September 2025 – Jacob Brazeal
1 post published by Jacob Brazeal during September 2025| Jacob Brazeal
1 post published by Jacob Brazeal during September 2025| Jacob Brazeal
I. I have always depended rather heavily on conversational scripts. For me, this is not a specific list of things to say in a conversation, but rather a thematic approach to the interaction. The th…| Jacob Brazeal
I play bullet chess on lichess these days. My true skill level generally doesn’t change; ratings go up and down, mostly as a function of how focused and warmed up I am. Realistically, I would…| Jacob Brazeal
I. Suppose that I insult you, and you get angry at me. Does that make you an angry person? Well, no, you say: one angry reaction doesn’t mean you’re an angry person. (Plus, you didn’t start it!) But what if you always react this way when people insult you? Well, how often does that happen? If someone … Continue reading Baseball, Pitcher Wins, and Life→| Jacob Brazeal
I’ve been working on internal tools full-time for – huh! – more than six years now. Tools for analysts and accountants; for railroad inspectors and camp directors; for database develope…| Jacob Brazeal
I caught the chess bug as a college student, twenty-one years old, and it’s become my favorite way to unwind since then, as I’m now working at VisioStack and starting a master’s i…| Jacob Brazeal
I’ve been playing chess a long time now, and I’ve always been a good deal better (maybe a couple hundred ELO points) at blitz (3+0 or 5+0) than bullet (1+0). Well, I may have just fixed…| Jacob Brazeal
Suppose you are trying to measure a value P and you have two unreliable sensors. Sensor A returns 0.5P + 0.5U, where U is uniform random noise over the same domain as P. Sensor B will return either P or U with 50% likelihood. In other words, sensor A is a noisy measurement of your … Continue reading A puzzle of two unreliable sensors→| Jacob Brazeal
Last year I was on a date, and, being somewhat new to San Francisco, proposed a walk directly through the Tenderloin. After we arrived, my date was somewhat disturbed: “What happened?” I said. “Didn’t you see the naked man pooping in front of you?” She said. I had not seen this. (For the better, perhaps, … Continue reading On not noticing rather too many things.→| Jacob Brazeal
In a typical weight-lifting session, you gradually increase the amount of weight on the barbell as you warm up. In this post we will talk about how to make this process more efficient! Let’s say that you want to lift 65 lb for the first lift. The barbell itself weighs 45 pounds, and so you … Continue reading Computationally optimal arrangements of barbell plates→| Jacob Brazeal
I wondered how GPT-3 might do on the following problem: given a partially-connected graph, find a path between two nodes, or determine that no path exists. I wrote some code to automate generating graphs, feeding them to GPT-3, and parsing + grading its results. I generated 1000 random graphs and fed them to the model. … Continue reading Using GPT-3 to pathfind in random graphs→| Jacob Brazeal
It’s always a good day when you run into Robert Picardo. I. A Curious Coincidence Our story begins on a lazy weekend sometime in August, 2023, in that timeless city, San Francisco. I was out …| Jacob Brazeal
