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I care about practicality. I read books on an iPad and take notes on my laptop; in general, if I can avoid having another thing by replacing it with a digital copy, I’ll use it digitally. For many of their historical uses, pen & paper just aren’t practical anymore compared to computers. A nicer experience, sure, but for my day-to-day work, not practical. Only recently did I realize the…
With tools like Claude Code and Codex, I think typing speed is starting to matter more, and I haven’t seen anyone mention this yet. Before AI, typing speed didn’t matter much for programming, because everyone needed to take time to think through problems, come up with a good solution, and debug. These activities were not typically bound by typing speed. A fast typer might code up a…
I was nominated to submit a commencement speech for my grad school’s 2026 commencement. They didn’t select it, so I’m putting it here. Congratulations class of 2026. We are graduating at a very strange time in human history. Everything is changing: AI, the job market, the world order, our lives. Many of you are rightfully worried about what comes next. In addition to our degree,…
I just upgraded the processor in my Framework 13, and all things considered, it went well. Most importantly, it was easy . I also upgraded the webcam, which took about five minutes to swap. The original machine with a Ryzen 7640U was $ 1k, and the HX 370 mainboard upgrade was $ 1k. You could probably get a “better” laptop for $2k, but it wouldn’t be nearly as repairable or…
I try to use default keybindings and keyboard layouts as much as possible, but as a vim user, I’ve always mapped Caps Lock to escape wherever possible. On certain mechanical keyboards (I use the Drop ALT ) you can map multiple functions to the same key, so a tap presses one key while holding it treats it as another. I never thought about this much until recently, but realized this…
I just published a novella that I wrote during the summer of my PhD thesis defense. I actually wrote the first scene a year ago because it wouldn’t get out of my head, then returned to it in May 2025. A novella is apparently just a short novel, so that’s what this is, I guess. I have no interest in wasting people’s time—especially my own—so I wrote Growth and Decay to…
0x0d-I: March 13th, 2181, 10:00pm “Hi Ari, it’s Ari.” Ari’s head snapped to face the speaker placed on the floor. It was a small bookshelf speaker, with a laptop resting on top. On the screen, a bar scanned across a waveform titled 12-greeting-final-2-final.mp3 . The voice sounded like Ari’s. “I’m you, from about an hour ago. Please don’t panic. I…
Just upgraded my Framework Laptop 13 Mainboard from a Ryzen 7640U to a Ryzen AI HX 370. I run Arch Linux. Here’s my experience: Upgrade was easy, but the cables for my WiFi card wouldn’t snap into place. There’s a plastic thing that I have to put on top of the connector to hold them in place, but it’s a massive pain to connect. Took me over 20 minutes to align and lock the…
Like many edgy teenagers, I once embraced nihilism —the belief that nothing matters, that existence is fundamentally meaningless. I could write a book on how strongly I subscribed to this area of thought, but that’s not the point of this post; you’ll have to trust that the following comes from someone who climbed out of the pit: Everything matters. And that’s even scarier. I…
My latest paper is available on arxiv: Low Rank Factorizations are Indirect Encodings for Deep Neuroevolution . The general idea is that we can search for stronger neural networks in a gradient-free fashion by restricting search to networks of low-rank. We show that it works well for language modeling and reinforcement learning tasks. It’s essentially a crossover between the following…
If all goes well, I’ll leave Brandeis University with a PhD degree in computer science this summer. Here are my parting thoughts for our remaining students, divided into technical and non-technical sections. I write this out of self-interest; students after me will represent our university in years to come, and it’s in my best interest for them to be as effective as possible.…
I used to have a mental block against casually reading things that weren’t designed to be casually read, like old papers, textbooks, documentation, etc. If I was going to read for enjoyment, I’d read blogs or popular science/fiction books. Not sure why. Over time, I’ve met people who read things I’d never think to read. I’ve gotten a lot of value from copying them, so…
Starting from REINFORCE, the original deep reinforcement learning algorithm, we will trace the evolution of policy gradient methods to the Group Relative Policy Optimization algorithm used to train Deepseek r1 . This post ignores the LLM side of things, less-related developments in RL, and most of the equations used for these algorithms, but captures the essence and intuition of the RL-timeline…
I just finished The Story of Civilization, Vol. 1 (1976) by Will Durant. It’s a fantastic read; Durant is eloquent, witty, and surprisingly relevant today. Below are some of my personal highlights of his writing, mixed with some quotes-of-quotes I found interesting. Sections: Introduction | Communism | Government | Women | Morals | Language | Appearance | Sumeria | Egypt | Babylon | Assyria…
I don’t think r1 will get us to artificial super intelligence, but whatever comes next probably will. We are reaching a familiar bottleneck in AI. Previously, humans had to manually hardcode the patterns that AI could recognize. With deep learning, machines began to learn patterns on their own, without human assistance. With (relatively) expensive humans out of the loop, we threw machines at…
I’m doing an internship right now, and thankfully, I read a few books on software design before starting. I had to design a database schema, data submission page, submission approval page, and dynamic dashboard for the project I was assigned to. This is one of those projects that AI can obviously do 90% of to work for if designed appropriately–if the right abstractions are used,…
Wikipedia translates the Greek philosophical concept of Eudaimonia as “Human Flourishing”, particularly on the spiritual level. It refers to genuine happiness and fulfillment over hedonism or GDP. The modern world feels meaningless at times. Instead of hunting or farming to put food on the table, many of us sit at a computer or stand behind a counter, far removed from the fruits of our labor—if…
It used to be good enough just to copy others. Now, with AI in the hands of billions, there’s little value in copying. For instance, take programming. Five years ago, building apps, websites, or games required a non-trivial amount of skill, and getting your first project off the ground was an accomplishment. Now, AI can generate most starter projects in hours, if not minutes. I think this…
CUPERTINO, CALIFORNIA - Apple today announced the release of the groundbreaking iPad Pro Max, the world’s first tablet powered by the all-new quantum Q1 processor. Capable of 30 octillion floating point operations per second, the Q1 makes the iPad Pro Max the most powerful streaming device ever made, over 2x faster than the M4 iPad Pro. Available in both 11-inch and 13-inch sizes, Apple says…
I installed linux on a OnePlus6T. Setup took less than an hour, technical issues included. Why $90 for 8GB RAM, 128GB storage, 2.8GHz 8-core CPU Linux on the OnePlus 6T is well documented Low power consumption Tiny footprint No additional cables Built-in battery backup WiFi, bluetooth, speaker, screen, etc Negligible environmental impact sans shipping I wanted to play with Linux on ARM I…
Contents: Introduction , Step away, come back later , Focus, but not too much , Generalization comes after specialization , Don’t bother if you don’t need to , Let Go Introduction I recently read Zen in the Art of Archery , which isn’t a book about archery as much as it is a book about zen. The book describes author’s journey learning archery from a zen master. I highly…
I’ve been an author on a few papers before, but I recently published the first research project where I was responsible for most of the work and direction. It’s in the first 2024 issue of the journal Artificial Life , which you can find here . You can find a non-paywalled version here Below, I tell the chronology of the project and summarize our findings. We explore the conditions…
punk.ist - A list of increasing importance Unix - The philosophy of modular programs vi key bindings - Comfortable computing Artificial Life - Life in silico 100 Rabbits - Low-tech maritime artist collective Antifragility - Strength from setbacks Lauryn Hill’s MTV Unplugged - The unknown Queen of Hip-Hop George Watsky’s Live! From the Metro - The concert which made me love live music…
How great would it be if the solution to most errors you face were in the first place you looked? That’s what the Arch Wiki has been for me: a massive wealth of information and troubleshooting resources to help me navigate the various configuration and installation issues I’ve encountered. Some people claim Arch Linux is too difficult for new users, but for me it’s been the only…
Excerpts I found interesting from Alan Watt’s The Way of Zen , grouped by vibes: Definition Convention Feel Growing Spontaneity Pointing Ego Interference Present Negation Liberation Za-zen Widespread Art Definition Zen Buddhism is a way and a view of life which does not belong to any of the formal categories of modern Western thought. As will soon be obvious, a way of liberation can have no…
Flash attention , a recent implementation of attention which makes less calls to high-bandwidth memory, uses a version of the softmax function which is numerically stable. In this post, I’ll briefly showcase how this is done and an example of an unstable softmax. The softmax function is used in machine learning to convert a vector of real numbers to a vector of probabilities which sum to 1,…
Kittyplot is a program designed to plot experiment data in the kitty terminal using the kitty graphics protocol , primarily for use on HPC clusters. Plots are rendered using matplotlib, and users can zoom into different regions of the plots by setting x and y limits using their editor. I use prompt_toolkit to accept regexp input and I override the tab-completion to instead display a list of all…
Make a fucking website already, Owen. You’ve been playing around with the idea of making a blog for like two years, but you’ve been dragging your feet. Maybe you can’t decide what framework to use, or where to host it, or blah blah blah. If you want excuses not to make a site, I’m sure you’ll find them. But it literally just takes a few hours, less if you don’t…
Matthew Carlson’s blog post “Fighting Distraction With Unit Tests” inspired me to share some extra benefits of writing test code I’ve discovered during my PhD program. I’m working on a weird project that’s constantly changing as I try new things, and naturally, debugging and ensuring correctness was a nightmare. So I started writing tests, cursing myself for…
I don’t know anybody in real life who blogs regularly, and I think that kills my motivation to write blog posts myself. I actually started writing this post before realizing that a friend of mine has a blog , but in my defense he’s only posted twice in the past 2 years. I suppose that makes my title a lie, but I like the title, and the point still stands. I want to build a writing…
I love the look of LaTeX but hate the experience of writing in LaTeX, at least compared to Markdown. Luckily, Pandoc can convert Markdown files to PDFs using a LaTeX engine as the renderer , and includes a custom Markdown specification that can fill almost all my LaTeX needs. First, let’s talk about where Pandoc Markdown falls short: No custom LaTeX style guides (although citation style…
An ever-expanding list of concepts in the field of AI to give myself and others an easy reference. Each item in the list contains a short, rudimentary definition I’ve written, as well as a link to a resource that can explain it better. Ablation Study : Removing some parts of a machine learning model to measure impact on performance Advantage Function : The difference between a Q-value for a…
There is a great tool known as pandoc that can convert documents from one filetype to another. For example, you can convert a Microsoft Word document to a PDF, without even needing to own a copy of Microsoft Word! However, we care about Pandoc’s ability to convert a Markdown document to a slideshow presentation using LaTeX Beamer as a rendering engine. There is a great writeup about this…
Is it better to have no facts about a topic and thus no opinion, or have access to a few “out of context” facts and thus a misinformed opinion? TL;DR: Either start learning about issues you care about, or stop caring about them so much. It’s more honest, less mental effort, and is less likely to ruin Thanksgiving. You can’t be well-informed on every topic; It’s just…
Not all rules are made equal. Some rules, like the speed limit, are broken by everyone and their mother, and are enforced (mostly) when people are breaking them to a dangerous point. Other rules, like “don’t murder people”, are enforced far more. Why is that? Different Rules, Different Tools Some rules are in place to assign blame to someone with bad judgement. There’s…
The more I learn about the world, the less certain I become about it. There are so many conflicting views and information taken out of context that it’s hard to discern fact from truth. Below are some notes I keep to help navigate the sea of information that is modern society. TL;DR: Don’t get fooled by facts if they have no context, don’t discount an opinion because it’s…
Here’s the problem with advertising AI-based technology that doesn’t exist: You cannot promise anything about your product. We’ve all seen AI advertised to the masses that doesn’t work as advertised, just look at any voice-to-text system. When I got my Apple Watch, I hoped to use it to respond to messages without getting distracted by my phone. I quickly realized that…
Jeff stepped over a beer can, then over a water bottle and onto a mat, whose faded lettering vaguely resembled the phrase “Welcome!” He opened his front door and walked inside. Looking to his right, Jeff noticed his old hooded friend where he left him; on his living-room rocking chair. The cold metal scythe still in his lap, the skeleton hadn’t moved an inch from where he left…
Some thoughts on Happiness: Happiness doesn’t come from wealth. Otherwise, therapists and anti-depressants would have to be much cheaper. If happiness came from consumption of goods and services, it would therefore follow that once those goods and services are reduced or cut off, one would no longer be as happy. If you can cut off happiness, it’s more akin to a drug than an emotion.…
Introduction In this essay we will give a brief history of crytocurrency leading up to Bitcoin, give an overview of the Bitcoin protocol by summarizing key sections of the whitepaper, and briefly discuss Bitcoin’s use of cryptographical proof and computational security instead of trusted third parties within the protocol. History Bitcoin is far from original. Digital currencies date back as…
What happened to “Don’t give out your name on the internet?” Within the past 15 years, the desire for online anonymity has vanished – as “normal people” joined the digital world, the number of “creepy people” worth hiding your identity from seems to have dropped in comparison. Despite the perceived safety of the online world, remaining anonymous…
Forgiveness has a negative connotation these days. We see forgiving each other as weak — as not standing by one’s values, as giving up one’s pride. This view is incredibly counter-productive and, in my opinion, the cause of many problems in today’s society. Here is the actual definition of forgiveness: forgive (verb) to cease to feel resentment against (an offender) Source: Merriam Webster This…
Choosing sides is fun. Be it politics or pop culture, nothing validates an opinion better than classifying opposing opinions as wrong. Sometimes, as seen by Holocaust deniers or the anti-vaccine movement, it’s possible people can be completely and utterly wrong. However, in the general case, both sides have merits and both sides have pitfalls. When trying to gain a perspective of the bigger…
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