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Welcome all readers from the non-technical lines of sight post The past 6 months of almost every moment of my free time has been spent developing an algorithm with my friend Tom Buckley-Houston to exhaustively prove that we’ve found the longest line of sight in the world. We both felt it was very doable algorithmically, but current options looked extremely computationally intensive. Since the inception of the project, through hard work and collaboration, we have been able to speed up the calculations by hundreds of times, and make it entirely feasible on top-of-the-line CPUs such as the AMD Turin. Please enjoy the deep dive, and make sure to check out Tom’s sister-blogpost and https://alltheviews.world for the final product! ...

One fateful day I was browsing a tech forum, lobste.rs, and stumbled upon a message that would captivate me for 6 months. My good friend Tom Buckley-Houston, posted in a “what are you working on this week” thread that he was working on algorithmically finding the longest line of sight in the world. In other words, how far from a (likely) very tall point can you see another (likely) tall point? “Well Ryan,” you may be saying, “isn’t this a solved problem? It’s somewhere between Russia and China” and I would say: “have you explored the entire earth yet?” It took a lot of very good sleuths to find the theoretical longest line of sight, but we haven’t exhaustively proven there can’t be any longer, have we? ...

Monday night at 4pm I was spending time with my girlfriend for the last few moments of her trip when I received a phone call from a “Private Number”. She was about to head to the airport when I got wide-eyed and said I needed to answer a call. I knew this was likely to be a call informing me that a pair of lungs had been found for me, and I was right. The Coordinator told me it wasn’t for sure, and that by 8pm they would have a decision on whether the lungs were for me. At 7pm I had a call with them confirming that this was the case. ...

Special thanks to @tombh for proofing this blog post! Edit 5/28: added a link to the repo and corrected the solver I used Did you know that LinkedIn has games? I sure as hell didn’t until my Dad showed me that they in fact have 5 (!) different games that you can play. One of them stood out to me as somewhat interesting, Queens: Solved Queens board ...

Hello! My name is Ryan Berger, I’m a 24-year-old software developer living in Seattle, WA. This is the first real post of my blog, and oh boy is it a doozy! To cut it short: in the coming months, I will be undergoing a bilateral lung transplant at the University of Washington. I have—since I was 13—known this was coming, but my lung function and blood tests show that I am not too far off from respiratory failure. My doctors have determined that I am in good shape and it is now time. ...