2025-07-14 12:11:00

There’s this common trope that floats around trading circles:

“The best traders don’t post online.”

It’s usually meant to discredit anyone sharing trades, charts, ideas, or PnL publicly. The thinking goes: *If you were actually good, you wouldn’t need to post. The real killers at firms and funds aren't posting online and therefore if you are, you must be a fraud.

But here’s the reality...

Great Traders at Firms Don’t Need to Post

If you're working at a firm or fund and you're genuinely great, people already know.

You’ve got internal hype. Your name’s circulating. You're getting more risk, more buying power, and more respect. Your coworkers and managers? They're already circle jerking you up and making you feel great!

You don’t need external validation, because it’s baked into the environment. Your results are being rewarded both monetarily and with the attention from others.

The machine handles the recognition for you.

Retail Traders Don’t Have That Environment

Now flip it to the retail side.

You’re on your own. No office full of traders giving you props. No risk manager handing you more capital. No new hire whispering to others just how good you really are!

So yeah, some great retail traders post. Because they want to be seen. They want to be respected. They want someone to notice.

And honestly?

There’s nothing wrong with that.

If you’re putting in the work, finding edge, trading well, validation can feel good. You don’t need to pretend otherwise.

Some people post to find community. Others post to help, or to sell a product. And some post because they’re just proud of what they’ve been able to accomplish.

Don’t confuse that with insecurity or ALWAYS being a fraud.

Sometimes it’s just human nature.

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2025-07-14 05:25:09

Daily notes are useless. The value of a note is directly proportional to the number of times it is visited. That value is exponentiated each time a note is shared. Daily notes aren't revisited and they aren't shared.

Daily notes look like this:

notes/ 
  yyyy-mm-dd.md
  yyyy-mm-dd.md
  yyyy-mm-dd.md

On the surface, the idea of a note per day seems great. You plan out your day and track your work. You can revisit the past if needed. But you won't. All you are doing is generating digital clutter. You will also never share these notes, so the chance of their value increasing exponentially is zero.

Instead you should focus on creating notes that you are likely to revisit or likely to share.

Focus.md

I have one note that I visit all the time when I am working. It's a single Markdown file that I constantly update. It's essentially a to-do list that just helps me juggle all the things that I need to track. I call it focus.md

# Focus

Tasks that I have to do

## Periphery

Tasks that I have to be aware of, but I don't have to do.

It's nice because it lets me offload information that I don't need at hand and helps me focus on what I need to do.

Don't ask the same question twice

I try to never ask the same question twice. That means that when I do have a question, that question and its answer get a note.

They look something like this:

# Issue

## Issue details

## Resolution

Since I'm a programmer, I make a lot of these notes. I don't visit them very often, but I do revisit them if the same issue pops up again. But these notes find their value in being shared. If another person encounters the same issue, and I am able to help them fix it, then the note is worth the cost of its creation. I even add a lot of these notes to our documentation so I don't have to share them by hand.

It took me a while to figure out what's worth recording, and what isn't. And I am sure that it will be something different for you. But tools are supposed to prevent toil. Don't waste your time with daily notes.

2025-07-14 04:34:00

I get emails about how I customized my blog sometimes, so I thought I should publish that information some time in a comprehensive post summarizing everything and holding helpful links. This is not meant to replace the emails, so if you have questions, still feel free to reach out - I just didn’t wanna lock it behind having to message me :) and also I'll try to keep this very beginner friendly!

basics

• When you see a cool blog, you can always rightclick on that site, click 'View Page Source' (or an equivalent in your browser), and see their code. The custom CSS part of a Bearblog starts at <style>.
• If you are curious about a specific part of a website, right-click it and click 'Inspect'. This opens up a view that shows what the code behind that specific part is.
• If you want to target a specific part of the website with your CSS but don’t know what it’s called, it can help to Inspect and copy the CSS path. Not always entirely accurate for what you wanna do (especially if it adds some nth child stuff; chances are you could target it better) but it at least tells you some information to work with.
• The MDN is a good resource for CSS; I like their live examples you can click on.

bearblog specific

• For Bearblog specific styling, be sure to check out the Styling docs
• There’s bear.css.observer by mgx to toy around with. To get familiar with how CSS works, consider changing some values like colors and sizes to see how the theme reacts; turn red to blue, increase 200px to 210px, etc. That also makes you understand typical terms like color, width, font-size, margin, padding, border-radius etc. (those are the most important for beginner customizing in my opinion)
• A lot of themes can work (with some adjustments here and there) with the Bearming addons. I don’t use the Bearming Theme, but also have Bearming addons in my design. Many of my pages use the timeline addon, the 'what other people say' uses the testimonials addon.
• Always remember that you can set post attributes and that you can save a Post template (via the button 'Edit template' in the post editor) so that it all comes prefilled when you click 'New Post'. You can set meta data there like tags, a description, an image (both of these are visible in the preview you see when it’s posted on socials, Discord etc.) and more.
• If you want to display things automatically like post lists based on tag, or when the blog or post was created, when you were last active, etc. I encourage you to check out the docs on Embedding custom post lists and Neat Bear features. Custom post lists is how my home page and my “all entries” page split by year works, and inserting blog attributes is how it automatically updates when I have posted last and shows when this blog was created on the home page.
• If you want to change how your blog looks like for just one page, you can either set a class name via the post attributes (more about that here) so you can specifically target that page within your normal Theme CSS, or do it the lazy way like I do it: Write custom CSS into the post itself, starting with <style> and ending with </style>. That’s how my Filou and Benji pages work; they set a lot of things like the navigation bar and footer to display: none and change values like background color and width.
• Remember that you can’t just customize your blog but also your dashboard. I have used this code to always show me how many posts I have in total (if you are curious, right now it’s over 340).

other lists

• There’s this list by folkmoss, and
• this resource list by Sylvia for more helpful tweaks.

my stuff

• Here’s my blog design code. Should be 99% up to date since I haven’t changed much since then.
• Here’s my blinking cursor title code. It's an odd solution, you might wanna do it differently.

If I can think of anything else, I'll update it :)

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2025-07-14 00:18:00

Programming Language Theory (PLT) is one of my favourite areas of computer science yet I feel it's one of the most misunderstood by outsiders.

It's full of beautiful constructions and great ideas at the intersection of pure theory and practical applications. And yet outside of the PLT community, it's considered cryptic, hard, useless, not practical. The problems are similar to the public perception of pure maths ("why would I learn it?", "does it have any practical applications?") but somehow even worse.

How did it happen?

Problem 1: Theory vs applications

PLT can be done and appreciated as a pure maths subject, just like a beautiful construction proving an intricate topological theorem, or a stunning painting. It's an art. To fully appreciate it, you need some education.

A purely theoretical work is sometimes presented as having "practical applications". Sometimes the authors mean "it can be used to prove other theorems and the other 8 people interested in this topic might find it practically useful for that purpose". At other times, it's an overstated hope for potential future applications.

Imagine an experienced software engineer who got interested in PLT and wants to learn more. Someone told them that they should start with reading "The Lambda Calculus. Its Syntax and Semantics" by Barendregt. They go and struggle through unfamiliar notation, fighting to extract a drop of insight relevant to their experience. Finally, they understood the Church-Rosser theorem.

"What's Church-Rosser theorem good for?", software engineer asks. Oh, you see, it has practical applications, you just don't know enough to see it yet.

The engineer disappeared. His time was better spent learning a new Javascript framework - at least there he could see practical benefits.

Problem 2: Standing on the toes of the giants

Even simple-sounding theorems require heavy machinery. And that machinery is still being built, even though we started in the 30s.

How is that different from any other branch of mathematics? Well, if you take a look at undergraduate or graduate mathematics curriculum, you'll see that most subjects connect to one another. The build up on one another. Or there are celebrated "bridge" theorems, providing a way to translate results from one branch of mathematics to another.

Not so much in PLT. Each development, each proof starts close to starting from scratch. You won't find many authors reusing someone else's lemmas and theorems. Even definitions aren't agreed upon. So each paper can feel like starting from scratch.

Don't get me wrong, PLT researchers read each other's papers and do influence each other's work. But this influence happens at the level of techniques and approaches rather than formal reuse. Instead of building theorem-upon-theorem like in other mathematical fields, PLT researchers tend to adapt and modify each other's proof methods for their own ground-up constructions.

Problem 3: Abstraction creep

I mentioned that each paper, each problem might require a separate setup, with its own definitions, lemmas and theorems. Wouldn't it be nice if we could package common proof techniques as ready-made theorems and reuse them across many proofs?

It definitely would be nice but the price to pay is a very high level of abstraction. Think of it as a codebase which uses complicated architectural patterns, lots of indirection, many layers. Not in the spaghetti code kind of way, it's all necessary and used well - but there's a steep learning curve.

Just like with that codebase, where implementing each single piece of functionality from scratch would be so much easier without using so many abstractions, it's also the case for proofs using abstract methods. They are powerful but you lose intuitive clarity and make it harder for new people to jump in.

Problem 4: It's just hard

PLT is very hard. Minor changes to a language might break properties you rely on, language features don't compose nicely. The design space is vast, exploring each corner is expensive (how many production-grade compilers are there in the world?) and we've only had so much time.

On the other hand, PLT is about very concrete objects: programming languages. I can experiment with them, I can write interpreters, create my own toy language. Many people do! Why not learn some theory as well? How hard can it be?

It's an unpleasant surprise.

Solutions?

I can't dictate what people should and shouldn't do. But I'm well within my right to write down a wish-list:

• Be honest and tell people that big part of motivation for PLT work is its inherent beauty and immediate applicability in software engineering scenarios is not the goal.
• Create introductory materials for software engineers interested in PLT. It doesn't need to be comprehensive but it should provide motivation for why the theory exists, why it can be useful and why it is hard.
• Keep your theorems and proofs as simple as possible. I know the incentives in academia and asking everyone to write their papers with novices in mind won't happen but this is my wish-list and I can wish whatever I want.

A prayer

May I have the strength of will and clarity of mind to bring the beauty of PLT to more people through my hard work. May readers understand my intentions, forgive my sarcasm and enjoy the writing.

2025-07-13 23:03:16

I want a place to Learn in Public. A place to document my projects and knowledge. Not another blog to share moments. But a living document that will grow with me.

It will be my personal wiki. Each notes will always be a work-in-progress. The goal won't be to get everything right. The goal is to take care of it like a garden.

It will be a place to be myself. A safe place to learn. A place to expose my ideas.

A digital garden is what I want to do.

2025-07-13 00:09:00

Here's an idea: Can we just have the facts of the news reported to us?

In the olden days, when I was a teenager, the news appeared on the telly box thing in the early evening. They waffled on for 30 minutes with all that was happening. Job done. Next TV show.

Now we have wall-to-wall 24-hour news channels. All they do is regurgitate the same stories over and over. However, worse than that, it's not just the facts.....it's their feckin' opinions, and that of experts they wheel in.

The incessant speculation on why something happened; who might be to blame; what can we learn from it; what might happen next -- and we are drip fed a few facts as they get released.

I stopped watching news on the TV, and consume it by reading online. Even this is now getting full-on monotony. At least I can read quickly and move on.

I only require my doom-and-gloom in small doses. Not forced fed it constantly and with a heavy coating of total twaddle.

And the rant ends!