Paul Lapey
About Me
I am currently a software engineer at Sunday Robotics working on robotics and machine learning infrastructure. I was previously at Applied Intuition, and before that at Roivant Sciences. I studied Computer Science and Economics at Williams College.
My interests include:
- medium sized dogs
- rock climbing
- reading
- lifting
- linux
- classical music
Books I've Read Recently click links for notes...
collecting my thoughts on books so i don't forget them
- Never Let Me Go (2005) by Kazuo Ishiguro
It's a tragic story but not one I was compelled by. The narrator is passive and affectless, which is sort of the point, but I could not bring myself to care about any of the bland characters. Perhaps a skill issue. - Johannes Brahms: A Biography (1997) by Jan Swafford
Brahms desperately did not want to be biographized. And yet this just makes him all the more fascinating to biographers... (currently reading). - Tools for Conviviality (1973) by Ivan Illich
Illich's focus is distinguishing "convivial tools" that increase human autonomy from industrial tools that curtail freedom and hollow out satisfaction. This felt prescient in light of the transformation of the internet from an open forum that enabled human connection to a Skinner box optimizing for attention, addiction, and ad revenue. - Crime and Punishment (1866) by Fyodor Dostoevsky
I was expecting this to be dense and difficult to get through. It ended up being much more intense and moving than I anticipated: it is emotionally raw and the suspense and intrigue of the story made it hard to put down. The plot also advances faster than one would expect: the Crime occurs about 76 pages in, leaving the remaining ~480 for a long sentence of Punishment.
- The Cuckoo's Egg (1989) by Clifford Stoll
Fun book about a berkeley physicist turned sysadmin who tracks down a hacker trying to break into berkeley computers. - Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph (2014) by Jan Swafford
I wanted to read this because I knew a little bit about Beethoven and the general shape of his life seemed too dramatic and improbable to be real. It's real. - The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
I wanted to read this because of the associated Brahms piano quartet, one of my favorite pieces. I regret reading it. - The Two Hands of God (1963) by Alan Watts
- The Vintage Guide to Classical Music (1992) by Jan Swafford
It's fun because you can pick the sections you want to read based on what types of classical music you like. For example, I stopped reading once the book got to the 20th century. At this point in music history, Music Academia largely decided that all novel ideas in Good Music had been exhausted and therefore composers like Schoenberg, Stravinsky, and Cage pursued novelty in the burgeoning field of Bad Music - When We Cease to Understand the World (2020) by Benjamin Labatut
Contact Info
Research
As an undergraduate at Williams, I conducted research in the field of combinatorial generation. My research focused on efficiently generating certain sets of Catalan objects, specifically Łukasiewicz words and ordered trees (plane trees).- A Shift Gray Code for Fixed-Content Lukasiewicz Words (pdf) - Read an illustrated summary here! A paper that I presented at the University of Trier for the 33rd International Workshop on Combinatorial Algorithms (IWOCA 2022). Published by Springer, also available on ResearchGate.
- Pop & Push: Ordered tree iteration in O(1)-time (pdf) A paper that I presented at the 33rd International Symposium on Algorithms and Computation (ISAAC 2022).
- Honors Thesis: Cooler than Cool: Cool-Lex Order for Generating New Combinatorial Objects (pdf) My honors thesis in computer science at Williams College. This thesis includes two main results:
- The first Gray code for generating fixed content Lukasiewicz words, presented at IWOCA 2022
- A pull Gray code for generating ordered trees with a fixed number of nodes, to be presented this winter at at ISAAC 2022
A joint work with my thesis advisor, Aaron Williams, this paper provides the first shift Gray code for fixed content Lukasiewicz words. This was one of two main results from my honors thesis.
Also a joint work with my thesis advisor, Aaron Williams, this paper provides the first "pull Gray code" for exhaustively generating Ordered trees with
n nodes. The algorithm described in this paper generates each tree in worst-case O(1) time, evaluating only three conditionals per generated tree.
O(1) time. Source code is available in C; both projects can be built with make on systems with gcc.
Software I particularly like
tilling window managers: [dwm](https://dwm.suckless.org/) in particulra
vi/vim/neovim: the best text editor
fzf, dmenu
About this site
features / non-features
- Serverless: For some, serverless means letting AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud abstract away server interaction from the programmer. These services are serverless in the same sense that hiring someone else to build your house is "constructionless."
- This website is serverless in a different sense: it runs on a Raspberry Pi in my parents' basement (pictured to the right). While this paradigm is not truly serverless either, the fact that my server is smaller than a deck of cards allows me to feel closer to a true serverless experience.
- No javascript: absent javascript, the web is fast. This website is small and will load quickly on any device.
