victorliu.info

AI is making me a micromanager

Victor liu — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0700

I am a manager. I hate being a manager. Granted, I manage a whopping two people (two and half, if we're being realistic about job tasks), but I still don't enjoy it. I understand it is a necessary evil in a company of size greater than two, and on the …

The inhumanity of the metric system

Victor liu — Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 -0700

The metric system is made for computation. I am not a computer.

Email letter to CUSD board and superintendents, 2026-05-28

Victor liu — Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 -0700

Update: See below for a summary of responses.

To whom it may concern,

You heard from me tonight during public comments at the board meeting. I am writing to better understand the process by which the list of improvements to West Point Elementary was assembled, and voice my concerns. For …

A legible home computer

Victor liu — Tue, 26 May 2026 00:00:00 -0700

TL;DR: Modern computing sucks. Let's go back to the 90s, but redesign things more sensibly.

Many articles have been written on the deplorable state of modern computing and the world in general. The fact that somehow 8 GB of RAM in 2026 is considered "insufficient" is mindboggling, considering I …

First yard mowing of 2026

Victor liu — Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 -0700

I mowed the yard today. Well, actually, it was with a weedeater, but the effect is the same. I am writing this note to remember for next year that this is too late by about two weeks. The last rain was about two weeks ago, and that was when the …

Starting again

Victor liu — Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 -0700

Redesign of this site, and another attempt to keep up blogging.

Circular arcs 4 - extrema

Victor liu — Thu, 27 Dec 2018 00:00:00 -0800

One basic operation upon shapes is to compute bounding regions. For a shape made up of pieces of simple curves, this amounts to computing directional extrema on the curve. In other words, given a curve and a direction vector \(d\) (without loss of generality we assume it is normalized), determine …

Circular arcs 3 - parameterization

Victor liu — Sun, 02 Dec 2018 00:00:00 -0800

In the last article, we discussed how to compute a point on the arc given a parameter value. In this article, we explore the inverse problem of computing the parameter value given a point (approximately) on the arc.

Parameters used for arc evaluation and parameterization.

To recap, we obtained the …

Circular arcs 2 - evaluation

Victor liu — Thu, 29 Nov 2018 00:00:00 -0800

Continuing the series on circular arc representations, we next discuss the most fundamental operation of curve representation: evaluation at an arbitrary parameter value.

The typically most desirable parameterization is arc length parameterization. We will use instead a parameter \(s\in[0,1]\) that is proportional to the arc length parameterization …

Circular arcs 1 - representation

Victor liu — Tue, 27 Nov 2018 00:00:00 -0800

I have written a short note on circular arcs, but I feel it would be a good idea to revisit much of that material and explain some of the rationale and derivations. We will begin this series with this article on arc representation.

The goal is to represent an arc …