The GRE
I took the diagnostic test that accompanied my 2010 GRE study book by Kaplan and I failed miserably. I am glad that it was only a diagnostic quiz, because otherwise I would not have the smallest chance on the coldest day in hell to get into a graduate program.
The problem that I have with the GRE is that the questions are irrelevant. They do not measure how likely you are to perform well at graduate level study, instead they measure how many complicated and useless words you can learn in a given number of months, how many irrelevant passages you can read in 45 minutes, and how many unnecessarily complicated math problems you can do in an hour.
It is sad, that I find calculus relieving after taking the math portion of the GRE. It is not difficult per se, it is just worded in a strange way and forces you to think in terms of theoretical math. Not algebra, not trigonometry, not calculus, but some weird ass backwards math that does not remotely apply to the real world.
I don’t want to sound like I am complaining that the GRE is “too hard”. I will take it in January, and I will get a great score. I am just frustrated at the fact that everything I learned in college has not prepared me for this exam, and nothing that I learn in Graduate school will relate to it.
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Recent Favorite Blog Posts
This is a collection of the last 8 posts that I bookmarked.
- A eulogy for Vim from Drew DeVault's blog
- Pluralistic: AI "journalists" prove that media bosses don't give a shit (11 Mar 2026) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
- Avi Alkalay: Uniqlo T-Shirt Bash Script Easter Egg from Fedora People
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- Pluralistic: California can stop Larry Ellison from buying Warners (28 Feb 2026) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
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Articles from blogs I follow around the net
Highlights from my conversation about agentic engineering on Lenny's Podcast
I was a guest on Lenny Rachitsky's podcast, in a new episode titled An AI state of the union: We've passed the inflection point, dark factories are coming, and automation timelines. It's available on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. Here …
via Simon Willison's Weblog: Entries April 2, 2026Flood Fill vs the Magic Circle
Musings from Robin Sloan: Most olive oil production at medium-or-greater scale depends on machines of this kind [over-the-row olive harvester]; they trundle over trees planted in long rows, almost like continuous hedges, and collect the fruit with vibratin…
via Information Overload April 2, 2026The Blandness of Systematic Rules vs. The Delight of Localized Sensitivity
Marcin Wichary brings attention to this lovely dialog in ClarisWorks from 1997: He quips: this breaks the rule of button copy being fully comprehensible without having to read the surrounding strings first, perhaps most well-known as the “avoid «click here»…
via Jim Nielsen’s Blog April 2, 2026Generated by openring