for tomorrow

 It feels like just yesterday I wrote the last post on this blog. This last month has been a blur, which makes sense because almost every week had a consistent rhythm. But I realized that this isn’t the consistent rhythm I want, honestly I don’t even want to carry this over into the next month. How did so much time go by before I realized this? Let’s turn back to trusty song lyrics Life goin’ fast, but we kids and we thinkin' it'll be that way forever, so we waste time Ignoring the perhaps harsh tone of using this lyric as a metaphor, I think people often fall into this form of complacency in life. Falling into a narrow vision of what your future will look like makes you lose the bigger picture and what you’re actually working towards. A good example of this is going into Quant. When a coworker of mine was in college, he told me that almost everyone he knew had the goal of getting a job as a Quant researcher. They made lots of money and actively worked on interesting problems— ...

The concept of being ‘sentient’ is being brought to light more, especially now, where sentience is one of the most defining characteristics of humans, and replicating sentience is now the final frontier of technology. Humans are a dominant species for two reasons. Firstly, we are smart and are physically capable of having novel ideas and executing them. Throughout history, people have worked really hard to replicate, and even improve, this part of our existence. Industrial factories are much better at assembling things. Calculators are much better at computing things than us. And the leading reasoning models are a lot better at competitive math than (most of) us.  And this is actually the second reason why humans have been dominant— our ability to actively think about how to be better. Being sentient is realizing that you have this level of control over outcomes in your life, as opposed to accepting your physical limitations and just ‘going with the flow.’ Drastic, positive change ...

When I was transitioning from backflipping onto a cushion to backflipping on flat ground (which I’m still slightly scared to do…), I was tempted to ‘just do it’ to overcome the fear. And while this did work at times, at some point I was told that it looked like I was just “throwing my body at it,” instead of being deliberate about the action. In my last semester of high school, I spent a lot of time pursuing various side quests, like learning to play the guitar, do cool stuff with cards, or to backflip. And with each of these things, I have gained a newfound appreciation for developing a ‘mind-muscle connection’, both for how magically it manifests itself and how interesting the development process is. I used to play soccer competitively, and every practice, I'd realize that as I warmed up, the world seemed to move slower and slower in my head. I would slowly start to have enough time to actually think through how the ball interacted with my feet, and where the other players were m...

After visiting both MIT and Stanford this last month, one thing I noticed from these talent-dense communities is that the unquantifiable quality of having ‘aura’ is one of the most important character traits there is. In these environments, raw intelligence alone is not enough. The ability to communicate competence coexists with the competence itself, and neither flourishes without the other. Aura is easy to recognize but hard to explain. It’s not difficult to see who people respect, but the reason for this respect is more challenging to pinpoint. I think there are two types of aura: intellectual aura and rhetorical aura.  The former is literally how smart you are, based on objective measures. These are people that you genuinely know are smart when you are around them. They have good ideas in conversations, and have accomplished respectable things. Most people are able to respect people with intellectual aura pretty easily, mainly because the ways we prove intelligence are difficul...

Pain biologically serves as a deterrent from things against our best interests. It's usually a signal that something is wrong, like a headache or a sore throat when we’re sick. But then there’s saying “no pain, no gain.”  Working out is inherently painful . The entire process of building muscle is by tearing them down for them to build back stronger. That pain doesn’t seem to be a signal that something is wrong. And this is a metaphor for almost everything—but its simultaneously a paradox. Pain is usually a signal to stop, but it's also sometimes a signal to keep going. Perhaps this is where the distinction between discomfort and pain is important. Doing something difficult, even if you like it, is usually uncomfortable—hence a feeling of discomfort. But pain is different, even for nonphysical things. Studying for olympiads has always made me feel discomfort, but it was only painful when I was burnt out. The way I’ve described discomfort seems like I just cherry-picked all the ...

It’s crazy to say, but I feel like I’m running out of time in the second semester of my senior year. Between school and work almost every day, I’m left with far less time to pursue side quests or hang out with my friends than I had planned for. Don’t get me wrong—working is super fun—but the scarcity of time has never felt more real to me. And this is surprising to me. I used to feel like saying you have “no time” was just an excuse that means you didn’t care enough about something, which it probably is. If I really cared, I would’ve spent an extra hour on that project instead of listening to music. And most of the time, I trust myself to make this value judgement correctly. But when I’m tired, the bar for motivation rises exponentially, and something I could’ve done a few hours ago is almost impossible to do now. I almost always have enough time, just not enough motivation. The most obvious solution to this is removing “agentic” choices from these things, partially outsourcing this m...