SQL pipe syntax. It seems to be a trend with modern SQL engines to include “pipe” syntax support now (e.g. BigQuery). I’m a fan of functional programming inspired design patterns and the excellent work by the prql team, so I’m glad to see this next evolution of SQL play out.
A structured logging framework. Spark logs are notoriously lengthy and this means you can now use Spark to consume Spark logs! Coupled with improvements to stacktraces in PySpark, hopefully this will mean less grepping tortuously long stack traces.
A new DESCRIBE TABLE AS JSON option. I really dislike unstructured command line outputs that you have to parse with awkward bashisms. JSON input/outputs and manipulation with jq is a far more expressive consumption pattern that I feel captures the spirit of command line processing.
A new PySpark Plotting API! It’s interesting to see it supports plotly on the backend as an engine. I’ll be curious to see how this plays out going forward… Being able to do #BigData ETL as well as visualisation and analytics within the one tool is a very powerful combination.
A new lightweight python-only Spark Connect PyPi package. Now that Spark Connect is getting more traction, it’s nice to be able to pip install Spark on small clients without having to ship massive jars around.
A bug fix for inaccurate Decimal arithmetic. This is interesting only insofar as it reminds me that even well-established, well-tested, correctness-first, open-source software with industry backing can still be subject to really nasty correctness bugs!

Databricks has some excellent coverage on the main release and the new pipe syntax specifically.

Answering the Unasked

hello@abstractnonsense.xyz (Yossi Frenkel) — Sat, 24 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I’m not sure exactly where this originated from, but I’m quite delighted by this exam question:

State some substantive question which you thought might appear on this exam, but did not. Answer this question (correctly).

As an interview question, I’ll sometimes ask: “Tell me something interesting you’ve discovered or learned recently.” I find its goes a long way to understanding the way the candidate thinks; how they convey technical knowledge to others; and to get a flavour for how real their passion and interest is for the domain.

Paper: Step-by-Step Diffusion: An Elementary Tutorial

hello@abstractnonsense.xyz (Yossi Frenkel) — Sat, 24 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been reading through Step-by-Step Diffusion: An Elementary Tutorial by Apple (arxiv). The mathematics underpinning diffusion language or image models is quite complex, but this walkthrough strikes a nice balance between concrete mathematical grounding and intuition.

View Transition Web API

hello@abstractnonsense.xyz (Yossi Frenkel) — Sat, 24 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The (relatively) new View Transition API is really slick! Simply adding the following CSS to my blog enabled same-document view transitions - no JavaScript required!

Go ahead and give it a try now! Simply click a link to another page on this site and you should observe a seamless transition occur.

css

@view-transition {
 navigation: auto;
}

If you want to add even more pizzazz, you can declare CSS keyframe animations:

css

/* Create a custom animation */
@keyframes move-out {
 from {
 transform: translateX(0%);
 }

 to {
 transform: translateX(-100%);
 }
}

@keyframes move-in {
 from {
 transform: translateX(100%);
 }

 to {
 transform: translateX(0%);
 }
}

/* Apply the custom animation to the old and new page states */
::view-transition-old(root) {
 animation: 0.4s ease-in both move-out;
}

::view-transition-new(root) {
 animation: 0.4s ease-in both move-in;
}

For a blog like this there’s no real use, but for more complex web applications, the View Transition API is a really seamless way to integrate smooth transitions.

Things rewrites their server architecture in Swift

hello@abstractnonsense.xyz (Yossi Frenkel) — Fri, 23 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been a long time user of Cultured Code’s Things to-do app. It’s slick, has well designed ergonomics, and is perfectly minimalistic. Things’ Markdown support is tasteful and its approach to task management structured but pared back.

They’ve just announced a rewrite of their existing server-side infrastructure stack in Swift, the linked post and blog post are worth a read.

From a technical perspective, I’ve always appreciated its rock-solid proprietary Things Cloud syncing service. In particular, I find it interesting the app asks for Local Network access to enable faster syncing:

btop of your resources

hello@abstractnonsense.xyz (Yossi Frenkel) — Sat, 26 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

btop is now my default terminal resource monitor, supplanting top, htop, and all the others of that ilk. I wanted to spare a few words for its beautiful (and functional!) text-based user interface (TUI):

pane management: btop divides your terminal window into multiple information-dense panes displaying CPU, memory, network, and process information simultaneously. What’s fantastic about btop is that user ergonomics and customisation are clearly front and centre: each pane is numbered, and toggling off/on a pane is as simple as pressing the corresponding pane number. Instead of fiddling with a config file and refreshing (as many other command-line tools require), you can effortlessly switch between panes on-the-fly.
command input: In a similar vein, attached to each pane is a set of commands that configure that view. A single letter of the command is highlighted in red, and pressing that letter will toggle that filter/sort/configuration in that panel. Putting the commands front-and-centre shifts the mental burden of recalling “What command displays my processes hierarchically” (e) from searching the manual to just looking at the screen.
global configuration: if you want your customisations to be sticky across sessions, there’s a cleanly navigable and expressive configuration window that lets you apply globally persistent configurations. This is much nicer than setting command line flags or editing a config file.
cursor support: Despite running in a terminal, you can simply click on processes to select them, or use scroll wheels to navigate long lists. This blending of terminal efficiency with GUI-like interactions creates a really slick experience that respects both keyboard purists and those who don’t mind the forbidden practice of mouse navigation.
process management: As an added bonus, selecting any process will allow you to send any signal straight from the TUI.

What makes btop stand out is its intuitive keyboard navigation system. Unlike many other CLIs, btop maps essential functions to single keystrokes. This design philosophy means the interaction mode gets out of the way - toggling through complex system information and controls is always just a keystroke away. To borrow from The Design of Everyday Things, this feels like a set of masterfully crafted affordances.

The Outsider by Albert Camus

hello@abstractnonsense.xyz (Yossi Frenkel) — Sat, 19 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Just finished The Outsider by Albert Camus (also known as The Stranger). Reading it felt like walking through an impressionist painting. Finishing it, one is left with a slightly blurred picture of a life — bleak yet nostalgic, emotionally distant yet resoundingly poignant.

One feels as much an Outsider to the book as the protagonist himself.

Some highlights:

New word learnt: “lading”: put cargo onboard a ship
Wine with lunch! How quintessentially French…
Trams everywhere! A halcyon stalwart construction of bygone days

Despite the surrealism, everything feels strangely real - detached, yet vivid. The first-person voice and inner monologue makes everything feel in equal parts clear and blurry. I don’t know how much the various English translations differ, but this edition felt super crisp and readable. I was expecting it to be a more ponderous read, but the langauge was fresh and crisp.

2025 Australian Election Forecast Model

hello@abstractnonsense.xyz (Yossi Frenkel) — Fri, 18 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

My friend, Dania Freidgeim, created a probabilistic model of First Preference votes for the 2025 Australian Federal Election. Australia uses a Preferential voting (Instant-runoff) system, which makes this a really interesting exercise! Please go check it out!

Structured outputs from LLMs

hello@abstractnonsense.xyz (Yossi Frenkel) — Mon, 14 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This is more of a “to-do” than anything, but I really love the idea of inference-time next-token probability-distribution hacking to enforce structured outputs. There’s this neat Python library outlines that I’d love to explore in more depth - it even supports context-free grammars for output guiding!

To uv or not to uv

hello@abstractnonsense.xyz (Yossi Frenkel) — Sun, 13 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

uv is a blazing fast Python package manager that aims to displace pip. It’s a really slick tool that lets you go from git clone to executing code with all the dependencies seamlessly. All the standard accolades apply: written in Rust, beautiful terminal UI, well thought-out user ergonomics … all written by Astral, the same company that gave the Python community ruff.

But what makes it so damn fast? Under the rusty hood, the magic is even more impressive. Charlie Marsh, the project lead, presented at Jane Street and revealed some of the inner workings. The whole talk is super interesting, but some standout highlights are:

It's always DNS

hello@abstractnonsense.xyz (Yossi Frenkel) — Sun, 23 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I recently moved to the city. As usual, considering the technological ruin that is the NBN, I was fully expecting to go another round against the ISP gods.

I was not disappointed.

My old apartment used HFC, which was … not bad. But since my new apartment supported FTTP, I figured I may as well upgrade my plan.

Oh boy.

First up, the new apartment already had an Optus Ultra Wi-Fi Gen 2 modem-router along with a terrible Optus NBN plan. Since I’m lucky enough to get a 50% discount on More NBN through work, the first step was to switch ISPs.

Inverse UMAP transforms

hello@abstractnonsense.xyz (Yossi Frenkel) — Tue, 11 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

TIL that the dimensionality reduction algorithm UMAP¹ has support for inverse transforms!

Naturally, these are lossy inverses, but being able to generate novel examples of, for example, handwritten digits (yep, classic MNIST once again) is exceedingly cool.

The example images of handwritten digits here are sampled from the compressed planar space, and “inverted” into the original “image space”.

On a related note, the whole explanatory article for UMAP is a beautiful work of exposition, full of rich ideas that make one ponder deeply. I only wish I understood everything in here end-to-end.

Irregular Expressions

hello@abstractnonsense.xyz (Yossi Frenkel) — Tue, 11 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Someone at work asked if it’s possible to validate credit card numbers with the Luhn algorithm in regex.

Technically, a regular language could recognise valid fixed-length credit card numbers by brute-force enumerating all possible sequences. But as a more general solution, I don’t think DFAs can support the modular arithmetic required for arbitrary sequence lengths…

Possible or not, I feel incredibly nerd sniped.

Open uBanking

hello@abstractnonsense.xyz (Yossi Frenkel) — Sun, 09 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In Australia, we have the Consumer Data Right, a government mandated interoperability standard for the Banking (and now Energy) sector.

Also known as Open Banking, the idea is to ensure that banks expose APIs that allow safe access to your transactions history and account data without having to rely on hacky methods like screen scraping¹.

Unfortunately, due to how the standard is enforced, it’s pretty tough to get access to your own transactions without going through an “approved data broker” that charges a premium for it (like Basiq), or a free app with limited export support like Frollo.

Surely you're `jq`ing

hello@abstractnonsense.xyz (Yossi Frenkel) — Tue, 18 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Today I read through the jq manual cover-to-cover. For those unaware, jq is a popular CLI tool to query and manipulate JSON. It’s also a Turing-complete mini-language with nice functional semantics that fits well into the ethos of composable CLI tools.

It was an exemplar of well-written technical documentation. Concise, well-written, littered with examples, and linking to an interactive playground to test-and-learn.

Some learnings:

It’s surprisingly functional! You can implement recursive functions and use higher-order functions! For example, here’s factorial in jq:

bash

$ jq '[.,1]|until(.[0] < 1; [.[0] - 1, .[1] * .[0]])|.[1]'

It supports string interpolation - this is really nice if you’re piping stuff from JSON into a string. Coupled with format strings this becomes frictionless:

bash

$ echo '{"search":"hello; world"}' | jq -r '@uri "https://www.google.com/search?q=\(.search)"'
# https://www.google.com/search?q=hello%3B%20world

You can define functions that accept functions¹, and control structures that allow labelling.

bash

$ echo '[[1,2],[10,20]]' | jq -r 'def addvalue(f): . + [f]; map(addvalue(.[0]))'
#[[1,2,1], [10,20,10]]

You can traverse complex data structures with first-class pathing support. And you can easily modify nested structures to extend objects.
For the category theorists/polyglots, there’s a denotational semantics paper written about jq.
Bonus: You can build a Brainfuck interpreter in jq; and you can build a jq interpreter in jq - how’s that for bootstrapping!

Side note: This is one of my goals for 2025 - read through documentation end-to-end to develop mastery over tools. I’m trying to prioritise selectively depth over breadth.

Shellshocked? Brace yourselves!

hello@abstractnonsense.xyz (Yossi Frenkel) — Sat, 15 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I just discovered that to capture multiple lines of stdout from a shell script and redirect them to a file, you can simply wrap them in braces!

For example, my “Create a blog post via a GitHub Action triggered on an Issue creation” workflow uses this snippet:

bash

{
 echo "---"
 jq 'del(.content)' "parsed_issue.json" | yq -P
 echo "---"
 echo ''
 
 # Inline "content" key for the body
 jq -r '.content' "parsed_issue.json"
} > content/micro-blog/"$FILENAME"

Typography in Parasite

hello@abstractnonsense.xyz (Yossi Frenkel) — Mon, 27 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This is awesome! Typographic Hangul from the title scene of Parasite

Developer Ergonomics

hello@abstractnonsense.xyz (Yossi Frenkel) — Wed, 22 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

“I wonder how much it is insightful to watch someone doing a workflow and to note when discomfort kicks in. That’s a really insightful thing to realize what matters from bitter experience, right? … Experience tells you when to worry about something and when not to worry about it” - Ben Sparks

That is - the rising discomfort of a programmer when employing a new tool, framework, or library is a good window into the ergonomics of how one uses your tool, framework, or library. Source: How I animate 3Blue1Brown | A Manim demo with Ben Sparks. The whole video is worth checking out! It’s a masterclass on how to construct a programatic-animation library and demonstrate how to work within it.

Audiolising SwiftUI Graphs

hello@abstractnonsense.xyz (Yossi Frenkel) — Tue, 18 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This demonstration of an auditory representation of a (visual) graph in Swift Charts is wild: Vectorized and function plots in Swift Charts at WWDC24.

Week 22

hello@abstractnonsense.xyz (Yossi Frenkel) — Sun, 28 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I noted that there’s a difference between Anomaly detection and Outlier detection.
Word of the week ~ enjambement

enjambement: (in verse) the continuation of a sentence without a pause beyond the end of a line, couplet, or stanza.
As an aside, I find Rust as a language fiendishly complex at a first glance, and I’m amazed by people who find it so straightforward. Having said that, I’d much rather have lived in a universe where Rust was the first ’low-level’ language I learnt instead of C.

Week 21

hello@abstractnonsense.xyz (Yossi Frenkel) — Sun, 21 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Discovered the concept of similarity graphs through a talk on Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection (UMAP) for Dimension Reduction at SciPy 2018.
Word of the week ~ grimoire, from French, an alteration of “grammaire” (grammar)

grimoire: a book of magic spells and invocations.
Also, in the world of books: The Cossacks by Leo Tolstoy.