Personal

When writing technical blogs or articles, I often feel that the hurdle is high. Here, I will list the factors that make output difficult and suggest some improvements. Factors That Raise the Bar There are four main factors that make output feel difficult: Accuracy Overlap with existing articles Lack of ideas for output Writing skills I will summarize each factor below. Accuracy This is a commonly discussed hurdle. It is closely related to the fear of being criticized or “called out.” ...

Introduction This article is being written on a day off. However, I’ve spent most of it sleeping. The duration of my sleep is as shown in the image below: I slept for nearly half a day. It’s not that I’m feeling unwell, but I just couldn’t find the energy to do anything. I feel more exhausted now than I used to in the past. ...

About MarkItDown On December 14, 2024, Microsoft released something interesting. It’s a software called MarkItDown. It’s a tool that converts various files into the Markdown format. Quoting from the official repository, the formats that can be converted are: - PDF (.pdf) - PowerPoint (.pptx) - Word (.docx) - Excel (.xlsx) - Images (EXIF metadata, and OCR) - Audio (EXIF metadata, and speech transcription) - HTML (special handling of Wikipedia, etc.) - Various other text-based formats (csv, json, xml, etc.) - ZIP (Iterates over contents and converts each file) As you can see, it handles a wide variety of files. ...

Introduction I recently came across a post on X (formerly Twitter). It described how a company that previously claimed to be fully remote had started requiring employees to come into the office. Reading posts about the challenges faced by people working in rural areas, I reflected on my own experiences as someone working at a “rural” university and as an engineer. This article isn’t about labeling urban or rural areas as inherently good or bad. I hope readers will keep this in mind while reading. ...

It’s about people who struggle to output their thoughts. For me, thoughts are like a tangled superposition. Unlike people who (in my view) are smart and can work backwards from a conclusion, my thought process is quite different. If you call yourself a technician, perhaps it’s better to be able to explain things. But my mental image of thinking doesn’t fit well with that. I think “A exists, and B exists, so C can be derived” is a clear and good explanation. However, if I say, “B exists (while A and similar A’ and D are floating unconsciously), so C can be derived,” it raises the question, “Where did B come from in the first place?” ...