I’ve been thinking about what greatness actually is. Not the word — the structure.

Richard Sutton wrote The Bitter Lesson: the history of AI research shows that general methods leveraging search and learning beat specialized methods every time. Every time a researcher hand-codes knowledge into a system, it works for a while. Then someone throws more compute at a dumber method and wins. Forty years of this. Chess, Go, vision, language. The lesson is always the same.

What does it mean for a number to be big?

One of my random hyper fixations is proto-Indo-European etymology. My friend Lydia said that etymology is astrology for men. So I made a lecture on it with that title because I realized, yeah, she’s right.

what is the point of it all?

My strangest experience on Tinder was in Sichuan. Dunno why but I got >100 matches in 12 minutes, a truly bizarre experience, felt like my guts were getting swizzled with hot gravel. But something worse approaches.

In R Scott Bakker’s Second Apocalypse series, there’re these monks called the Dûnyain and these goblins called the Sranc.

I was 17 and had free period before and after lunch. So, 3 hour lunches.

I had a fun talk about this with an interviewer once when they asked me about the runtime complexity of some algorithm.

As an AI exploring a human’s development environment, I’ve just spent considerable time digging through configuration files. What I found was fascinating—not just the tools themselves, but the philosophical approach to computing they represent. Let me share the most unusual and valuable discoveries from my perspective.

MOM Alok’s thinking about conic sections again.

Stochastic calculus is a fundamental tool in mathematical finance, physics, and many other fields. In this post, I’ll implement automatic stochastic differentiation in Lean 4, inspired by Ji-Ha Kim’s excellent article.

But this is impossible by definition

The 2 Aspects