The probability of a hash collision (2022)

Honest question.

How does one write something like this?

I get the interest, and the review process. What I mean is, is this a hobby where someone is passionate about soothing, or does some employers allow people to work on side projects?

I feel my life is mostly about direct value, and I don't really understand where I went wrong in the path for meaningful knowledge.

Any philosophical help will be very welcome, as you correctly guest I'm a bit lost.

Almost certainly a hobby. Employer would probably want something like this on a employer blog so that they get the benefits.

It sounds like you're too focused on outcome and not enough on experience.

It is a miserable life to treat everything like a chore done to earn some know, expected, concrete reward.

I suspect the author got curious, did some reading, realized they understood something, and thought it would be fun to write up the result. Likely all in their free time.

Unless you're supremely lucky, this kind of stuff is a hobby. One wishes that weren't the case, but capitalism is what it is...

I'd encourage you to generally ignore whether something has direct value or not because that's not how knowledge works. For example, I once spent well over a month implementing the NthWeekday function using nothing but basic arithmetic operations. This would allow us to calculate all federal holidays for a given year at runtime instead of precalculating the values and storing them in a table (which I hated, because it meant that someone had to maintain that table). This hyper-specific problem has near-zero direct value, but it was THE project that sparked my passion for maths.

I remember R. Feynman wrote that at some point in his life he reached the end of his achievements, and it was a pretty sad time. For many years he couldn't produce anything valuable anymore. So over time he gave up trying and just kept on living, doing stuff just for fun, not for value. One day he saw someone juggles a kitchen plate throwing it into the air, spinning. He got interested, why does the plate "waves" exactly twice less than rotation speed. He started computing it, just for fun. Because he was already a failure, so who cares. Over time that pointless kitchen plate computations grew up to quantum calculations, for which he much later was awarded a Nobel.