Skip to main content

Posts

What High School Doesn't Teach Us

I still remember how life was before quarantine, being carefree and indifferent to the big problems of the world; living life through the highs of today rather than the worries of tomorrow. And many people say that quarantine made kids grow up too fast, showing them that the world isn’t a perfect place, rather a collection of imperfect ideas that when looked at from the right angle gives the illusion of tranquility. An illusion that was broken in seconds. When people say this, they usually mean it negatively, as if to say being older is being thrust into a world with problems, without the solutions. And I completely agree with this, but is it such a bad thing? As people, we naturally feel lost when there’s nothing we’re working towards, like a big promotion, a group project, or a nonprofit cause. But children haven’t developed this sense of self-awareness. Naturally, as we get older, this universal fact becomes clearer and even self-evident. I feel lucky that I got a taste for this dur...
2 comments
Read more
Recent posts

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 ...
Post a Comment
Read more

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

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...
2 comments
Read more

Pain and Discomfort

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 ...
Post a Comment
Read more

There's Usually Enough Time

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

At the End of the Day, it's the End of the Day

Outside of playing video games, most of what I did in middle school was write code and do competition math. And I was happy in this reality. But as I entered high school, I looked at the skills I had, and regretted not having many outside the technical world. I couldn’t play an instrument, and could barely name a few fun facts about myself during the first day of school introductions. So I asked myself why. Well, I thought it was because I was never forced to do anything for most of my life , so I just stuck to those technical-esq things. And I did feel slightly bad about it, but it simultaneously felt out of my control. I took that feeling of inadequacy, a gap between the person I was and wanted to be, and attributed it to something that wasn’t me. This is the epitome of cope. Cope, fundamentally, is the way that we keep living with ourselves, and it's not necessarily bad. But, sometimes, cope becomes a fancy way of feeling sorry for yourself. I don’t mean to demeaning or pessimis...
Post a Comment
Read more

Momentum is Not Usually Conserved

 During a long bus ride, I asked one of my most cracked coding friends how he practiced for upwards of 6 hours a day without getting demotivated or feeling unproductive. His response was quite simple, “whenever you feel terrible, just take a shower.” To that I replied, “you can’t shower 5 times a day.” The small group listening in all laughed, and while I smiled at the joke, it masked the reality that I actually meant what I said. See, whenever I practiced competitive programming, or did anything for that matter, I would expect a decent level of progress. So if I spent an hour on a problem just to find the solution to be simple, or “wasted” time debugging a single line, it would kill any motivation I had. And unfortunately, the inverse doesn't hold. The feeling of gratitude from every hard problem I solved quickly, or a cool concept I learned, was disproportionately short-lived. In general, I think it's a lot harder to lose than to gain momentum. And while this seemed unfair to...
1 comment
Read more