Ryan Gibson
LightNews LightNews
ragibson.bsky.social
Ryan Gibson
@ragibson.bsky.social
4 followers 9 following 20 posts
I am a Computer Scientist and Mathematician with a wide range of technical interests. In my free time, I enjoy working on mathematical, statistical, and programming projects as personal hobbies.
https://ryanagibson.com/
Posts Replies Media Videos
ragibson.bsky.social
I experimented with a toy model of stress that compounds during consecutive work days and decays during rest. Greedy optimization of PTO then ends up looking a lot like typical vacation advice.
ryanagibson.com/posts/optimi...
A plot of stress levels from the toy model with no PTO and PTO optimized for lowest average stress. The PTO is mainly used in four long chunks of 7-11 days and mostly surrounding holidays. The "no PTO" stress floats around 90% for the last half of the year while the "optimized PTO" stress oscillates around 50% all year.
December 29, 2025 at 10:17 PM
ragibson.bsky.social
Quick riddle: which is slower and by how much? Thousands of simple operations or one print statement?
ryanagibson.com/posts/print-...
Two snippets of code. The first is several arithmetic, bitwise, and logical operations repeated 1500 times, and the second is a print statement of "A relatively short sentence."
August 20, 2025 at 3:45 PM
ragibson.bsky.social
How much should you spend for the most cost-effective PC build? How often should you upgrade? Is future-proofing worth it? I scraped more than a decade of data and spent some time on a simple model to find out.
ryanagibson.com/posts/optima...
A contour plot showing PC upgrade cost-efficiency. The x-axis shows initial PC cost ($250-$2,000) and y-axis shows years between upgrades (1-12). Colors range from red (50% efficiency) to green (100% efficiency). The optimal strategy, marked with an X, is a $734 PC upgraded every 5.7 years. The most efficient zone is around $600-$1,000 with 3-11 year upgrade cycles.
June 11, 2025 at 4:12 PM
ragibson.bsky.social
I worked on some QR code cellular automata that remain scannable on every frame. See ryanagibson.com/posts/qr-cod... for details.
May 21, 2025 at 2:55 AM
ragibson.bsky.social
Beating a dead horse with an old post, but: save aggressively and invest early. Some back of the envelope calculations show those first few years matter the most.
ryanagibson.com/posts/early-...
A huge percentage of retirement savings come from the first few years due to compounding. More than half of your total savings come from the first decade of contributions. About one third of your total savings come from the first five years.
May 15, 2025 at 3:55 PM