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Make Time Move Slow

 “Make time go slow.” At SPARC 2025, life was moving too fast. There was always something fun to do, and a distraction was always there if I wanted it. So this piece of advice during the class we had on meditation felt perfectly timed. The next day, instead of going to class, I took a walk along the cliffside and just sat there. I sat there staring, letting my existence sink in. Writing this blog is probably the slowest my life has been in the past month, and it started with me letting my existence sink in (my roommate will tell you I spent a lot of today just staring at our ceiling). But even now, I have to intentionally move slowly, to prevent myself from joining the ping pong games running outside or the groups of people going to parties outside my window. Once I stopped filling every moment, I started noticing the things I kept saying I wanted to do but never made time for. When I talked to my friend about lacking motivation to do things that actually improve me, a piece of adv...
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Thoughts on AI After a Month of Stanford

I don’t have many long stretches of time where someone doesn’t mention the existential crisis that many people in intellectual fields are going through: whether AI will take their jobs or not. And what's crazy to me is how dystopian these people make the future out to be. I think that even if we extrapolate timelines based on current rates of progress, there’s still so many interesting problems that will need to be solved post-AI. At the highest level, I don’t believe AI is the last “big” thing. Problems like inference, robotics, energy, or even world hunger will persist, and will require significant innovations beyond the current state-of-the-art systems. AI is currently, and has been, really really good at solving well-defined problems in the digital world, but as soon a problem does not satisfy these two properties, AI falls flat. At a slightly more controversial level, the thing that these models are optimizing for does not make them capable of solving problems in the real worl...
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Jump Discontinuities

Generally when we think of a baseline for the future, we tend to assume it's a flat line from exactly where we are now. But this is almost never actually the case. If you're actively investing, net positive returns mean almost nothing. The actually useful question is whether you're outperforming the simple counterfactual: putting your money in an index fund and letting it compound. This concept of comparing to a simple counterfactual generalizes surprisingly well to almost every aspect of life. It's easy to be complacent, seeing how far you’ve come and the obvious differences between you now and you in the past. But it's a lot harder to see which parts represented genuine changes beyond the trajectory you were already on. For example, graduating high school feels like progress, but a freshman version of me was on the path to do this. The reason I’m writing this is because I have a mental list of things I've done that I’m proud of, and I realized that I’m most pr...
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Life's Moving Too Fast

 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— ...
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Becoming Sentient

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 ...
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Mind-Muscle Connection (How to Learn)

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...
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Aura is All You Need

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...
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