Recent content on Jerry Liu

 The best relationships in my life are seldom the longest ones. 
 One of my best friends Carolina entered my life by storm, a whirlwind of entrepreneurship and road trips in France during the summer of ‘16, topped off with some trauma bonding during the attack in Nice. 
 As I traveled the world the rest of that year, we’d end up calling every day; I thought of her as my…
Well, 2026 has just started and my autistic ass has already learned a few new social patterns. Had some truly surprising revelations and thought I’d share for fellow neurodivergents who also need to consciously and explicitly think about social conventions. 
 1. Emotional Bids 
 I was today years old when I learned that not everyone takes everything literally. 
 I know it sounds…
Hi, I’m Jerry. Sometimes I write software, but mostly I just think about stuff. Sometimes I write my thoughts here.
I’m always open to conversations, about anything. I’d love to learn what you’re interested in, truly 100% I promise, so hit me up! My gmail is personjerry@
Boring Stuff For my day job, I lead the AI engineering team at Numeral. Btw we’re…
When I joined my first startup after leaving a big tech company, I was excited to move fast. No bureaucracy, no committees, just ship code and grow. 
 On my second day, I pushed some code to unblock fast experimentation for an upcoming growth sprint. I proposed a change that let us safely roll out new React Native builds via CodePush to a subset of users, without waiting on full App Store…

 You don’t get to take unlimited big bets in a single lifetime. You get a small number of windows where risk tolerance, energy, capital, and conviction align. 
 In The Black Swan Nassim Taleb frames this as asymmetric exposure to unlimited upside with limited downside. And startups are one of the clearest modern mechanisms for that kind of asymmetry. But what’s often missed is that these…
I thought I was cool
Walking to Equinox Soho
In my Canada Goose
At 0 degrees in the Manhattan Winter
Only for my panache to crumple instantly
As a pleasant cigarette smoke wafted into my nose
From a nameless dark man
In a thrifted French beret
And cheap leather jacket
Eclipsing me like I was nothing
As he read Poe out of a hardback
Draped on the…

 I’ve been chatting with a few female friends about dating. 
 Dating in New York, they say, feels like every guy operates with the emotional depth of a vending machine: Insert coin, select option A (situationship) or B (serious), dispense relationship if available. 
 Meanwhile, I’ve had conversations with guys who brag about “only doing long-term relationships”…
Reverberations:
Waves flooding a hollow trunk
floating in a rice field. 1
The husk splits,
roots finally spreading
into soil I’ve been taught to reject,
for it was, after all, beneath me.
How hard it is
to support yourself
with both feet off the ground.
I am bamboo now-
hungry for growth,
nourished by the music
of both earths
that…
Thirty years, the maven,
mind’s eye, a Raven.
Confidence awaken,
unleashed roars the Kraken.
Castle becomes a haven,
banished the Phantom, craven.
Moves made bold, brazen,
The Lion’s heart, emblazon.
// 30
Kingdom yet lays hidden
premonitions surge unbidden
Mountainous doubts arisen,
precipitous self-prison.
Steps inexorably…

 The Japanese have a word for it: tsundoku . It means acquiring books and letting them pile up unread. 
 I do this constantly myself, at times unhappy for being wasteful, but there was part of me that loved it. Having the books on my shelf signals something positive and meaningful to me. So I asked myself, why am I ok with buying books I won’t read when the internet has everything?…

 (For context: AGI stands for Artificial General Intelligence , which means an AI that matches or exceeds human-level reasoning across all cognitive tasks, rather than specific tasks like chess. The common disposition in tech is that it does not yet exist, and debate whether if/when it will exist and what the ramifications will be) 
 You exist. 
 You’re not omnipotent or…

 In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except that life comes with insecurities. 
 Insecurity is a near-universal human condition. 
 Ironically, people who appear most confident often turn out to be driven by the deepest insecurities. They may dominate conversations, make grand pronouncements, or display what looks like pride. In reality this betrays a defense mechanism…
AI tech era—
Engineers clambering to
deprecate themselves.
Billboards peek from snow,
promising the future, now—
Yet progress, glacial.
My pocket is filled
with Einstein, Hawking, and Tao;
My purse is empty.
Discuss on Hacker News
The zombie wakes
Begrudgingly leaving its bed
Bindings falling away
Dirt seeping from his eyes
As he recaptures the art
Of setting one bony foot after the other
Stumbling past the doorway with a groan
Down into the catacombs
Where lies his Treasure
The Elixir in the Holy Grail
His bare minimum consciousness
Delivers him to unto the sealed shelf
And…
Tech craze,
Zuck pays.
New space,
house Hayes.
Buy vase,
few Ks.
Partays,
loud bass.
Work days,
bus chase.
Delays,
long face.
Thick haze,
cold Mays.
Years’ daze,
fast pace.
Lone gaze,
sad phase.
“Need praise,”
shrink says.
Replace
old ways.
Mom stays,
embrace.
Her…
The doctor,
the entrepreneur,
the engineer,
and the ghost
sit in a rented red Fiat
endlessly driving
from Nice
to the winding bends
of the Alps.
Cheap Thrills
from cheap speakers
echoes in the crisp mountain air,
but our ears register only
the sound of youthful invincibility
and infinite potential.
Every year
I find myself pulled…
I followed every coefficient
backpropagated every label
but for all the good
of ten million data points
and a thousand machines I taught
to learn how humans
“behave”
I myself
never learned
why she changed her mind
about her love for me
on the coldest sunny day
that summer in Portugal
on days
she sleeps
my muse
i light
a candle
and imagine
the wisps
that billow
in reverse!
coalescing into
the vein
in my
forehead;
it pulses
and carries
mango coconut
-scented ideas
to me.

 After 6 years of consulting and startup adventures, I’ve been trying to get back into big tech. While browsing Reddit and Blind to get a pulse of FAANG nowadays, I’ve noticed something fascinating: Google, the company that defined “moonshots” in Silicon Valley, no longer commands the extreme prestige it once did. 
 Moonshots 
 Google’s still a great…

 The world is shrinking, and some people are upset. Today I read on article on Hacker News “What does a world without Airbnb look like?” which talks about the negative sentiment against long-term tourists in Barcelona, and it corroborated the discussion I saw on the Digital Nomad subreddit yesterday “Cancel Barcelona Trip?” . 
 Mobility 
 When I was a kid, my…

 I find that when I play RPG games, I often hoard single-use items like potions and scrolls, saving them for some future critical moment. I finish games like Skyrim with a backpack full of unspent resources, reserved for a crisis that never actually arrives. What’s the point, then, of all these items? 
 Just like I save items in games, in real life I too am reluctant to ask for…

 Introduction 
 When I was younger, I thought dating was primarily about “impressing” someone enough that they would somehow find you attractive. After discussing this with my therapist, I now understand that my lack of self-confidence led me to feel like I had to “deceive” others to be liked because I didn’t like myself. Thus, inauthenticity. 
 That line…

 

 In the fast-paced world of software engineering, an industry characterized by an average tenure between 1-2 years 1 , the notion of seniority has always been somewhat fluid. It is an environment where you’re expected to go from “new grad” to “senior” within 36 months, which presents a pace much faster than in most other professions. But this swift…
At dinner the other day my Chinese dad brought up whether English had a term for the Chinese word 鲜. In fact, there is: umami. But it’s not a word common for English learners, and I think even native speakers may not use the word frequently or have encountered it at all, unless they have an interest in cooking. 
 The word itself, as you may be able to tell, is loaned from Japanese, which…
This morning I read Creation happens in silence , a short and sweet blog post about how the vital moments of the creative process happens in silence, and often in isolation. 
 I think there are advantages to sharing your work as quickly as possible , but I agree that the initial synthesis should be done alone with one’s thoughts. 
 Procrastinators like me often don’t realize…
So if you know me, you know I love self-help books and I collect too many and don’t read enough of them (as they’re overfilled with anecdotes and only a few actual points). Also I keep finding new ones I’m interested in. 
 Well, ChatGPT solves this problem. You can ask it for a summary of a book that you don’t have any access to, and it will miraculously generate the…
ChatGPT is super hot right now , and its two biggest uses are to generate art and to generate code . 
 Which astounds me, because while I enjoy the occasional AI portrait or landscape, I wouldn’t trust the code my interns wrote much less a black box AI system. 
 
 Despite the flaws, probably safer than an AI-built bridge 
 


 I started my career as an engineer at Facebook before leaving to build a startup. Transitioning from a well-defined engineering individual contributor role to a nebulous startup leadership role meant a lot of falling on my face and a lot of lessons learned. 
 Here are 3 tips to keep in mind if you’re starting on this journey and want to fail less than I did. 
 1. Focus on What…
It’s January 1st 2023, so I imagine everyone is making their New Years’ Resolutions. I want to talk about setting these goals and how it helps us. 
 
 I recently read a blog article titled The Power of Starting Again , which talks about the invigoration of restarting the new year with a clean slate. I appreciate the sentiment of encouraging action, but I think the reasoning is…

 Anyone else remember setting their status on MSN Messenger before Facebook took over? 
 Everyone was on that platform at the time, and if you were online you were expected to reply instantly. Crazy times. 
 For your status you’d usually just write what you were doing, or passive-aggressively signal that you were mad at someone. Definitely fun as an adolescent.

 Nobody has ever asked me what a pointer is IRL, but here’s what I would say if they did.
Link to article . My thoughts below. 
 This is an article by a psychologist relating improv techniques to conversational patterns. 
 The piece is interesting because it explores some archetypes of people in conversation, how we might conceptualize what we’re doing in conversations, and how we might improve our conversational skills to bring out the best in each other. 
 Quote:…

 When’s the last time you just sat down and thought about stuff? 
 For me, it’s not a regular habit, but I think it should be, and I think formalizing it as “blogging” is the way to make it happen. 
 While it could be just a me-problem, I suspect in the advent of the Instagram and TikTok eras I’m not the only one constantly on a media-powered serotonin…

 Who What When Where Why and How - A Short Silicon Valley Poem 
 
 
 The CEO looks at the market conditions to identify a problem that a user segment has. 
 Consumes: when , where 
 Answers: who , why 
 

Link to original comment on Reddit . Quoted in full below. 
 
 Alright, here goes. I’m old. What that means is that I’ve survived (so far) and a lot of people I’ve known and loved did not. I’ve lost friends, best friends, acquaintances, co-workers, grandparents, mom, relatives, teachers, mentors, students, neighbors, and a host of other folks. I have no children,…

 

 One of the most common university majors for past presidents is History. In fact, students of history find their way into some of the most “influential” professions, with careers in politics, policy-making, and law. 
 Those who study history learn of the decisions that were made in the past, the reasoning behind them, and the results thereafter. Thus those who…
There’s a common trend among companies, blogs, and even Github repositories to create a list of “tools” for startups. Here’s a startup built on that premise: Startup Stash . Here’s a Medium article: 400 Free Resources And Tools For Entrepreneurs, Freelancers and Startups . Here’s a Github: Awesome Startup . Here’s a VC resources page: Antler Toolbox .…
I play a fair amount of video games, including emotional, aesthetic games like Florence and complex, open games like Dwarf Fortress . Over the years there are periodically discussions about whether video games are art . For example, here are articles from Time and London Review of Books on the subject. 
 
 These discussions tend to ask about the aesthetic and entertainment values of the…
OpenAI recently shut down one of their clients’ chatbot projects and this was discussed on Hacker News with plenty of arguments on both sides. I’m of the opinion that we should default to be on the side of OpenAI for this one.