Recent content in Blogs on rohan ganapavarapu
ChatGPT unfortunately does not distribute a Linux app. I have heard a lot of good things about computer use and wanted to try it with my sub, but unfortunately I was relegated to the Codex CLI. So I built my own. It has since (today) booked my flights, renewed my license, and paid a parking ticket. I had a few requirements in mind: Native like performance It can access my laptop just like my…
Very few people have deep conviction in technology, or really even understand technology in vivo. stagnation In 1968, “2001: A Space Odyssey” was released to theaters. It was a microcosm of a cultural infatuation we had with the future. Technology had reinvented our lives many times over, and there was this cosmic hunger for what would come next. We had split the atom, gone to space,…
Anthropic’s culture, storytelling, and aesthetics are perhaps the best in the modern valley. This is enshrined in their stellar retention and their product (Claude, Claude’s constitution). But they have a big consumer marketing problem. Their story isn’t widely heard or legible to the greater cultural conscience.[0] To me it’s a puzzle–how can a company so good at…
This essay is about the AI businesses that will eat the world, and how to build them. the future of work There is no question that a large majority of white collar work will be automated, what is at stake is how, and what the journey will look like getting there. Elon Musk@elonmusk·FollowJoin @xAI and help build a purely AI software company called Macrohard. It’s a tongue-in-cheek name, but the…
This blogpost is a synopsis of my personal journey chasing apparent oddities in the way my laptop’s brightness is set. a new laptop A few months ago my (not so) old thinkpad was falling apart. The delete key was missing (which, does not lead to less mistakes, as I have learned), and the screen was affixed to the laptop lid by painters tape. I am reluctant to switch laptops, as the setup and…
This is a walkthrough of my attempt at building a realtime assistant (J.A.R.V.I.S.) that can respond on demand to voice, text, and your laptops screen. It was highly technical, including a lockless ring buffer, FSM (finite state machine), and concurrency via asynchronous channels. All in rust! I will attempt to show you from first principles how this complexity arises. Unlike related projects, you…
1 Preliminaries Symbol Meaning $d$ width of the residual stream $L$ number of Transformer blocks $V$ vocabulary size, so logits live in $\mathbb R^{V}$ $h^{(\ell)}$ residual-stream vector entering block $\ell$ $r^{(\ell)}$ the update written by block $\ell$ $W_U\!\in\!\mathbb R^{V\times d},\;b\in\mathbb R^{V}$ un-embedding matrix and bias Additive residual stream. With (pre-/peri-norm) residual…
I recently saw a tweet[1] about how people should go about starting startups/businesses, and it caused me to formalize my intuitions around two distinct types of tech businesses I am familiar with. I’ll call them $O(n)$ startups and $O(n^{2})$ startups. Throughout this essay, let n represent the time elapsed since launch. An $O(n)$ startup grows its key metric (revenue, users, etc.) roughly…
This is a reference, not a guide. In a modern LLM, the “weights” consist of several distinct collections of matrices and tensors that serve different functions during inference: Token Embeddings - Large matrix mapping token IDs to vector representations - Used at the very start of inference to convert input tokens to vectors - Typically shape: [vocab_size, hidden_dim] Attention…
tl;dr: There’s more to the story than “distribution is the last moat”. It’s clear that both the price/difficultly of creating software and the cost of intelligence is going down. I don’t yet think people have internalized the cascading effects of this on the way software companies monetize (or really in general), especially in tandem with the speed of increasing…
These are my thoughts on zero sum games. From poker to quant trading. Zero-sum games are fundamentally informational contests. The GTO (unexploitable) strategy is often suboptimal in practice because it is either unimplementable or even unknown and assumes everyone else is playing optimally. The GTO strategy is not maximally exploitative it is minimally exploited. In a game of non-optimal…
github: https://github.com/Ocean-Moist/rohlang3 I’ve long been obsessed with minimalistic languages that still manage to have expressive power. My usual approach: start with a bare-bones combinator calculus (like SK), then keep adding “one more extension” until it looks suspiciously like a full-blown typed language. rohlang3 is exactly that experiment. It’s a small language built in Rust that…
There’s something interesting and beautiful about evolution that is often overlooked: it works through emergence. No central planning, no intelligent design, just countless micro-interactions creating macro-level optimization that appears almost deliberately crafted. the diversity problem Think about what human society needs to function. We need visionaries and executors, leaders and…
premise I want to explore where mainstream programming languages are headed, using Java and Go as my primary subjects. java is underrated The reason I say Java is underrated is because it is oddly both easy to learn and its type system is strong enough to make many incorrect states irrepresentable.[1] It has product types and sum types, and makes managing state explicit and easy enough.[2] Java is…
backstory (skip if only interested in technical explanation) Yesterday I had a CS midterm from 8-10pm. I was somewhat stressed as I had basically gambled by not properly studying for it. However I finished early, and I was feeling pretty good. Even though it was a Monday night I felt it was cause for celebration. So all of us CS kids gathered (and one engineering guy with a chem midterm at 9am the…
I recently rewrote the interests section of my blog to be more concise. The primary interest I wrote down was “making things that alter thinking at scale.” When I distilled what I believed to be one of my long-term goals I landed on that. Recently I thought about how this is both similar and different to YC’s goal of “Make something people want”. I find that…
inspiration I frequently lost pencils and never took notes for most of my academic career. Eventually I got to the point in my self-studying and in my learning were notes was necessary. I find that writing things down can 2-3x the amount of stuff I can hold in my head at once, while making it easier to reference, and makes me remember it for longer and quicker. pencils I prefer pencils to pens as…
about me I am 18, born in 2006. This is generally a good thing as I am in the prime of life currently. I am not one of those people who think they were “born in the wrong decade”, I think I was born at the perfect time to take advantage of superlinearly growing technological advancements. the internet today I generally greatly dislike social media, although I am an avid user of it.
In 9th grade my English teacher told me I was writing an assignment with broad over-generalizing maxims and beliefs. I tend to write absolutely, especially when being un-technical/un-scientific. I think this is because this makes my writing more concise and more clearly communicative–unencumbered by the recognition of my limitations or the limitations of my ideas. This is because I take for…
The Laptop Before I broke it, I used a Zephyrus G14, it was great, the best mobile AMD cpu, and a pretty good gpu. It was probably the best laptop on the market. Great cpu for compiling stuff (gentoo moment), and great gpu for VM passthrough so I can send texts and write swift. (sorry apple). I am now using a thinkpad x13 yoga, the folding and touch screen is gimmicky and I don’t use it.
DISCLAIMER: Let me preface this by saying my favorite language is Haskell and that I write toy languages for fun. I am a pl nerd so my opinion is valid. Also the title is like 20% bait. My secret was always that I like coding in java, in some sort of masochistic way. Everything is dead simple. Everything is so verbose you can never forget what anything is. It is like sitting down and playing a…
The moment my dreams were shattered (a childhood story) In the second grade I played in a chess tournament. I made my way somewhat easily to the semi-finals and I still remember exactly how I lost. I remember the exact moves that caused me to fall into a relatively common opening trap (called the Noah’s Ark Trap) and how I lost. After the opening, I got destroyed in the middle game and I got…