TL;DR – go read this Probability Theory primer by Michael Betancourt https://betanalpha.github.io/assets/case_studies/probability_theory.html

I spent the past month or so struggling with the measure theoretic foundations of probability theory. What the heck are sigma algebras? Nothing I read really landed with the dozen or so brain cells I have dedicated to mathematics. You may rightly ask what could possible work with such little mental capacity.

From the shockingly limited learning I’ve somehow accomplished to date, I’ve made a couple far-reaching and likely false generalizations that fit my world view:

1) Every key insight can be explained simply given the correct framework.

2) Any esoteric notation or concept has an underlying motivation that can be simply explained.

My hope is that I can find those simple explanations for everything I care to learn. Sir Dr. Betancourt’s excellent exposition checked those boxes for me. Whether or not that translates into a workable grasp of these concepts is left to be determined.

No but we all have our vices. After getting soundly trounced in a puzzlehunt, I took some of that frustrated energy and channeled it into https://autoideate.com. Right now it only highlights random portions of the input text. I had grand visions of automated rearrangements of words, pattern recognition, association building etc. Of course all of that fell by the wayside as life moved on.

Now my favorite personal use case is to fill the entire screen with “-” characters and watch the light show.