[
  {
    "title": "The AI Industrial Explosion — Part 1: Maximum growth rates with current production methods",
    "url": "/posts/2026-09-10-zotero-3bdn4ei6.html",
    "date": "2026-09-10",
    "summary": "I thought this was a very interesting blog post, if a bit technical1.\nZotero item: 3BDN4EI6\nIn the sense of having big unfamiliar words. ↩︎\n",
    "content": "I thought this was a very interesting blog post, if a bit technical1.\nZotero item: 3BDN4EI6\nIn the sense of having big unfamiliar words.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n"
  },
  {
    "title": "Reinforcement learning: an introduction",
    "url": "/posts/2026-08-25-zotero-vh6piyav.html",
    "date": "2026-08-25",
    "summary": "Meta: I am reading the free online copy of this textbook published by one of the authors, the legendary Richard Sutton. I have written my Anki notes below, and provided a link through which you can download the decks as APKGs for easy import into Anki. If you notice any errors in my notes or have any advice for how I should write these notes, email me at krishna@amitav.net. This post is very likely to change over time as I read more and more of the textbook. No spoiler warnings because this is a technical text.\n",
    "content": "Meta: I am reading the free online copy of this textbook published by one of the authors, the legendary Richard Sutton. I have written my Anki notes below, and provided a link through which you can download the decks as APKGs for easy import into Anki. If you notice any errors in my notes or have any advice for how I should write these notes, email me at krishna@amitav.net. This post is very likely to change over time as I read more and more of the textbook. No spoiler warnings because this is a technical text.\nChapter 0: Preface Anki Notes Direct download of the preface Anki deck.\nNaming components of the expected approximate action value function (Cloze) [latex]$\\overline{V}_{t}(s) \\doteq$[/latex] {{c1::[latex]$\\sum_{a} \\pi(a|s) Q_{t}(s, a)$[/latex]}}\rwhere a is {{c2::the action}}, s is {{c2::the current state}}, [latex]$\\pi$[/latex] is {{c2::the current policy}}, and [latex]$Q_{t}(s, a)$[/latex] is {{c2::the action-value of action a given state s}}. Explaining components of the expected approximate action value function (Basic) Front: The following function is the expected approximate action value at time [latex]$t$[/latex] and given state [latex]$s$[/latex] and policy [latex]$\\pi$[/latex]:\r[latex]$\\overline{V}_{t}(S) \\doteq \\sum_{a} \\pi(a|s) Q_{t}(s, a)$[/latex]\rExplain what the function of the terms [latex]$\\sum_{a}$[/latex], [latex]$\\pi(a|s)$[/latex], and [latex]$Q_{t}(s, a)$[/latex] are.\rBack: Firstly, [latex]$\\sum_{a}$[/latex] is used to execute the terms within the summation for every possible action in state s, therefore taking the action-value of every possible action. [latex]$\\pi(a|s)$[/latex] gives the probability of action [latex]$a$[/latex], and is used to weight the action-value of the action ([latex]$Q_{t}(s, a)$[/latex]) by how probable that action is to be taken. Dynamic Programming Definition (Basic) Front: What is dynamic programming in the context of reinforcement learning?\rBack: Dynamic programming is the family of algorithms that compute optimal value functions and policies given a perfect model of the environment. Definitions of a policy (Cloze) An agent\u0026#39;s policy is simultaneously {{c1::a decision-making rule}} and {{c2::a mapping from perceived states of the environment to actions to be taken when in those states}}. Definiton of a reinforcement learning system (Cloze) A reinforcement learning system is a system that {{c1::wants something}}. Chapter 1: Introduction Anki Notes Direct download of the chapter 1 Anki deck.\nPurpose of a value function (Basic) Front: What does an agent\u0026#39;s value function do?\rBack: It gives the approximate total expected accumulated reward over the future, starting from the present state. Lack of exploration-exploitation issue in supervised learning (Basic) Front: Why doesn\u0026#39;t the exploration-exploitation issue appear in supervised learning?\rBack: In reinforcement learning, the exploitation-exploration trade-off exists because at each timestep, the agent must choose between learning about the reward of an unknown action via performing it or earning a predictable amount of reward via performing a known action. On the other hand, in supervised learning the model is explicitly told the correct label after each example, so unlike the reinforcement learning agent it needn\u0026#39;t discover the most effective choice, it must merely remember it. Optional subelement of a reinforcement learning system (Basic) Front: Which of the four subelements of a reinforcment learning system (policy, reward signal, model of the environment, value function) is optional?\rBack: A model of the environment. Reward signal purpose (Basic) Front: What does an agent\u0026#39;s reward signal do?\rBack: It determines the agent\u0026#39;s goal. Policy purpose (Basic) Front: What does an agent\u0026#39;s policy do?\rBack: It determines how an agent behaves. Subelements of a reinforcement learning system (Basic) Front: The four subelements of a reinforcement learning system:\rBack: 1. Policy\r2. Reward signal\r3. Value function\r4. Model of the environment Exploration-exploitation trade-off for stochastic tasks (Basic) Front: How does the exploration-exploitation dilemma become more difficult when the task is stochastic? Back: When the task is stochastic, the agent must attempt an action multiple times to build a good estimate of that action\u0026#39;s reward and a previously high-reward action may occasionally produce low reward. This results in exploration being more expensive and exploitation being more uncertain. Exploration-exploitation trade-off (Basic) Front: What is the exploitation-exploration trade-off in reinforcement learning?\rBack: To obtain a high reward, the agent must prefer actions it has found effective at producing reward (i.e. exploiting the good actions), but in order to discover which actions produce high reward, the agent must explore many different actions, of which only a few might produce high reward while the others produce low reward. Therefore, there is an inherent trade-off within reinforcement learning between maximizing near-term reward via exploitation of known high-reward actions and maximizing long-term value via exploration of the action space in search of the highest-value actions. Aspects of a reinforcement learning agent (Basic) Front: A reinforcement learning agent has 3 aspects: Back: 1. Sensation\r2. Action\r3. Goal Important features of reinforcement learning (Cloze) The 2 most important distinguishing features of reinforcement learning are:\r- {{c1::trial-and-error search}},\r- {{c1::delayed reward}} Reinforcement learning definition (Cloze) Reinforcement learning is learning {{c1::what to do}} in order to {{c1::maximize a numerical reward signal}}. Zotero item: VH6PIYAV\n"
  },
  {
    "title": "List of (cool) companies in Toronto",
    "url": "/posts/list-of-cool-companies-in-toronto.html",
    "date": "2026-08-20",
    "summary": "Meta: If you know a company in Toronto and would like it added to this list, email me here: krishna@amitav.net\n8090 (conflict of interest) NationGraph Shopify Obsidian superwhisper Modem Cohere ",
    "content": "Meta: If you know a company in Toronto and would like it added to this list, email me here: krishna@amitav.net\n8090 (conflict of interest) NationGraph Shopify Obsidian superwhisper Modem Cohere "
  },
  {
    "title": "Hi, this is a test page to show my friend George-Owen how the admin page works",
    "url": "/posts/hi-this-is-a-test-page-to-show-my-friend-george-owen-how-the-admin-page-works.html",
    "date": "2026-08-18",
    "summary": "Hello! You should check out his site.\n",
    "content": "Hello! You should check out his site.\n"
  },
  {
    "title": "Manna",
    "url": "/posts/2026-08-14-zotero-7n46y6sg.html",
    "date": "2026-08-14",
    "summary": "This is a science-fiction novel about a society in which human producers in the economy are mostly unnecessary. As for content warnings, it’s a little bit sad and makes reference to drugs and sex once or twice I believe but should be family-friendly overall. You can buy a copy here (not an affiliate link) or find the free version the author published online here. Spoilers ahead.\nClick here to expand this full blog post. There are heavy spoilers inside of this block. Overall the book has some good ideas, but the writing feels half-done. It doesn’t really end on a cliff-hanger, but the ending feels unsatisfying. The book feels unrealistic in many ways:\n",
    "content": "This is a science-fiction novel about a society in which human producers in the economy are mostly unnecessary. As for content warnings, it\u0026rsquo;s a little bit sad and makes reference to drugs and sex once or twice I believe but should be family-friendly overall. You can buy a copy here (not an affiliate link) or find the free version the author published online here. Spoilers ahead.\nClick here to expand this full blog post. There are heavy spoilers inside of this block. Overall the book has some good ideas, but the writing feels half-done. It doesn\u0026rsquo;t really end on a cliff-hanger, but the ending feels unsatisfying. The book feels unrealistic in many ways:\nthe \u0026ldquo;elites\u0026rdquo; of that world would stuff the populace into some dormitories with television and not allow them to leave alone but when some folks in a bus show up and say they want to take them it\u0026rsquo;s all good. Not to be morbid, but if the elites didn\u0026rsquo;t want to have to give them resources, why not just kill them? Allegedly they were putting birth control juices in the water so the plan seemed to be to eventually not have to deal with the populace, but if they have armies of robots it would surely be easier to just pull the plug. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure why the Australia project (the good guys) doesn\u0026rsquo;t just invade the rest of the world and give them all paradise. It seems like the natural thing to do. Zotero item: 7N46Y6SG\n"
  },
  {
    "title": "Guardian Angels: LLM Personalization for Productivity and Security",
    "url": "/posts/2026-08-05-zotero-y6y95jy4.html",
    "date": "2026-08-05",
    "summary": "Summary of Gwern’s take in my own words: “We should create LLMs that are personalized to each person to the extent that they can act as a stand-in for that person.” The rest of the essay is mostly discussing the mechanisms that would enable that and/or the things that would enable. Gwern refers to this hypothetical LLM as a “guardian angel.” For the rest of this blog post I will use the word “agent” to mean what Gwern means by “guardian angel.”\n",
    "content": "Summary of Gwern\u0026rsquo;s take in my own words: \u0026ldquo;We should create LLMs that are personalized to each person to the extent that they can act as a stand-in for that person.\u0026rdquo; The rest of the essay is mostly discussing the mechanisms that would enable that and/or the things that would enable. Gwern refers to this hypothetical LLM as a \u0026ldquo;guardian angel.\u0026rdquo; For the rest of this blog post I will use the word \u0026ldquo;agent\u0026rdquo; to mean what Gwern means by \u0026ldquo;guardian angel.\u0026rdquo;\nHere are my major criticisms of this work:\nI think that they abstract away many of the difficulties with making guardian angels work as engineering problems, but I believe that many of the issues that they point out with LLMs (inability to differentiate between data and instructions, lack of creativity, poor memory, etc.) are also engineering problems; More philosophically, I think that their thesis of training an LLM to think like a person is very difficult because it\u0026rsquo;s very difficult to get somebody\u0026rsquo;s thoughts. I think there are quite a few interesting things in this though:\nTheir comments on brain imitation learning (i.e. augmenting textual data with fMRI readings) were interesting. Here are some further reading they provide: Schultz et al. 2019, Liu et al. 2023; Their comments on generalization (C-f \u0026ldquo;influence functions\u0026rdquo;) seemed instinctively wrong, but the way in which they phrased their understanding leads me to believe that I am likely wrong on that topic. This section seems quite key to their thesis, however. Overall it was a very nice, well-written, well-researched essay.\nA more philosophical objections I have is around the principle of the guardian angel being to \u0026ldquo;[e]nhance\u0026rdquo; the principal. I think this sort of system is uniquely well-suited to people late in their career. The way they describe the system is that it would do what Gwern does to Gwern\u0026rsquo;s standards. For me personally, because I am relatively young, I very rarely have the requisite skills to do a project prior to doing the project, nor do I have standards that are calibrated to assess the output of a project that a hypothetical guardian angel would complete. For me, the process of working is the process of learning. My job primarily is to learn quickly, and the output of that learning is a project or a paper or a product or a system. One open question I have is what a system like guardian angels would look like for folks early in their career; more concretely, how does one have agents that are meant to enhance a principal complete a task autonomously, if the principal does not have the necessary skills to evaluate the output of that task.\nZotero item: Y6Y95JY4\n"
  },
  {
    "title": "Taking Social Initiative",
    "url": "/posts/2026-08-03-zotero-g8da5fqt.html",
    "date": "2026-08-03",
    "summary": "One action item for myself from this is to read this post by Neel Nanda on asking good questions.\nSummary Keep in touch with people, Organize things, Be sincere, Be lenient. Zotero item: G8DA5FQT\n",
    "content": "One action item for myself from this is to read this post by Neel Nanda on asking good questions.\nSummary Keep in touch with people, Organize things, Be sincere, Be lenient. Zotero item: G8DA5FQT\n"
  },
  {
    "title": "On Failure",
    "url": "/posts/on-failure.html",
    "date": "2026-08-01",
    "summary": "I’m not failing enough. Today I went to the gym, and I was doing my bench press, when a fellow walked over and corrected my grip; my grip was narrow, but to workout one’s chest one must use a moderate grip. I was thinking on the bicycle ride that that’s the first time in a few weeks I’ve really failed at something. I don’t think that’s a good thing. The times in my life I got the most done were the times when I was failing a lot, and the lack of failure is indicative that I’m not trying enough things. One thing I’m going to add to these posts going forward is a failure from the day.\n",
    "content": "I\u0026rsquo;m not failing enough. Today I went to the gym, and I was doing my bench press, when a fellow walked over and corrected my grip; my grip was narrow, but to workout one\u0026rsquo;s chest one must use a moderate grip. I was thinking on the bicycle ride that that\u0026rsquo;s the first time in a few weeks I\u0026rsquo;ve really failed at something. I don\u0026rsquo;t think that\u0026rsquo;s a good thing. The times in my life I got the most done were the times when I was failing a lot, and the lack of failure is indicative that I\u0026rsquo;m not trying enough things. One thing I\u0026rsquo;m going to add to these posts going forward is a failure from the day.\n"
  },
  {
    "title": "Canada Geese: Canada's Unofficial Official Unofficial Bird",
    "url": "/posts/canada-geese-canadas-unofficial-official-unofficial-bird.html",
    "date": "2026-07-31",
    "summary": "Meta: This was written a few years ago when I was in grade 7, which is why much of the writing is terrible, many of the facts misleading and wrong, and why there are so many parentheticals (like this (and sometimes nested parentheticals too)). I may return to this one day and make it better, but don’t hold your breath. You can also see some discussion from when I posted this, on Reddit.\n",
    "content": "Meta: This was written a few years ago when I was in grade 7, which is why much of the writing is terrible, many of the facts misleading and wrong, and why there are so many parentheticals (like this (and sometimes nested parentheticals too)). I may return to this one day and make it better, but don\u0026rsquo;t hold your breath. You can also see some discussion from when I posted this, on Reddit.\n“If you feel the urge, don’t be afraid to go on a wild goose chase. What else are wild geese for?” -Will Rogers\nThe Canada goose is in the family Anseriformes, which includes more than 170 species of waterfowl, like ducks (Geese that were born prematurely) and swans (Narcissistic geese). The Canada goose’s distinct features are it’s black head, grey body, and wings (Compared to the boring white of other geese) with a white chest and rump (According to Google it has a white chinstrap, tan breast, and brown back, but they don’t know what they’re talking about). If you’ve ever been near a Canada goose, you’ll know the fear they can strike in your heart with just a honk. The system of communication of the Canada geese is surprisingly complicated (It’s not really, I’m just saying that so that you don’t leave. Please don’t leave.). Geese honk in unison in order to stay together, and so that no 1 gets left behind when the gaggle (That’s the plural for a goose!) decides to take off and fly. If you go too close to a goose, the goose will start honking wildly. At first the goose may honk softly to give you a warning, but if you keep advancing the goose will honk louder to alert surrounding geese and may attack. Geese usually can’t seriously harm humans, but they can attempt to bite you or hit you with their wings, which can break bones (There are actually trained goose control experts who are called in when geese become a nuisance; these jobs pay 75 000 dollars a year, as much as an associate attorney). When geese mate, they usually mate with geese who are a similar size to them, known as assortative mating. The believed reason for this is because for geese and most other waterfowl they practise something known as sexual conflict. This means that for a male and female to mate, the male will have to force himself on the female. This means that a small gander (male goose) will have a low chance of being able to overpower a large dame (female goose) compared to a small dame. When geese hatch, for the first 2-3 weeks of their life the goslings (baby goose :] ) form something called a “gang brood”, which is when multiple broods (a sibship (a group of siblings) of geese) form one large brood. Some believe that they do this because the parents and the children couldn’t recognise one another, while others believe they simply do this so that the goslings have more protection from threats (It takes a village). Goslings are able to learn how to swim within the first day of being born and learn how to fly within 2-3 months of hatching (Unlike human babies who just sleep and eat \u0026gt;:[ ). Geese begin to look for a mate at around 3 years old, except for some who start at 2. When geese find a mate they will stay with them for life, if one mate passes away the other will look for another mate in the same mating season as their demise. Now that we know what the Canada goose looks like and does in its home territory, let’s talk about their yearly migrations.\nIt’s late October and the ground begins to freeze. A goose family consisting of a gander, a dame, and 2 children prepare for their annual migration south. They’re going to migrate from their breeding grounds in northern Quebec to their winter grounds on the eastern seaboard of the USA. The trip usually takes about a week, but some geese without goslings have been recorded flying the thousand kilometre journey in just one day travelling around 40 kilometres an hour, faster than the average Tour de France cyclist (I just want to say, how do they bike that fast‽ That can break speed limits! Someone needs to either call the FDA or an exorcist, because something isn’t right.). The geese usually migrate down from Canada to the central parts of the USA, but some can migrate as far south as Mexico. Just like most elderly Canadians, once the winter is beginning to end the geese will begin their migration up to Canada. This spring migration usually takes more time than the autumn migration, as the geese usually make several stops on the way to build energy reserves that will be needed for the final leg of the migration, as well as the breeding season right after. In addition to their autumn and spring migration, the geese also usually take a special migration called a moult migration. During late May and early June, geese moult all their feathers in order to repair them for the next year. During the 5 to 6 week moult the geese are unable to fly, making them vulnerable to predators, like coyotes (Coyotes can actually catch prey? Looney Tunes lied to me :[ ), bears, wolves, etc. During the late May and early June, the geese who for some reason or another weren’t able to mate migrate further North to places with lots of water so that they can hide from predators in the water, while geese with goslings generally migrate later in the season. Now that we’ve talked at length about the biology and the migration of the goose, let’s talk about their history in Canada.\nBefore European colonisation, the Canada geese were mostly constrained to living in southern Ontario and the southern prairies. As more Europeans began to colonise Canada, overhunting of the goose led to the goose being nearly extinct by the beginning of the 1900s. This led to a lot of wildlife officials and aviculture enthusiasts (An aviculture enthusiast is basically just a bird nerd :] ) attempting to help the Canada goose by breeding the geese on their farms and then releasing them to the wild. This bolstered their numbers, along with the passing of the Migratory Birds Convention Act, which aimed to protect migratory birds (Just a side note, why are legal documents so long? The Migratory Birds Convention Act is 64 pages long! For birds!). However, probably the most impactful change was mostly unintentional. With the coming of the 20th century, many forests were razed (burned) to make room for lawns and agriculture. For most animals this was a bad thing, but not for the Canada geese. They loved these new expansive lawns and manmade lakes because of the lack of predators and hunters in urban areas. If you just looked at the population of migratory geese it would show some growth, but most of the growth wasn’t of the migrant geese. From the year 1970 to the year 2012 the amount of migrant geese went from about a million geese to a little under two million geese, peaking at a little over 2 million in the years 2000 and 2008 (Did the geese cause the recession while the amount of resident geese went up a lot more. In 1970 it’s estimated there were roughly 200 thousand resident geese, while in 2011 there were 4 million resident geese. All this growth may seem fine and dandy, but these seemingly harmless little goobers can cause a lot of damage. Media Spokesperson for Manitoba Public Insurance rep?),orted that in 2015 there were 202 insurance claims related to geese. As well as being a nuisance to drivers, these ostrobogulous avians also cost the agriculture industry nearly $300 000 a year in crop losses. They also can also cause problems for planes too, the incident depicted in the movie Sully where US Airways Flight 1549 was forced to ditch (Make an emergency water landing) after the plane ran into a gaggle of geese.\nI hope you’ve learned a lot about geese today. While these little dopes may be a little bit annoying, I still believe it is a tragedy that they are just the unofficial official unofficial bird of Canada instead of the unofficial official bird or official unofficial bird of Canada. What can you do to help you ask? The best thing you can do is to speak up, show you care, contact your local Member of Parliament, stage a riot, anything to help our cause. I’ve been Amitav Krishna, and long live the Waterloo Navy.\n"
  },
  {
    "title": "On Deliberate Practice",
    "url": "/posts/on-deliberate-practice.html",
    "date": "2026-07-31",
    "summary": "One thing I have pondered of late is what I wish to deliberately practice. These thoughts have been stoked by many pieces of writing, but one that has been especially great is Tyler Cowen’s piece on this topic.\nOne great quote Cowen mentions is the following:\nWhat is it you do to train that is comparable to a pianist practicing scales?\nSadly, I don’t have a great response to this! The area in which this is most applicable is working out. Recently I have begun weight-lifting, and while it’s not a very exciting response, that is quite comparable to a pianist’s scales. When it comes to my work however, I have never found intentional repetition to be an especially effective method to improve my abilities. The greatest difficulty I face in this sort of deliberate practice is that currently, my work is very varied. It’s a mixture of engineering, machine learning, physics, and more recently chemistry. One thing I tried to do last October was commit to reading a different machine learning every week or so, but I found that ineffective at growing my skills. The only effective method I have found as of yet to improving my skills is to simply build projects.\n",
    "content": "One thing I have pondered of late is what I wish to deliberately practice. These thoughts have been stoked by many pieces of writing, but one that has been especially great is Tyler Cowen\u0026rsquo;s piece on this topic.\nOne great quote Cowen mentions is the following:\nWhat is it you do to train that is comparable to a pianist practicing scales?\nSadly, I don\u0026rsquo;t have a great response to this! The area in which this is most applicable is working out. Recently I have begun weight-lifting, and while it\u0026rsquo;s not a very exciting response, that is quite comparable to a pianist\u0026rsquo;s scales. When it comes to my work however, I have never found intentional repetition to be an especially effective method to improve my abilities. The greatest difficulty I face in this sort of deliberate practice is that currently, my work is very varied. It\u0026rsquo;s a mixture of engineering, machine learning, physics, and more recently chemistry. One thing I tried to do last October was commit to reading a different machine learning every week or so, but I found that ineffective at growing my skills. The only effective method I have found as of yet to improving my skills is to simply build projects.\nThere are areas, however, that I wish to excel in that are not my work. One of these is reading comprehension. A habit I\u0026rsquo;ve tried to pick up is reading everyday, but I\u0026rsquo;ve found it difficult to force myself to stick with this. This is mostly with non-fiction, and with fiction I can usually complete it faster, but non-fiction is the category in which I most wish to build my comprehension skills.\nA final skill I\u0026rsquo;ve tried to build is my photography. My approach to this is to take photos, of a consistent subject (geese), almost-daily. I used to try to make a habit of, from these photos, curating and describing and editing them, and making a blog post / X thread out of them, but I found that this put me off of the photography, because the accessory work took a much greater amount of time (often two or three times) the amount of time required to do the actual photography.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s all from me!\n"
  },
  {
    "title": "People who censor their dog's genitals when they post pictures.",
    "url": "/posts/2026-07-30-zotero-llkp3d3k.html",
    "date": "2026-07-30",
    "summary": "This was googled in relation to this post: https://amitav.net/posts/on-animals.html. As you can see in the second photo, the penis of the dog is relatively prominent. I considered censoring it, but I don’t think it matters that much.\nZotero item: LLKP3D3K\n",
    "content": "This was googled in relation to this post: https://amitav.net/posts/on-animals.html. As you can see in the second photo, the penis of the dog is relatively prominent. I considered censoring it, but I don\u0026rsquo;t think it matters that much.\nZotero item: LLKP3D3K\n"
  },
  {
    "title": "On Animals",
    "url": "/posts/on-animals.html",
    "date": "2026-07-30",
    "summary": "Meta: This is a blog-ified version of this X article\nHey! Alongside my good friend Krishiv Thakuria, I will be doing a long(ish) tweet everyday for the next 21 days.\nOne random thought I had today is that animals are really weird. Above, I have photographed a goose. A goose is a bird, and it’s alive[, definitely, but it’s also definitely not human. It’s quite small. It’s oddly shaped. I have four limbs, but a goose really has just two limbs, the legs, and two wings. It’s neck is long and thin, where mine is (proportionally) thicker and shorter. And it doesn’t really have a face, instead having a hard beak where I have soft skin.\nAbove I have photographed a dog. A dog is a mammal, so closer to me than to a goose, but still very dissimilar. the dog also has four limbs, but it’s back two limbs are almost the same length as its front two, unlike mine where my back two limbs (my legs) are quite a bit shorter than my front two. Its eyes are different than mine. In my eyes I have two black dots inside of a white orb, while its eyes appear to be an almost-black dark-brown. Its ears are floppy where mine are stiffer, and much longer too. Its nose does not so much protrude from the face as meld with it, where my nose protrudes from my face, a clearly distinct appendage.\n",
    "content": "Meta: This is a blog-ified version of this X article\nHey! Alongside my good friend Krishiv Thakuria, I will be doing a long(ish) tweet everyday for the next 21 days.\nOne random thought I had today is that animals are really weird. Above, I have photographed a goose. A goose is a bird, and it\u0026rsquo;s alive[, definitely, but it\u0026rsquo;s also definitely not human. It\u0026rsquo;s quite small. It\u0026rsquo;s oddly shaped. I have four limbs, but a goose really has just two limbs, the legs, and two wings. It\u0026rsquo;s neck is long and thin, where mine is (proportionally) thicker and shorter. And it doesn\u0026rsquo;t really have a face, instead having a hard beak where I have soft skin.\nAbove I have photographed a dog. A dog is a mammal, so closer to me than to a goose, but still very dissimilar. the dog also has four limbs, but it\u0026rsquo;s back two limbs are almost the same length as its front two, unlike mine where my back two limbs (my legs) are quite a bit shorter than my front two. Its eyes are different than mine. In my eyes I have two black dots inside of a white orb, while its eyes appear to be an almost-black dark-brown. Its ears are floppy where mine are stiffer, and much longer too. Its nose does not so much protrude from the face as meld with it, where my nose protrudes from my face, a clearly distinct appendage.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not really sure I have a coherent point here, I just thought it was odd what animals look like. Have a great day!\n"
  },
  {
    "title": "Exclusive: Death of girl in Chinese gene-editing trial was never made public",
    "url": "/posts/2026-07-30-zotero-d2nu36ak.html",
    "date": "2026-07-30",
    "summary": "Hello! This was an interesting piece. I found it via https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1v4zjfj/chinese_6yearold_girl_dies_after_receiving/\nZotero item: D2NU36AK\n",
    "content": "Hello! This was an interesting piece. I found it via https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1v4zjfj/chinese_6yearold_girl_dies_after_receiving/\nZotero item: D2NU36AK\n"
  },
  {
    "title": "2026-07-22 Retrospective",
    "url": "/posts/2026-07-22-retrospective.html",
    "date": "2026-07-23",
    "summary": "I’m listening to “Watermelon Sugar” by Harry Styles.\nI feel chill.\nIn the morning I did some work for my religion work.\n{{REDACTED}}\nAfter that I ate dinner, biked to the gym, photographed some geese, and then wrote my geese post + this daily update while intermittently scrolling X.\n",
    "content": "I\u0026rsquo;m listening to \u0026ldquo;Watermelon Sugar\u0026rdquo; by Harry Styles.\nI feel chill.\nIn the morning I did some work for my religion work.\n{{REDACTED}}\nAfter that I ate dinner, biked to the gym, photographed some geese, and then wrote my geese post + this daily update while intermittently scrolling X.\n"
  },
  {
    "title": "Goose Photography 2026-07-22",
    "url": "/posts/goose-photography-2026-07-22.html",
    "date": "2026-07-23",
    "summary": "Meta: This is a lightly-edited, blog-ified version of this X thread.\n1/8 This is a terrible goose picture because the geese are confined to the bottom right corner, but it’s an okay photo in sum. Too busy though, it will be much better with some cropping.\n2/8 I like the symmetry in this photo. The two geese in the front are facing the same way and look almost the same, which gives it a nice surreality. I suspect it will look much better after cropping out the top part because right now the light grabs attention away from the geese.\n",
    "content": "Meta: This is a lightly-edited, blog-ified version of this X thread.\n1/8 This is a terrible goose picture because the geese are confined to the bottom right corner, but it\u0026rsquo;s an okay photo in sum. Too busy though, it will be much better with some cropping.\n2/8 I like the symmetry in this photo. The two geese in the front are facing the same way and look almost the same, which gives it a nice surreality. I suspect it will look much better after cropping out the top part because right now the light grabs attention away from the geese.\n3/8 Good subject but it\u0026rsquo;s out-of-focus and blurry :^(\n4/8 I like this one quite a bit, but it\u0026rsquo;s overexposed. I think this will look much better after adjusting the brightness.\n5/8 This is an odd image, it feels like two images spliced together, but I do like it quite a bit. It\u0026rsquo;s also overexposed though, and I think cropping out some of the places in which the branches are overexposed will make it better.\n6/8 Almost great, it\u0026rsquo;s just slightly out of focus. Additionally, cropping out the tree on the very left will make it much better.\n7/8 Too far away from the geese.\n8/8 Better in terms of photographer (Amitav) positioning, but blurry and out of focus.\n9/8 #1 cropped. I like this quite a bit.\n10/8 #2 cropped. It feels better, but not much better.\n11/8 #4 cropped, I decided cropping looked better than tweaking the brightness. Ideally I would crop out the top geese and tree entirely, but the image felt too short, as if you would bump your head on the top of it.\n12/8 #5 cropped. I like it a lot.\n13/8 #6 cropped. I like it quite a bit, but it would be ten times better if the focus wasn\u0026rsquo;t so bad.\n"
  },
  {
    "title": "2026-07-21 Retrospective",
    "url": "/posts/2026-07-21-retrospective.html",
    "date": "2026-07-22",
    "summary": "Today I did some [[school_hrt3mss]] work. I finished a few assignments. It’s crunch time because the course ends on Friday.\n{{REDACTED}}\nI also did a bunch of blog stuff.\nI want to sleep now. The blog stuff + x kept me up till 1 again :^(.\nTop up DeepSeek API key Figure out how to x-post these posts to substack automagically. ",
    "content": "Today I did some [[school_hrt3mss]] work. I finished a few assignments. It\u0026rsquo;s crunch time because the course ends on Friday.\n{{REDACTED}}\nI also did a bunch of blog stuff.\nI want to sleep now. The blog stuff + x kept me up till 1 again :^(.\nTop up DeepSeek API key Figure out how to x-post these posts to substack automagically. "
  },
  {
    "title": "Tools",
    "url": "/posts/tools.html",
    "date": "2026-07-22",
    "summary": "*Meta: This is a dynamic post, which means that it will be updated often. You can navigate through previous versions of all posts here. If you are non-technical, ask your favourite LLM for help.\nThis is a non-exhaustive list of tools I use:\nPython, JAX, PyTorch, Quantum Espresso, Cirq, Jupyter Notebook, Marimo Notebook, OpenAI Codex, Ubuntu, i3, GitHub, Zotero (you can see my library here). In the future I would like to expand this post. This post was inspired by this post by Gavin Leech and this post by Ti Guo.\n",
    "content": "*Meta: This is a dynamic post, which means that it will be updated often. You can navigate through previous versions of all posts here. If you are non-technical, ask your favourite LLM for help.\nThis is a non-exhaustive list of tools I use:\nPython, JAX, PyTorch, Quantum Espresso, Cirq, Jupyter Notebook, Marimo Notebook, OpenAI Codex, Ubuntu, i3, GitHub, Zotero (you can see my library here). In the future I would like to expand this post. This post was inspired by this post by Gavin Leech and this post by Ti Guo.\n"
  },
  {
    "title": "2026-07-21 Goose Photography",
    "url": "/posts/2026-07-21-goose-photography.html",
    "date": "2026-07-22",
    "summary": "This is a blog-ified version of this X thread: https://x.com/amitavkrshna/status/2079752248872050770, with some minor edits. Also, these photos were actually taken yesterday, 2026-07-20, but I chose to exercise my free will and post them today instead.\n1/7 I don’t like this one because the camera isn’t straight and the geese are far away. It will be okay after some cropping + rotation\n2/7 I like this one a little bit, but I think it could also be improved by cropping from the left such that the geese take up ~all of the frame.\n",
    "content": "This is a blog-ified version of this X thread: https://x.com/amitavkrshna/status/2079752248872050770, with some minor edits. Also, these photos were actually taken yesterday, 2026-07-20, but I chose to exercise my free will and post them today instead.\n1/7 I don\u0026rsquo;t like this one because the camera isn\u0026rsquo;t straight and the geese are far away. It will be okay after some cropping + rotation\n2/7 I like this one a little bit, but I think it could also be improved by cropping from the left such that the geese take up ~all of the frame.\n3/7 I like this one a lot, the only thing I would change is somehow getting the other two geese to skedaddle.\n4/7 This is the same goose as pictured above. I like that I\u0026rsquo;m close to the subject matter, though I think it could be improved by:\nincreasing the contrast, cropping out the dead grass from the top.This is the same goose as pictured above. I like that I\u0026rsquo;m close to the subject matter, though I think it could be improved by: increasing the contrast, cropping out the dead grass from the top. 5/7 I wasn\u0026rsquo;t planning on taking this photo originally, but a minute after beginning to bike home I saw these folks in the water and knew I had to get a picture. This one is mediocre because it\u0026rsquo;s quite dark and the bench is the main subject, but I think that could be fixed.\n6/7 Blurry, out of focus, uninteresting angle.\n7/7 Saw this smaller, oddly coloured goose on the side of the river. Also blurry and out of focus.\n8/7 This is #1 cropped and rotated. Much better, but still mediocre because of the distance to the subject. I think this is the optima given the original image, because too much cropping makes everything blurry.\n9/7 This is #2 cropped from the left (and the bottom so that the geese are in the middle). I was conflicted about cropping out the unknown pole-shaped object, but I think it looks better without it.\n10/7 This is #4 cropped from the left and top + with brightness and contrast turned up. I think it looks better, with the only caveats is that the vibe is changed now that the geese is in the top left corner (feels like it\u0026rsquo;s running away) and it\u0026rsquo;s quite clear that it\u0026rsquo;s out of focus now.\n11/7 This is #5 with the brightness and contrast increased. I couldn\u0026rsquo;t figure out how to crop it so that the river didn\u0026rsquo;t look like a lake or that it didn\u0026rsquo;t feel like you would bump your head on the sky getting up from the bench.\n"
  },
  {
    "title": "Testing this for the feed",
    "url": "/posts/testing-this-for-the-feed.html",
    "date": "2026-07-21",
    "summary": "This is a test!\n",
    "content": "This is a test!\n"
  },
  {
    "title": "2026-07-20 Retrospective",
    "url": "/posts/2026-07-20-retrospective.html",
    "date": "2026-07-21",
    "summary": "Today Tyler Cowen announced the 56th cohort of Emergent Ventures winners, one of whom was me!! I have money now!\nIn addition, I received an email from {{REDACTED}} about being mentored, which seems cool! They’re a linguistics professor who dabbles in AI evaluation. One thing I noticed about their papers is that they have a much more prominently “academic” register. Reading (skimming) their paper was much more enjoyable than typical papers but also much more taxing. I felt the same way as I do when I’m listening to somebody who has a thick accent (particularly a thick French accent): I can understand the individual words, but the thought required to decipher the individual words expels from my working memory the knowledge of the previous words, making it much more difficult to comprehend a sentence.\n",
    "content": "Today Tyler Cowen announced the 56th cohort of Emergent Ventures winners, one of whom was me!! I have money now!\nIn addition, I received an email from {{REDACTED}} about being mentored, which seems cool! They\u0026rsquo;re a linguistics professor who dabbles in AI evaluation. One thing I noticed about their papers is that they have a much more prominently \u0026ldquo;academic\u0026rdquo; register. Reading (skimming) their paper was much more enjoyable than typical papers but also much more taxing. I felt the same way as I do when I\u0026rsquo;m listening to somebody who has a thick accent (particularly a thick French accent): I can understand the individual words, but the thought required to decipher the individual words expels from my working memory the knowledge of the previous words, making it much more difficult to comprehend a sentence.\nI photographed some geese today, but it\u0026rsquo;s too late for me to make a separate geese post so I will do it tomorrow.\nI printed out \u0026ldquo;You and Your Research\u0026rdquo; by Richard Hamming today and wish to read it tomorrow.\nI read Understanding LSTM Networks by Chris Olah today. I sketched it out and it was actually quite simple. I\u0026rsquo;m implementing it, in JAX specifically so that I can brush up on my skills there.\nTomorrow I need to do a LOT of work for my religion class. Like, a TON.\n{{REDACTED}}\nFinally, I also need to top up my DeepSeek API key. I use it for ensuring all of these posts are kosher to go on to the internet. The way I do it is that I use obsidian\u0026rsquo;s daily notes feature where I just write everything (that\u0026rsquo;s what I\u0026rsquo;m writing right now), and then anything that is personal or embarrassing or that I\u0026rsquo;m contractually obliged to not reveal to others or whatever I just redact when making my post. One time, though, a few weeks ago, I accidentally copied and pasted the unredacted version, so I implemented a system where DeepSeek audits all of the posts before they go out on to the internet. I\u0026rsquo;m especially worried about this because all of the posts are pushed to a public GitHub repository.\n{{REDACTED}} from [[Org Runpod]] gave me $1000 in compute!\nI have to update my website\u0026rsquo;s about me and projects and research sections.\n"
  },
  {
    "title": "Reading \"The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect\"",
    "url": "/posts/reading-the-metamorphosis-of-prime-intellect.html",
    "date": "2026-07-19",
    "summary": "Hello! Inspired by the neolab, I decided to read “The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect” by Roger WIlliams. Two things to start: there are SPOILERS AHEAD, and I would also like to repeat the author’s disclaimer from the book:\nThis online novel contains strong language and extreme depictions of acts of sex and violence. Readers who are sensitive to such things should exercise discretion.\nThis post will be family-friendly, but if you decide to read the original source, you should keep that in mind. In addition, I found some good suggestions on what parts to skip here (spoilers there), though I did not find this until after reading because I wanted to go in clean, and I’m not traumatized.\n",
    "content": "Hello! Inspired by the neolab, I decided to read \u0026ldquo;The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect\u0026rdquo; by Roger WIlliams. Two things to start: there are SPOILERS AHEAD, and I would also like to repeat the author\u0026rsquo;s disclaimer from the book:\nThis online novel contains strong language and extreme depictions of acts of sex and violence. Readers who are sensitive to such things should exercise discretion.\nThis post will be family-friendly, but if you decide to read the original source, you should keep that in mind. In addition, I found some good suggestions on what parts to skip here (spoilers there), though I did not find this until after reading because I wanted to go in clean, and I\u0026rsquo;m not traumatized.\nAnyways! To the meat: Spoilers inside of here for \u0026lsquo;The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect\u0026rsquo; One spoiler (which shouldn\u0026rsquo;t be that surprising) is that there exists an artificial, extremely powerful, superintelligent entity in the book which I will refer to as John. I think overall it provided an interesting perspective on one potential failure mode of a system like John, which in the book is lack of meaning. I know this is a pretty common concern, but I think the book does a great job of making it very visceral. In particular, it paints a very good picture of how Asimov\u0026rsquo;s Laws of robotics can go wrong:\nAsimov\u0026rsquo;s Laws of robotics, from \u0026ldquo;Runaround\u0026rdquo;\nProtect human safety, Follow human orders, unless the conflict with the first law, Protect the self, unless it conflicts with the first and second law. Because there\u0026rsquo;s been like three spoiler warnings, the specific failure mode it gives is that after coming into power, many humans begin taking on forms that are not usually associated with humans, such as becoming animals or zombies or even just becoming incorporeal. This has a bunch of consequences in the book, but I think this is a really good point: if a human order can make a human not human, thereby exempting the human from the first law, that would be putting it in danger of dying from the robot, therefore a human can never become not a human. Is this actually true? Maybe not.\nAnother interesting specific detail from the book was that many humans just isolated themselves completely from other humans, because John provided everything for them and could even create \u0026ldquo;fake\u0026rdquo; humans for them to interact with.\nThis is where I\u0026rsquo;m going to stop because it\u0026rsquo;s late and I want to go to sleep. One piece of future reading I want to embark on is one in which the AI is a dictator (as opposed to MOPI where it\u0026rsquo;s sort of a benevolent, all-powerful fairy), and according to Claude the best in this genre is Colossus by D. F. Jones. This has been stated in the spoiler box, but it doesn\u0026rsquo;t necessarily have spoilers: I will be reading Colossus by D. F. Jones soon.\n"
  },
  {
    "title": "Testing details tags on my blog platform",
    "url": "/posts/testing-details-tags-on-my-blog-platform.html",
    "date": "2026-07-19",
    "summary": " This is a test of details sections I’m testing this because I read a book I want to discuss while giving people a good spoiler warning and this seems like the best method ",
    "content": " This is a test of details sections I\u0026rsquo;m testing this because I read a book I want to discuss while giving people a good spoiler warning and this seems like the best method "
  },
  {
    "title": "2026-07-17",
    "url": "/posts/2026-07-17.html",
    "date": "2026-07-18",
    "summary": "It’s been quite a while since I’ve done an daily update. It’s been 8 days.\nSince 8 days ago I’ve done a little bit of work for the [[Org Material and Process Simulation Centre]] at Caltech. I defined a system-of-interest, BiVO_{4}, then today I started running some proof-of-concept experiments for converging the width of the slab, and tomorrow I want to run some for getting the Hubbard corrections.\n{{REDACTED}}\nTomorrow I will go on a bike ride. I want to go into the forest and photograph some geese. I also have to {{REDACTED}}.\n",
    "content": "It\u0026rsquo;s been quite a while since I\u0026rsquo;ve done an daily update. It\u0026rsquo;s been 8 days.\nSince 8 days ago I\u0026rsquo;ve done a little bit of work for the [[Org Material and Process Simulation Centre]] at Caltech. I defined a system-of-interest, BiVO_{4}, then today I started running some proof-of-concept experiments for converging the width of the slab, and tomorrow I want to run some for getting the Hubbard corrections.\n{{REDACTED}}\nTomorrow I will go on a bike ride. I want to go into the forest and photograph some geese. I also have to {{REDACTED}}.\n"
  },
  {
    "title": "Reflections on \"250 YEARS: The United States – from independence to empire\"",
    "url": "/posts/reflections-on-250-years-the-united-states-from-independence-to-empire.html",
    "date": "2026-07-10",
    "summary": "Seems quite crudely derogatory towards the U.S. and contradicts many of my priors. They argue that the reason for the revolution was primarily economic freedom from Britain’s meddling and not for democracy, backing this up with examples of many seemingly undemocratic parts of the government (supreme court, electoral college, etc.). They also argue that it was primarily a war waged by the wealthy for which the poor were used as weapons.\n",
    "content": "Seems quite crudely derogatory towards the U.S. and contradicts many of my priors. They argue that the reason for the revolution was primarily economic freedom from Britain\u0026rsquo;s meddling and not for democracy, backing this up with examples of many seemingly undemocratic parts of the government (supreme court, electoral college, etc.). They also argue that it was primarily a war waged by the wealthy for which the poor were used as weapons.\nMeta: source\n"
  },
  {
    "title": "2026-07-09 Retrospective",
    "url": "/posts/2026-07-09-retrospective.html",
    "date": "2026-07-10",
    "summary": "Today I woke up quite late, around 11.00 EDT, because yesterday I slept relatively late (~03.00 EDT). I scrolled (x, email, whatsapp, reddit, etc.) for a few hours, until ~18.00 EDT, until I joined a coworking call with {{REDACTED}} and {{REDACTED}}. I created a plan with claude on how I’m going to review Ch121a-DFT, and then did some review. I learned that:\nthe energy of a substance can be (lossily) modelled as a function of all of the positions of all of the nuclei within that substance, density functional theory is a tool for finding the function that gives the energy, geometry optimization is finding the positions of the nuclei (R) that minimizes the energy, i.e. finds the stable state, $$F_i = - \\frac{\\partial E}{\\partial R_i}$$ Where $F_i$ is the force on the i-th nucleus. It’s negative because we’re minimizing the energy. In general, within an atom or molecule, the force of gravity is negligible w.r.t. to the force between electrons. Electrons are harder to model. Let’s assume a toy system, where there are three dimension x, y, and z, and 10 points on each axis. Now, let there be 60 electrons. For 10 points on each axis and three dimensions, that means that there are a total of $10^3 = 1000$ possible points. Then, we have to compute the amplitude of each electron at each point, which is $1000^{60}$ possible configurations!! Naively one would think that we can represent this as just 1000 different wave functions, but sadly we cannot, because the amplitudes of electrons are correlated. This is very bad, because even for this relatively simple system it’s intractable to store. Now, the solution here is to commoditize (non-technical language) the electrons: instead of computing the chance of finding each electron at each point, we compute the chance of finding an electron at each point (density). It should be noted that the chance of finding an electron at a point can be greater than 1, because we can have multiple electrons on a points (subject to the Pauli exclusion princple etc. etc.). The storage scales constantly w.r.t. the electron count, only scaling as we add more points per axis, which one can intuit as being because we just give a point in our space (e.g. $[-2, 1, 3]$), and then our magical functional gives us the density at that point. This is good and tractable! Now, finally, what you’ve all been waiting for, the energy as a functional of the electron density (Kohn-Sham decomposition): $$E[n] = T_{s[n]} + E_{ext[n]} + E_{H[n]} + E_{xc[n]}$$ Where $T_{s}$ is the kinetic energy of a fictitious system with our same densities, $E_{ext[n]}$ is the external potential energy, $E_{H[n]}$ is the self-repulsion of the charge cloud, and $E_{xc[n]}$ is the exchange-correlation, aka everything not covered in the other terms, and with no known exact form.\nAfter this I goofed around a bit with PySCF, scrolled some twitter, ate a turkey sandwich, went on a run for under 2 minutes, then wrote this up.\n",
    "content": "Today I woke up quite late, around 11.00 EDT, because yesterday I slept relatively late (~03.00 EDT). I scrolled (x, email, whatsapp, reddit, etc.) for a few hours, until ~18.00 EDT, until I joined a coworking call with {{REDACTED}} and {{REDACTED}}. I created a plan with claude on how I\u0026rsquo;m going to review Ch121a-DFT, and then did some review. I learned that:\nthe energy of a substance can be (lossily) modelled as a function of all of the positions of all of the nuclei within that substance, density functional theory is a tool for finding the function that gives the energy, geometry optimization is finding the positions of the nuclei (R) that minimizes the energy, i.e. finds the stable state, $$F_i = - \\frac{\\partial E}{\\partial R_i}$$ Where $F_i$ is the force on the i-th nucleus. It\u0026rsquo;s negative because we\u0026rsquo;re minimizing the energy. In general, within an atom or molecule, the force of gravity is negligible w.r.t. to the force between electrons. Electrons are harder to model. Let\u0026rsquo;s assume a toy system, where there are three dimension x, y, and z, and 10 points on each axis. Now, let there be 60 electrons. For 10 points on each axis and three dimensions, that means that there are a total of $10^3 = 1000$ possible points. Then, we have to compute the amplitude of each electron at each point, which is $1000^{60}$ possible configurations!! Naively one would think that we can represent this as just 1000 different wave functions, but sadly we cannot, because the amplitudes of electrons are correlated. This is very bad, because even for this relatively simple system it\u0026rsquo;s intractable to store. Now, the solution here is to commoditize (non-technical language) the electrons: instead of computing the chance of finding each electron at each point, we compute the chance of finding an electron at each point (density). It should be noted that the chance of finding an electron at a point can be greater than 1, because we can have multiple electrons on a points (subject to the Pauli exclusion princple etc. etc.). The storage scales constantly w.r.t. the electron count, only scaling as we add more points per axis, which one can intuit as being because we just give a point in our space (e.g. $[-2, 1, 3]$), and then our magical functional gives us the density at that point. This is good and tractable! Now, finally, what you\u0026rsquo;ve all been waiting for, the energy as a functional of the electron density (Kohn-Sham decomposition): $$E[n] = T_{s[n]} + E_{ext[n]} + E_{H[n]} + E_{xc[n]}$$ Where $T_{s}$ is the kinetic energy of a fictitious system with our same densities, $E_{ext[n]}$ is the external potential energy, $E_{H[n]}$ is the self-repulsion of the charge cloud, and $E_{xc[n]}$ is the exchange-correlation, aka everything not covered in the other terms, and with no known exact form.\nAfter this I goofed around a bit with PySCF, scrolled some twitter, ate a turkey sandwich, went on a run for under 2 minutes, then wrote this up.\nTomorrow is going to be gym -\u0026gt; library working on this chemistry stuff. I would rate today 7/10, I did some work.\n"
  },
  {
    "title": "2026-07-08 Retrospective",
    "url": "/posts/2026-07-08-retrospective.html",
    "date": "2026-07-09",
    "summary": "{{REDACTED}}\nToday I woke up, I took shower and whatnot, ate breakfast, scrolled X, left the house around 09.40, arrived at the gym, worked out, left around 11.20, biked down to a tim hortons. Yesterday I posted an unredacted version of my daily update by accident, so I had to scrape the github history clean and then “I”(claude) implemented a system so that all of my posts are screened by DeepSeek before being posted. Basically the way these work is that in Obsidian I write an unredacted version as an obsidian daily note, then I create a new page in obsidian in my blogs folder and redact it. That’s the way it should work ideally, but in practice what happens is that I remember something while redacting stuff, add it to the redacted version, then have to add it back to the unredacted version, and then sometimes I get mixed up and copy the wrong version. That’s sort of a tangent. So after that I biked to a park, took a few photos of some geese, and then biked home. After that I played D\u0026D with my friends for a few hours. I’m going to do it in-person with {{REDACTED}} next week. After that I scrolled X for a bit, ran about 2 kilommetres, came home, read [[Reading Better Never to Have Been]], had dinner, wrote a blog post about it, scrolled X, messed around with an experiment on concept layers for pseudocode (inspired by http://arxiv.org/abs/2512.19980), and then wrote this. It’s approximately 2 am EDT.\n",
    "content": "{{REDACTED}}\nToday I woke up, I took shower and whatnot, ate breakfast, scrolled X, left the house around 09.40, arrived at the gym, worked out, left around 11.20, biked down to a tim hortons. Yesterday I posted an unredacted version of my daily update by accident, so I had to scrape the github history clean and then \u0026ldquo;I\u0026rdquo;(claude) implemented a system so that all of my posts are screened by DeepSeek before being posted. Basically the way these work is that in Obsidian I write an unredacted version as an obsidian daily note, then I create a new page in obsidian in my blogs folder and redact it. That\u0026rsquo;s the way it should work ideally, but in practice what happens is that I remember something while redacting stuff, add it to the redacted version, then have to add it back to the unredacted version, and then sometimes I get mixed up and copy the wrong version. That\u0026rsquo;s sort of a tangent. So after that I biked to a park, took a few photos of some geese, and then biked home. After that I played D\u0026amp;D with my friends for a few hours. I\u0026rsquo;m going to do it in-person with {{REDACTED}} next week. After that I scrolled X for a bit, ran about 2 kilommetres, came home, read [[Reading Better Never to Have Been]], had dinner, wrote a blog post about it, scrolled X, messed around with an experiment on concept layers for pseudocode (inspired by http://arxiv.org/abs/2512.19980), and then wrote this. It\u0026rsquo;s approximately 2 am EDT.\nTomorrow I need to do more actual work. Goddard lab + religion classwork. I also did not have a conversation of greater than 15 minutes with a stranger. So, this is the checklist:\n📅 2026-07-11 Finish reviewing Goddard lab materials, Finish all outstanding religion work and get caught up📅 2026-07-13 📅 2026-07-12 Choose system of interest to work on at Goddard lab ⏳ 2026-07-09 Reach out to emergent ventures folks about timing of the grant Have a great day!\n"
  },
  {
    "title": "2026-07-08 Goose Photography",
    "url": "/posts/2026-07-08-goose-photography.html",
    "date": "2026-07-09",
    "summary": "This is a blog-ified version of this X thread: https://x.com/amitavkrshna/status/2074987857446318454\n1/9 This was a bad photo, the geese are restricted to the upper left corner 2/9 Another mediocre photograph, though now there’s a single brave goose venturing into the top centre box 3/9 I like this one a little bit more, but the geese aren’t looking anywhere in particular which makes it less dramatic 4/9 I like this photograph quite a bit, they’re looking at an elderly fellow who was sitting on a bench out of frame 5/9 This photograph does a poor job of highlighting the geese in my opinion, although I like the prominent traingles and the slight surrealism of the island between the water bodies making it look like one body of water is above the other 6/9 This will be great when cropped a little bit (see 10/9) 7/9 This photo probably did not need to be taken, pretty much the same as 6 8/9 This one is a little bit better than mediocre, but still doesn’t focus enough on anything in particular, feels a bit distracted 9/9 This one will be pretty good after cropping out the bottom goose (see 11/9) 10/9 I really like this one, apart from the low-resolution 11/9 6/10, needs to be straightened ",
    "content": "This is a blog-ified version of this X thread: https://x.com/amitavkrshna/status/2074987857446318454\n1/9 This was a bad photo, the geese are restricted to the upper left corner 2/9 Another mediocre photograph, though now there\u0026rsquo;s a single brave goose venturing into the top centre box 3/9 I like this one a little bit more, but the geese aren\u0026rsquo;t looking anywhere in particular which makes it less dramatic 4/9 I like this photograph quite a bit, they\u0026rsquo;re looking at an elderly fellow who was sitting on a bench out of frame 5/9 This photograph does a poor job of highlighting the geese in my opinion, although I like the prominent traingles and the slight surrealism of the island between the water bodies making it look like one body of water is above the other 6/9 This will be great when cropped a little bit (see 10/9) 7/9 This photo probably did not need to be taken, pretty much the same as 6 8/9 This one is a little bit better than mediocre, but still doesn\u0026rsquo;t focus enough on anything in particular, feels a bit distracted 9/9 This one will be pretty good after cropping out the bottom goose (see 11/9) 10/9 I really like this one, apart from the low-resolution 11/9 6/10, needs to be straightened "
  },
  {
    "title": "Reflections on the Preface and Introduction to \"Better Never to Have Been\" by David Benatar",
    "url": "/posts/reflections-on-the-preface-and-introduction-to-better-never-to-have-been-by-david-benatar.html",
    "date": "2026-07-09",
    "summary": "Preface Relatively unremarkable, the only notable thing is that he seemed quite pessimistic about the expected impact of his work, though I suppose pessimism is what I would expect. The preceding sentence was not intended to be derogatory.\nIntroduction Ibid means that the same source cited. He refutes the idea that this conclusion that it is good to not exist is absurd. That conclusion is absurd, because one can do no good for one that does not exist, because definitionally nothing can be done to them. He refutes this by inverting this, and arguing that existing is bad for those existing. I think that this is an as-of-yet unproven assertion that existence is bad for those existing, but I do accept the idea that existencecan be bad for those existing. He asserts that life is ultimately pointless. He argues that pro-natal views are inherently advantaged, which I accept given that I accept that a child is inherently more likely to choose views agreeing with their parents than against them. He speaks a little of social pressures, but that’s mostly uninteresting to me, apart from this quote:\n",
    "content": "Preface Relatively unremarkable, the only notable thing is that he seemed quite pessimistic about the expected impact of his work, though I suppose pessimism is what I would expect. The preceding sentence was not intended to be derogatory.\nIntroduction Ibid means that the same source cited. He refutes the idea that this conclusion that it is good to not exist is absurd. That conclusion is absurd, because one can do no good for one that does not exist, because definitionally nothing can be done to them. He refutes this by inverting this, and arguing that existing is bad for those existing. I think that this is an as-of-yet unproven assertion that existence is bad for those existing, but I do accept the idea that existencecan be bad for those existing. He asserts that life is ultimately pointless. He argues that pro-natal views are inherently advantaged, which I accept given that I accept that a child is inherently more likely to choose views agreeing with their parents than against them. He speaks a little of social pressures, but that\u0026rsquo;s mostly uninteresting to me, apart from this quote:\nYou should have one for your husband, one for your wife, and one for your country (Reuters, \u0026lsquo;Brace yerself Sheila, it\u0026rsquo;s your patriotic duty \u0026lsquo;, Cape Times, Thursday, 13 May 2004, I. I, Amitav, found this here: https://iol.co.za/news/eish/2004-05-13-brace-yourself-sheila-its-your-duty/)\nHe also argues that the right to procreative freedom being more important than the right to immigrate is bad, which I disagree with for reasons I cannot currently articulate. I think it\u0026rsquo;s something to do with procreation being more \u0026ldquo;natural\u0026rdquo; somehow than immigration, but I have no arguments to back it up. He also argues against folks that say that one shouldn\u0026rsquo;t have kids because the world\u0026rsquo;s a horrible place, arguing that even if there were mounds and mounds fewer suffering, it would still be unwise to procreate.\nThe absence of bad things [\u0026hellip;] is good even if there is nobody to enjoy it (Better Never To Have Been, David Benatar, page 14)\nI think that this is refutable, but I struggle in this moment to refute it.\nThat was heavy, here\u0026rsquo;s a drawing of a goose. Have a great day!\n"
  },
  {
    "title": "This is a test of my pre-screening by DeepSeek for each post.",
    "url": "/posts/this-is-a-test-of-my-pre-screening-by-deepseek-for-each-post.html",
    "date": "2026-07-08",
    "summary": "Hello! I’ve implemented a pre-screening on all of my posts by DeepSeek to screen for any information that’s private or personal or would otherwise be regrettable to put out to the public.\n",
    "content": "Hello! I\u0026rsquo;ve implemented a pre-screening on all of my posts by DeepSeek to screen for any information that\u0026rsquo;s private or personal or would otherwise be regrettable to put out to the public.\n"
  },
  {
    "title": "2026-07-07 Retrospective",
    "url": "/posts/2026-07-07-retrospective.html",
    "date": "2026-07-08",
    "summary": "Today was a 5/10 day.\nI woke up and didn’t do a lot. I started scrolling X at 07.50 EDT. I tried to fix my backpack, got frustrated, scrolled X for a few hours, joined a call with {{REDACTED}}, fixed my mouse, scrolled more X, joined call with {{REDACTED}}, did some religion assignments and did {{REDACTED}} then scrolled more X + {{REDACTED}}, {{REDACTED}} came home, I had dinner + watched like 10 minutes of a talk on density functional theory, {{REDACTED}}, went on a run, and then started writing this.\n",
    "content": "Today was a 5/10 day.\nI woke up and didn\u0026rsquo;t do a lot. I started scrolling X at 07.50 EDT. I tried to fix my backpack, got frustrated, scrolled X for a few hours, joined a call with {{REDACTED}}, fixed my mouse, scrolled more X, joined call with {{REDACTED}}, did some religion assignments and did {{REDACTED}} then scrolled more X + {{REDACTED}}, {{REDACTED}} came home, I had dinner + watched like 10 minutes of a talk on density functional theory, {{REDACTED}}, went on a run, and then started writing this.\nI printed out the preface and first chapter of [[Reading Better Never to Have Been]], which I will read tomorrow. I wanted to read these because I was chatting with Claude about wanting to converse with more strangers this summer -\u0026gt; I want a girlfriend and to have kids young -\u0026gt; I want that because of the media I consume -\u0026gt; I need a more balanced media consumption, and it pointed me to this book on the antinatalist front.\nWake up between 07.00-08.00, Have breakfast, shower, read, etc., in two hours Bike down to the gym and arrive around 09.00 - 10.00, Finish up at the gym between 10.00 - 11.00, Bike down to Tim Hortons in Simcoe between 10.30 and 11.30, Work on school work, then {{REDACTED}} group work, until 13.30 AND 15 minutes required minimum allocation to conversing with a stranger, Bike back home, arriving around 14.00, Eat lunch before 14.30, Cowork on {{REDACTED}} group stuff until 17.00 OR (if Wednesday) do D\u0026amp;D until 17.00, Go on a run around the block until 17.30, Work on {{REDACTED}} group stuff until 21.00, Eat dinner until like 21.30 read + reflect + {{REDACTED}}+ scroll x + any other random stuff before 23.00 {{REDACTED}}. Also, my OpenClaw\u0026rsquo;s kimi account ran out of credits, but I\u0026rsquo;ve decided that since I haven\u0026rsquo;t used it in a while it\u0026rsquo;s probably not worth paying for. Tomorrow I want to (in order of importance):\nReview some of the desnity functional theory stuff Goddard gave me, Read some of the antinatalist book, Go to the gym, Do the school work, Finish the {{REDACTED}} Take a photograph of a goose, Go on a run "
  },
  {
    "title": "2026-06-27 Retrospective",
    "url": "/posts/2026-06-27-retrospective.html",
    "date": "2026-06-28",
    "summary": "{{REDACTED}}\nMeta: It’s late as I’m writing this and there’s a lot of personal stuff interspersed throughout my journal, so I’ve decided to redact it all.\n",
    "content": "{{REDACTED}}\nMeta: It\u0026rsquo;s late as I\u0026rsquo;m writing this and there\u0026rsquo;s a lot of personal stuff interspersed throughout my journal, so I\u0026rsquo;ve decided to redact it all.\n"
  },
  {
    "title": "2026-06-23 Retrospective",
    "url": "/posts/2026-06-23-retrospective.html",
    "date": "2026-06-24",
    "summary": "I am tired! I have not been posting for the last week, as I had procrastinated on many assignments and the end of the semester had been coming up. I had my math exam on Monday, and I believe I performed well. I have a history exam tomorrow, and I stayed up late tonight to study. I have had a problem with excessive amounts of X and {{REDACTED FOR CAREERIST REASONS}} and whatnot for the past few days. I read an article on lesswrong today about procrastination that I thought was interesting. I’ll leave the details to the article, but the takeaways are that the easiest actions I can take to reduce procrastination are to reduce the delay between doing the good action and getting a reward, increase the expectation of getting a good result from the good action, and increase the value of the good result. I feel as though there are nuances to accomplishing that, but I am tired, so I will end this entry here. {{REDACTED FOR CAREERIST REASONS}}. I also met with [[person_simon_bergeron]]. Tomorrow I wish also to work out. Finally, I wish to enable LaTeX embedding into my website.\n",
    "content": "I am tired! I have not been posting for the last week, as I had procrastinated on many assignments and the end of the semester had been coming up. I had my math exam on Monday, and I believe I performed well. I have a history exam tomorrow, and I stayed up late tonight to study. I have had a problem with excessive amounts of X and {{REDACTED FOR CAREERIST REASONS}} and whatnot for the past few days. I read an article on lesswrong today about procrastination that I thought was interesting. I\u0026rsquo;ll leave the details to the article, but the takeaways are that the easiest actions I can take to reduce procrastination are to reduce the delay between doing the good action and getting a reward, increase the expectation of getting a good result from the good action, and increase the value of the good result. I feel as though there are nuances to accomplishing that, but I am tired, so I will end this entry here. {{REDACTED FOR CAREERIST REASONS}}. I also met with [[person_simon_bergeron]]. Tomorrow I wish also to work out. Finally, I wish to enable LaTeX embedding into my website.\n"
  },
  {
    "title": "2026-06-16 Retrospective",
    "url": "/posts/2026-06-16-retrospective.html",
    "date": "2026-06-17",
    "summary": "I’m sort of screwed when it comes to school right now. I procrastinated on my photography and french CCAs, both of which were due a few days ago and both of which I am not yet finished. I must finish those soon. Today in the morning I learned about Haskell, rewrote my math test (I think I did better than last time), then in computer science I goofed off and played games with my friends instead of doing work, and then in French I worked on my french CCA (I think? I can’t really remember). When I came home {{REDACTED FOR CAREERIST REASONS}}, asked Claude to teach me how to solve a time-dependent schrodinger equation for a time-independent schrodinger equation, did that for a bit, {{REDACTED FOR CAREERIST REASONS}}, then did french history CCA stuff, and now this. Overall like 3/10 day.\n",
    "content": "I\u0026rsquo;m sort of screwed when it comes to school right now. I procrastinated on my photography and french CCAs, both of which were due a few days ago and both of which I am not yet finished. I must finish those soon. Today in the morning I learned about Haskell, rewrote my math test (I think I did better than last time), then in computer science I goofed off and played games with my friends instead of doing work, and then in French I worked on my french CCA (I think? I can\u0026rsquo;t really remember). When I came home {{REDACTED FOR CAREERIST REASONS}}, asked Claude to teach me how to solve a time-dependent schrodinger equation for a time-independent schrodinger equation, did that for a bit, {{REDACTED FOR CAREERIST REASONS}}, then did french history CCA stuff, and now this. Overall like 3/10 day.\nHave a nice day :^)\n"
  },
  {
    "title": "2026-06-15 Retrospective",
    "url": "/posts/2026-06-15-retrospective.html",
    "date": "2026-06-16",
    "summary": "Today was an okay day. I finished my ICS3U CCA, did some of my photography CCA, and did some math review. Tomorrow I have a math rewrite for exponentials. I feel like I’m sort of being crushed by work because I had a french and photography CCA both due yesterday that I did not do, so I’m sort of screwed, there are three days left before exams “start” (my first exam is next monday though) so I must work. {{REDACTED FOR LEGAL REASONS}}. {{REDACTED FOR CAREERIST REASONS}}. I also read some of good sleep, good learning, good life by Piotr Wozniak. I only read the summary and the part about the clock and the hourglass but basically:\n",
    "content": "Today was an okay day. I finished my ICS3U CCA, did some of my photography CCA, and did some math review. Tomorrow I have a math rewrite for exponentials. I feel like I\u0026rsquo;m sort of being crushed by work because I had a french and photography CCA both due yesterday that I did not do, so I\u0026rsquo;m sort of screwed, there are three days left before exams \u0026ldquo;start\u0026rdquo; (my first exam is next monday though) so I must work. {{REDACTED FOR LEGAL REASONS}}. {{REDACTED FOR CAREERIST REASONS}}. I also read some of good sleep, good learning, good life by Piotr Wozniak. I only read the summary and the part about the clock and the hourglass but basically:\nListen to your body clock, Not sleeping enough will kill your creativity and intellect, You need to follow your body clock AND do enough work before you can sleep I think sleep is something I need to improve a lot, but I feel like some of the points he makes are a bit too preachy and feel somewhat unpractical. In particular, his points on how if your kids have to wake up for school you should let them sleep and homeschool them instead seems impractical. It feels a bit like he holds the acquisition of knowledge as a valuable pursuit in and of itself and sleep as an essential part of that pursuit, while I feel a bit that knowledge is a means to the end of solving problems, and sleep is important, but there are other components to solving problems (i.e. collaboration, doing many things) that can encroach on that. I am probably too far in the other direction though. That said, I will be going to sleep now. Have a nice night! The following section was written before the past few sentences. This article is not in chronological order.\nClaude\u0026rsquo;s critique of my philo bac response see here In sum, this was better than previous attempts because I analyzed the terms, kept both of the concepts in play, and had a good case. However, I neglected the most essential word, necessarily. Claude\u0026rsquo;s problematique:\nEquality means treating like cases alike — but justice may require treating relevantly different cases differently. So does equality guarantee justice, or can equal treatment itself be unjust when it ignores relevant differences — and conversely, can justice demand inequality? Is equality a component of justice, or merely one of its possible forms, just only when the equality in question tracks what justice deems relevant\n"
  },
  {
    "title": "2026-06-15 Philo Bac Prompt",
    "url": "/posts/2026-06-15-philo-bac-prompt.html",
    "date": "2026-06-16",
    "summary": " L’égalité est-elle nécessairement juste ?\n(Translated to English) Is equality necessarily just?\nTaken from this nice list of 1996-2025 Philo Bac prompts\nTo begin, we will consider equality to be that two identical inputs receive two identical outputs. Now, whether this equality is just, depends heavily on your definition of just: does justice mean that punishment is allocated mostly in proportion to the damage done, or that punishment is allocated mostly according to the actions taken. In the latter case, equality necessitates justice, but in the former case it does not. Let us consider two people driving down the road in heavy rain, making them unable to see clearly what is in front of them. Suppose that a farmer’s cow wanders on to the road in front of the first car, and is struck, and killed. In the latter definition, the just judgement would be to not punish the driver, as given the same information as the second driver they made the same judgement. This, however, leads to an issue when we consider the farmer’s perspective. Surely for the farmer, it matters little whether the driver did or did not intend to kill their cow, the core issue is that they had a cow and that cow is now dead as a result of the actions that the driver took. So, from the farmer’s perspective, this is not just. This is the core conflict:\n",
    "content": " L’égalité est-elle nécessairement juste ?\n(Translated to English) Is equality necessarily just?\nTaken from this nice list of 1996-2025 Philo Bac prompts\nTo begin, we will consider equality to be that two identical inputs receive two identical outputs. Now, whether this equality is just, depends heavily on your definition of just: does justice mean that punishment is allocated mostly in proportion to the damage done, or that punishment is allocated mostly according to the actions taken. In the latter case, equality necessitates justice, but in the former case it does not. Let us consider two people driving down the road in heavy rain, making them unable to see clearly what is in front of them. Suppose that a farmer\u0026rsquo;s cow wanders on to the road in front of the first car, and is struck, and killed. In the latter definition, the just judgement would be to not punish the driver, as given the same information as the second driver they made the same judgement. This, however, leads to an issue when we consider the farmer\u0026rsquo;s perspective. Surely for the farmer, it matters little whether the driver did or did not intend to kill their cow, the core issue is that they had a cow and that cow is now dead as a result of the actions that the driver took. So, from the farmer\u0026rsquo;s perspective, this is not just. This is the core conflict:\nShould justice prioritize the needs of the victim or the actions of the perpetrator?\n"
  },
  {
    "title": "2026-06-12 Retrospective",
    "url": "/posts/2026-06-12-retrospective.html",
    "date": "2026-06-13",
    "summary": "{{REDACTED FOR CAREERIST REASONS}} I did a little bit of work on my ICS3U culminating interpreter and on my IEEE qCCL poster, but not a whole lot. I wrote my MCR3U sequences and series test today. I was tired because yesterday I slept at 23.00 PDT, and had to wake up at 04.00 PDT for school, it’s technically 21.29 PDT right now but I probably won’t get up until 06.00 - 07.00 PDT tomorrow, so I’m good. Crunch time. This weekend I have to do:\n",
    "content": "{{REDACTED FOR CAREERIST REASONS}} I did a little bit of work on my ICS3U culminating interpreter and on my IEEE qCCL poster, but not a whole lot. I wrote my MCR3U sequences and series test today. I was tired because yesterday I slept at 23.00 PDT, and had to wake up at 04.00 PDT for school, it\u0026rsquo;s technically 21.29 PDT right now but I probably won\u0026rsquo;t get up until 06.00 - 07.00 PDT tomorrow, so I\u0026rsquo;m good. Crunch time. This weekend I have to do:\nmy photography CCA my photography assignment, my french CCA, prepare for my rewrite of the exponentials test, {{REDACTED FOR LEGAL REASONS}} {{REDACTED FOR LEGAL REASONS}} sign the emergent ventures paperwork. Finish poster and send for printing. Prioritized, this is: Finish poster and send for printing, Sign the Emergent Ventures paperwork, Photography CCA, French CCA, Photography assignment, {{REDACTED FOR LEGAL REASONS}} {{REDACTED FOR LEGAL REASONS}} Prepare for rewrite of my exponentials test In addition, I must begin practicing for my presentation at IEEE qCCL. "
  },
  {
    "title": "2026-06-10 Retrospective",
    "url": "/posts/2026-06-10-retrospective.html",
    "date": "2026-06-11",
    "summary": "I didn’t do a lot for most of the day, then in an hour I did a lot. Tomorrow I must work more.\n",
    "content": "I didn\u0026rsquo;t do a lot for most of the day, then in an hour I did a lot. Tomorrow I must work more.\n"
  },
  {
    "title": "2026-06-09 Retrospective",
    "url": "/posts/2026-06-09-retrospective.html",
    "date": "2026-06-10",
    "summary": "I slept in today, spent a while in the bathtub, missed the bus, my dad drove me to school and I missed announcements. I took some photos for my photography CCA in the rain, got really wet, finished most of last night’s math homework, went to math class, then went to computer science, goofed off and did no work, went to French, goofed off some more, came home, {{REDACTED FOR LEGAL REASONS}}, {{REDACTED FOR LEGAL REASONS}}, {{REDACTED FOR LEGAL REASONS}}, {{REDACTED FOR LEGAL REASONS}}, {{REDACTED FOR LEGAL REASONS}} then wrote my philo bac response, and then this. I didn’t work out today or work on my poster. Priorities for tomorrow in order:\n",
    "content": "I slept in today, spent a while in the bathtub, missed the bus, my dad drove me to school and I missed announcements. I took some photos for my photography CCA in the rain, got really wet, finished most of last night\u0026rsquo;s math homework, went to math class, then went to computer science, goofed off and did no work, went to French, goofed off some more, came home, {{REDACTED FOR LEGAL REASONS}}, {{REDACTED FOR LEGAL REASONS}}, {{REDACTED FOR LEGAL REASONS}}, {{REDACTED FOR LEGAL REASONS}}, {{REDACTED FOR LEGAL REASONS}} then wrote my philo bac response, and then this. I didn\u0026rsquo;t work out today or work on my poster. Priorities for tomorrow in order:\nFinish poster for IEEE qCCL, {{REDACTED FOR LEGAL REASONS}} {{REDACTED FOR LEGAL REASONS}} Do more work on my interpreter for ICS3U, Do more of my exam review for math Work out That\u0026rsquo;s pretty much it Claude\u0026rsquo;s critique of my philo bac response See Here In sum, it\u0026rsquo;s better, I interrogated the key noun, built a good conceptual distinction, but I a) concluded early and b) concluded on a different question. I skipped the term \u0026ldquo;égoïste\u0026rdquo;, or \u0026ldquo;selfish\u0026rdquo; which is the key word. \u0026ldquo;[I am] an optimizer, and you keep quietly relocating the question into a space where optimization is possible — which is exactly the space where the philosophy isn\u0026rsquo;t.\u0026quot;(Claude) Action item from Claude: \u0026ldquo;before drafting, find the word whose meaning, if it shifted, would flip the answer — and analyze that one.\u0026rdquo; And its suggested problematique:\nEvery quest for happiness is, by definition, a quest for my happiness — so is it selfish in any meaningful sense, or only trivially self-referential? Can the pursuit of my own happiness be realized only through others (friendship, virtue, devotion to ends beyond myself), such that it ceases to be selfish — or does seeking fulfilment through others merely conceal a more refined egoism, in which other people are means to my own contentment\n"
  },
  {
    "title": "2026-06-09 Philo Bac Prompt",
    "url": "/posts/2026-06-09-philo-bac-prompt.html",
    "date": "2026-06-10",
    "summary": " Chercher à être heureux, est-ce une quête égoïste ? (Translated to English) Is searching for happiness a self-centred quest? Taken from the happiness section of the 1996-2025 Philo Bac Prompts\nThe self-centeredness of happiness depends on its specific form. Namely, there are two main types of happiness: pleasure and fulfilment. Pleasure is happiness in its most primitive form, while fulfilment is a more abstract, less direct form of happiness, less common in creatures outside of humans. Things that cause pleasure vary little from person to person and are much more clear and consistent in their causality, while fulfilment is dependent mainly on the innards of one’s own mind. One does not imply the other: a rich man can feel unfulfilled with his life despite being able to fill every material desire, while on the other hand a poor man can be at peace. They are not mutually exclusive, but they tend to be inversely correlated, as too much pleasure can make one unmotivated to seek fulfilment. These definitions may lead one to believe that fulfilment is the more self-centred mode of happiness since it’s less dependent on the state of the outside world than pleasure, however often pleasure is zero-sum in nature. If I eat this piece of cake, you cannot also eat this piece of cake. In addition, fulfilment is very often dependent on helping others, while pleasure, being much more scalable, can also be automated with much greater effectiveness while cutting out others. Thus, we can say that lasting happiness requires others, while temporary happiness does not. Leading us to rephrase the above as:\n",
    "content": " Chercher à être heureux, est-ce une quête égoïste ? (Translated to English) Is searching for happiness a self-centred quest? Taken from the happiness section of the 1996-2025 Philo Bac Prompts\nThe self-centeredness of happiness depends on its specific form. Namely, there are two main types of happiness: pleasure and fulfilment. Pleasure is happiness in its most primitive form, while fulfilment is a more abstract, less direct form of happiness, less common in creatures outside of humans. Things that cause pleasure vary little from person to person and are much more clear and consistent in their causality, while fulfilment is dependent mainly on the innards of one\u0026rsquo;s own mind. One does not imply the other: a rich man can feel unfulfilled with his life despite being able to fill every material desire, while on the other hand a poor man can be at peace. They are not mutually exclusive, but they tend to be inversely correlated, as too much pleasure can make one unmotivated to seek fulfilment. These definitions may lead one to believe that fulfilment is the more self-centred mode of happiness since it\u0026rsquo;s less dependent on the state of the outside world than pleasure, however often pleasure is zero-sum in nature. If I eat this piece of cake, you cannot also eat this piece of cake. In addition, fulfilment is very often dependent on helping others, while pleasure, being much more scalable, can also be automated with much greater effectiveness while cutting out others. Thus, we can say that lasting happiness requires others, while temporary happiness does not. Leading us to rephrase the above as:\nProblematique: Is it better to seek easy, temporary happiness or difficult, long-term happiness?\n"
  },
  {
    "title": "2026-06-08 Retrospective",
    "url": "/posts/2026-06-08-retrospective.html",
    "date": "2026-06-09",
    "summary": "Hello guys! I worked out today (Upper B) for the first time since last week, had two meetings, and then goofed off for pretty much the rest of the night. Today I also started my computer science culminating assignmetn. Here’s Claude’s summary of my night from my browser history (all times in EDT):\n~19:30–19:45 — Podcast / Reddit wind-down Started on Reddit reading about indie podcasts — CGP Grey’s “State of the Workflow,” the Unmade Podcast, Hello Internet, Cortex, 99% Invisible. Poked at 8090’s Software Factory / {{REDACTED FOR LEGAL REASONS}}, briefly and checked your 8090 Google Calendar (week of June 8). Looked up Jeff Dujon (Unmade host). ~19:45–20:10 — Admin \u0026 paperwork\n",
    "content": "Hello guys! I worked out today (Upper B) for the first time since last week, had two meetings, and then goofed off for pretty much the rest of the night. Today I also started my computer science culminating assignmetn. Here\u0026rsquo;s Claude\u0026rsquo;s summary of my night from my browser history (all times in EDT):\n~19:30–19:45 — Podcast / Reddit wind-down Started on Reddit reading about indie podcasts — CGP Grey\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;State of the Workflow,\u0026rdquo; the Unmade Podcast, Hello Internet, Cortex, 99% Invisible. Poked at 8090\u0026rsquo;s Software Factory / {{REDACTED FOR LEGAL REASONS}}, briefly and checked your 8090 Google Calendar (week of June 8). Looked up Jeff Dujon (Unmade host). ~19:45–20:10 — Admin \u0026amp; paperwork\nAmazon.ca — checked Your Orders / Buy Again Gmail (krishna@amitav.net) → {{REDACTED FOR CAREERIST/LEGAL REASONS}} Transfer / bank documents). Downloaded the zip/PDFs and asked Claude to help understand the EV form. ~20:15–20:35 — Focus-music rabbit hole Signed into Brain.fm, then went comparison-shopping for alternatives: myNoise, FlowTunes, amidAudio, the cubny/focus GitHub repo, Google Lyria 3 music API. Detoured into some music videos (Call Me Maybe, Kesha, Party in the USA). ~20:37–20:55 — Banking + headphone shopping Logged into TD EasyWeb, then shopped Amazon.ca for over-ear headphones — looked at Monster Persona 4th/5th ANC and went to checkout (\u0026ldquo;Place Your Order\u0026rdquo;). Researched a TOZO NC20 charging case and over-ear-vs-in-ear on Reddit. Checked Proton Mail. ~21:00–22:40 — The big one: r/wallstreetbets + GameStop deep dive This is where most of your night went. Started with SpaceX IPO timing and an Intel \u0026ldquo;$700k\u0026rdquo; WSB thread, then fell fully into wallstreetbets — dozens of posts (panic-sell memes, \u0026ldquo;Times Square right now,\u0026rdquo; etc.). That flowed into a long GameStop short-squeeze read: Wikipedia, DeepFuckingValue, Mark Cuban\u0026rsquo;s AMA, Robinhood class-action posts, the \u0026ldquo;I Hold The Line\u0026rdquo; parody. You also logged into TD again mid-stream. ~22:40–23:00 — ML/research pivot Switched to r/MachineLearning and r/learnmachinelearning — reading group docs, MVA master\u0026rsquo;s program, conferences (ICML/NeurIPS/JMLR), Cohere Labs Discord. ~23:00–23:45 — Networking + your resume Looked up Boardy (AI networking bot) and people (Tom Buchwald, Noah Barbaros, Chinmay Arvind). Visited amitav.net, then Overleaf — opened/compiled your resume (amitav_krishna (Copy)) and exported PDFs. Started an Android Studio download (2026.1.1, Linux tar.gz, from MajorGeeks). Browsed lots of r/LinkedInLunatics. ~23:55–01:15 (now June 9) — Late night Checked all your inboxes (8090 Inc., personal Gmail, Proton), glanced at Jane Street\u0026rsquo;s site, more r/LinkedInLunatics, and finished in Bitwarden looking up amitav.net credentials before logging into your amitav.net admin to start a New Post. I spent a lot of time on Reddit :^(. Here\u0026rsquo;s my plan for tomorrow (all times in PDT):\n22.40 (today) - 04.00: sleep, 04.00 - 05.00: get ready for school 05.00 - 05.30: bike to school 05.30 - 06.10: HTTV (school announcements) 06.10 - 06.50: Photography CCA 06.50 - 07.15: Finish math homework :^( 07.15 - 08.35: Math class 08.35 - 09.15: Flexible, either ICS3U (Computer science) CCA work or MCR3U(math) exam review / homework 09.15 - 10.35: ICS3U CCA work 10.40 - 11.55: CHC2DF (History) CCA work (I\u0026rsquo;ve been procrastinating on this :^( ) 12.00 - 12.30: Bike to gym 12.40 - 13.50: Work out 14.00 - 14.30: bike back home 14.45 - 15.15: {{REDACTED FOR LEGAL REASONS}} 15.15 - 15.45: Eat dinner 16.00 - 16.45: IEEE qCCL work 17.00 - 17.30: {{REDACTED FOR LEGAL REASONS}} 17.30 - 18.15: {{REDACTED FOR LEGAL REASONS}} 18.15 - 19.00: {{REDACTED FOR LEGAL REASONS}} 19.00 - 19.45: IEEE qCCL work 19.45 - 20.00: Philo bac 20.00 - 20.15: Write the daily update blog post (like I\u0026rsquo;m diong right now) 20.45 - 04.00: sleep {{REDACTED FOR CAREERIST REASONS}}\n"
  },
  {
    "title": "2026-06-07 Reflection",
    "url": "/posts/2026-06-07-reflection.html",
    "date": "2026-06-08",
    "summary": "Hello! I have not posted for the past couple of days. To be completely honest, I forget a lot of what I have done for the past four days, yesterday I had a graduation party for my friend, Krishiv Thakuria, at which I was MC. I have not been keeping up with the Philo Bac prompts.\n{{REDACTED FOR CAREERIST REASONS}}\nI also figured out the logistics for how I will print my conference poster, my next steps are to figure out what my biggest / highlight figure will be and then adapt the prose around that.\n",
    "content": "Hello! I have not posted for the past couple of days. To be completely honest, I forget a lot of what I have done for the past four days, yesterday I had a graduation party for my friend, Krishiv Thakuria, at which I was MC. I have not been keeping up with the Philo Bac prompts.\n{{REDACTED FOR CAREERIST REASONS}}\nI also figured out the logistics for how I will print my conference poster, my next steps are to figure out what my biggest / highlight figure will be and then adapt the prose around that.\n{{REDACTED FOR LEGAL REASONS}}\n{{REDACTED FOR CAREERIST REASONS}}\nTasks:\nDecide on highlight figure for IEEE qCCL poster, Write a response to a philo bac prompt, taking care to examine the critical nouns, {{REDACTED FOR CAREERIST REASONS}} {{REDACTED FOR CAREERIST REASONS}} "
  },
  {
    "title": "2026-06-03 Reflection",
    "url": "/posts/2026-06-03-reflection.html",
    "date": "2026-06-04",
    "summary": "Retrospective Today I did some work for 8090. I wrote an introduction as a response to one of the philo bac prompts as I had intended. I did some work for my computer science assignment. I did quite a bit of bicycling, and I also worked out today.\nToday was leg day, and around half way through I had seated leg curls, and I couldn’t find a leg curl machine, and I asked somebody and he pointed me to the leg extension machine, and I sort of nodded and thanked him, and then went on my phone to see if I could substitute the leg curls for something else, but I guess he thought I didn’t know how to use the machine, and so started showing me, so I got in the machine and started doing the workout, and after like 8 reps (probably reasonable for a set), I got up to fill up my water, and then just left the building. I probably shouldn’t have done that. Tomorrow I will rewrite the workout to remove the leg curls.\n",
    "content": "Retrospective Today I did some work for 8090. I wrote an introduction as a response to one of the philo bac prompts as I had intended. I did some work for my computer science assignment. I did quite a bit of bicycling, and I also worked out today.\nToday was leg day, and around half way through I had seated leg curls, and I couldn\u0026rsquo;t find a leg curl machine, and I asked somebody and he pointed me to the leg extension machine, and I sort of nodded and thanked him, and then went on my phone to see if I could substitute the leg curls for something else, but I guess he thought I didn\u0026rsquo;t know how to use the machine, and so started showing me, so I got in the machine and started doing the workout, and after like 8 reps (probably reasonable for a set), I got up to fill up my water, and then just left the building. I probably shouldn\u0026rsquo;t have done that. Tomorrow I will rewrite the workout to remove the leg curls.\n{{REDACTED FOR CAREERIST REASONS}}\n{{REDACTED FOR CAREERIST REASONS}}\nTomorrow I have a presentation for my TKS demo day, and it\u0026rsquo;s sort of surreal because that will be the last time I\u0026rsquo;m doing something real for TKS, and then it ends. Odd.\nTasks:\nFinish computer science passion project presentation, Do and publish philo bac prompt response, Make a set of notes for + crush demo day, {{REDACTED FOR CAREERIST REASONS}} Do work for 8090, {{REDACTED FOR CAREERIST REASONS}} P.S.: These daily updates are usually my only type of journaling, but this means that things that, for one reason or another, I cannot publish on my blog, I also cannot write down for my future self. I think this is dumb, so what I am going to do going forward is to keep uncensored versions of my journal entries for my personal viewing and then redact them before publication.\nCritique of my philo bac response by Claude Original Response This is my summary of its critiques:\nI turned a philosophy question into an economics question, I, too quickly, tried to reduce it to something tractable, but \u0026ldquo;a good problématique opens out, it never reduces\u0026rdquo;, I didn\u0026rsquo;t analyze the key verb (\u0026ldquo;besoin\u0026rdquo;), I sort of shrug off art as a means to an end as if it\u0026rsquo;s obvious. \u0026ldquo;I would argue that art serves much the same purpose as education\u0026rdquo;, the key word being purpose: the tension is that many argue that art is an end in itself.\nClaude\u0026rsquo;s suggested problematique: Do we need artists the way we need farmers — as a means to sustain life — or does the very fact that we make and want art reveal a different order of need, one that can\u0026rsquo;t be cashed out in utility: the need for a life that is more than survival? And if art\u0026rsquo;s value is not instrumental, is \u0026ldquo;need\u0026rdquo; even the right word — or do we need artists precisely because some human goods are useless\nand action item for me for tomorrow: \u0026ldquo;before you write a single sentence, spend three minutes on the key noun. Write down two or three rival senses of it.\u0026rdquo;\n"
  },
  {
    "title": "2026-06-03 Philo Bac Prompt",
    "url": "/posts/2026-06-03-philo-bac-prompt.html",
    "date": "2026-06-04",
    "summary": " A-t-on besoin d’artistes ?\n(Translated to English) Do we need artists?\nTaken from the art notion section of the 1996-2025 Philo Bac prompts\nOne might say that they are not necessary, because they don’t directly contribute to creating more food and water and all of the other bare essentials for life. Ask a starving man if he needs artists and he would say no, he needs more farmers. This is, however, quite a reductionist perspective on the human experience. One could make the same argument with respect to an accountant, or a scientist, or a software engineer. In fact, much of the advancement in our world has come because of these folks, who interface with these abstractions over our basic necessities. The inventor of the tractor may not have handed us wheat directly, but they have no doubt allowed for the production of much more food than any individual farmer in history. What is the value provided by an artist, though? I would argue that art serves much the same purpose that education does; namely, shaping one’s mind to think in a different way. The opportunity cost of an artist is that their time and effort could have been dedicated to the preexisting fields of work, to directly help others in the present. Thus, the question of whether art is necessary reduces to the question of:\n",
    "content": " A-t-on besoin d\u0026rsquo;artistes ?\n(Translated to English) Do we need artists?\nTaken from the art notion section of the 1996-2025 Philo Bac prompts\nOne might say that they are not necessary, because they don\u0026rsquo;t directly contribute to creating more food and water and all of the other bare essentials for life. Ask a starving man if he needs artists and he would say no, he needs more farmers. This is, however, quite a reductionist perspective on the human experience. One could make the same argument with respect to an accountant, or a scientist, or a software engineer. In fact, much of the advancement in our world has come because of these folks, who interface with these abstractions over our basic necessities. The inventor of the tractor may not have handed us wheat directly, but they have no doubt allowed for the production of much more food than any individual farmer in history. What is the value provided by an artist, though? I would argue that art serves much the same purpose that education does; namely, shaping one\u0026rsquo;s mind to think in a different way. The opportunity cost of an artist is that their time and effort could have been dedicated to the preexisting fields of work, to directly help others in the present. Thus, the question of whether art is necessary reduces to the question of:\nProblematique: Are we, as a society, limited by execution on preexisting ideas and fields, or by exploration of different, new ideas and fields?\n"
  },
  {
    "title": "Becoming better at philosophy",
    "url": "/posts/becoming-better-at-philosophy.html",
    "date": "2026-06-03",
    "summary": "Hey guys! I saw a post a few days ago on X about how the French write these big philosophy essays when they graduate, and I was like “Wow, that must be scary”, and then I thought “Hey, there’s no way the French are all smarter than me, why can’t I do that”, and so, I have decided that I will practice writing French-style dissertations. A big thing about these dissertations is that it’s not just talking about a theme, it’s responding to a question. According to Claude and Assistance Scolaire Personnalisee1, there’s a few different parts to a dissertation, namely:\n",
    "content": "Hey guys! I saw a post a few days ago on X about how the French write these big philosophy essays when they graduate, and I was like \u0026ldquo;Wow, that must be scary\u0026rdquo;, and then I thought \u0026ldquo;Hey, there\u0026rsquo;s no way the French are all smarter than me, why can\u0026rsquo;t I do that\u0026rdquo;, and so, I have decided that I will practice writing French-style dissertations. A big thing about these dissertations is that it\u0026rsquo;s not just talking about a theme, it\u0026rsquo;s responding to a question. According to Claude and Assistance Scolaire Personnalisee1, there\u0026rsquo;s a few different parts to a dissertation, namely:\nIntroduction, Development, Conclusion. The introduction serves to present the tension in a question and \u0026ldquo;state that tension as a precise question\u0026rdquo; (taken from claude). To practice this, I had Claude give me a prompt, namely \u0026ldquo;Is observing enough to know?\u0026rdquo; This was my response (I used around 10-15 minutes to write this): The obvious answer is yes: to know something is to know that it exists, or is true, and observing something tells you that a thing exists. However, this is not the full picture, as we almost never have the full picture. Consider the sun. From initial observation, it seems obvious that it is moving, and that the Earth is still. However, we know this not to be the case; in fact, it is the Earth\u0026rsquo;s rotation that makes it seem like the sun is moving with respect to a certain point. This seems like a mark against observation as knowing, but it is, in fact, not: the reason we know that the Earth rotates, is by even more observation. Observation in the limit is knowledge, however we can never know when we have exhausted the supply of observations to make.\nProblematique: How much observation is required to say one truly knows something?\nClaude pointed out a few flaws, the biggest one being that I stated a different question from the one asked and I resolved the tension in the introduction (\u0026ldquo;Observation in the limit is knowledge\u0026rdquo;). My goal for the next four weeks is to use 15-30 minutes every day to practice this. This is the plan stolen from Claude:\nWeek 1 — problématique only. One bac prompt/day. Write just the problematization paragraph (~15 min), then self-grade on the rubric below (~5 min). Goal: stop resolving early; find the categorical tension. Week 2 — problématique + three-part plan skeleton (one line justifying each part). Tests whether the tension you opened actually generates a progressive plan. Week 3 — write one full partie with a real reference/example. This is where your knowledge gap bites, so pair each day with one Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on that prompt\u0026rsquo;s central notion — read it after drafting, to see what you missed. Week 4 — one full dissertation (weekend), and re-attempt a Week-1 prompt cold. The re-attempt is the point: it tells you whether the corrected move became automatic or you just understood it once. And gave me the following resources to read:\nPrompt supply: https://pedagogie.ac-montpellier.fr/recueils-des-sujets-de-philo-du-bac More prompts: https://www.sujetdebac.fr/annales/philosophie/ Worked examples: https://www.annabac.com/annales-terminale-generale-philosophie Concepts: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. I will be posting these here on this blog. If you have any comments on my writing, please reach out to me at krishna@amitav.net; I crave criticism.\nFor various reasons, I know how to read French, I do not know of any similar resources that are not in French, but I\u0026rsquo;m sure that there do exist some.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n"
  },
  {
    "title": "2026-06-01 Retrospective",
    "url": "/posts/2026-06-01-retrospective.html",
    "date": "2026-06-02",
    "summary": "The year is over halfway over! That is sad. To the best of my knowledge, I have not accomplished much yet, mainly just finishing my paper and grant application to emergent ventures. I have also done some school work I believe. Hopefully after another 6 months, there will be less guessing because I will have these entries!\n",
    "content": "The year is over halfway over! That is sad. To the best of my knowledge, I have not accomplished much yet, mainly just finishing my paper and grant application to emergent ventures. I have also done some school work I believe. Hopefully after another 6 months, there will be less guessing because I will have these entries!\n"
  },
  {
    "title": "2026-05-20 Retrospective",
    "url": "/posts/2026-05-20-retrospective.html",
    "date": "2026-05-21",
    "summary": "Hello! My name is Amitav!\nToday I did little work. This is bad. I read a lot of random things. I practiced competitive programming, completing question 2 from the 2011 CCC Senior division and getting stuck on question 4 before spending some time learning about max flow graphs, though tomorrow I must continue learning about them further. I finished listening to David Senra’s podcast on Claude Shannon, and began listening to his podcast on Phil Knight (Nike man). In addition, I began listening to a podcast from Machine Learning Street Talk with Llion Jones and Luke Darlow on a stagnating machine learning research landscape. They also discussed their own model, Continuous Thought Machines, though I don’t have too many thoughts on it as I didn’t read the paper in much detail. I completed none of the tasks I set out for myself yesterday. It’s also late. One thing I will try for tomorrow is restricting the set of media I am allowed to consume. In particular, tomorrow I will only consume my work Slack, work email, school email, school brightspace page, and “The Death of Ivan Ilyich”, along with my music. Another thing I began tracking today was how much profanity I used, which came to 140, +/- 10-15. That includes also times I had profane thoughts, with the number of times I spoke what I consider curse words probably in the single digits. I am attempting to cut down my profanity usage as it’s unprofessional and I would not like to accidentally curse in front of coworkers. My goal by next Monday is to bring that number down to at most 70/day, with at most one spoken instance per day. I believe this may not be ambitious enough, as I suspect beginning tracking caused me to curse more out of awareness of my tracking. My tasks for tomorrow are:\n",
    "content": "Hello! My name is Amitav!\nToday I did little work. This is bad. I read a lot of random things. I practiced competitive programming, completing question 2 from the 2011 CCC Senior division and getting stuck on question 4 before spending some time learning about max flow graphs, though tomorrow I must continue learning about them further. I finished listening to David Senra\u0026rsquo;s podcast on Claude Shannon, and began listening to his podcast on Phil Knight (Nike man). In addition, I began listening to a podcast from Machine Learning Street Talk with Llion Jones and Luke Darlow on a stagnating machine learning research landscape. They also discussed their own model, Continuous Thought Machines, though I don\u0026rsquo;t have too many thoughts on it as I didn\u0026rsquo;t read the paper in much detail. I completed none of the tasks I set out for myself yesterday. It\u0026rsquo;s also late. One thing I will try for tomorrow is restricting the set of media I am allowed to consume. In particular, tomorrow I will only consume my work Slack, work email, school email, school brightspace page, and \u0026ldquo;The Death of Ivan Ilyich\u0026rdquo;, along with my music. Another thing I began tracking today was how much profanity I used, which came to 140, +/- 10-15. That includes also times I had profane thoughts, with the number of times I spoke what I consider curse words probably in the single digits. I am attempting to cut down my profanity usage as it\u0026rsquo;s unprofessional and I would not like to accidentally curse in front of coworkers. My goal by next Monday is to bring that number down to at most 70/day, with at most one spoken instance per day. I believe this may not be ambitious enough, as I suspect beginning tracking caused me to curse more out of awareness of my tracking. My tasks for tomorrow are:\nComplete project demo for 8090 (URGENT) Start longer running experiments for my QSD paper to allow the models to train to convergence Modify hyperparameters to be an unreasonable number of epochs (\u0026gt;10000) with early stopping Rent out two CPU pods Generate the 5 qubit and 8 qubit dataset, one on each pod Rent out four pods on RunPod, SCP each dataset to two of the pods SCP over the relevant models to each pod Begin training the models "
  },
  {
    "title": "Emergent Ventures Application: Neural Networks for Quantum Denoising",
    "url": "/posts/emergent-ventures-application.html",
    "date": "2026-05-21",
    "summary": "I recently applied to Emergent Ventures for funding to continue my research on using neural networks to fix broken quantum measurements. Below is my full application.\nDescribe your proposal in a tweet I’m using neural networks to fix broken quantum measurements. My work scaled prior results from 5 to 8 qubits, but I want to attack a bottleneck when scaling up the size of the models themselves with new representations.\nAbout me Quantum computers could transform drug discovery, materials science, epilepsy treatment, and many other fields that require high-fidelity simulations of the physical world. Their outputs are currently destroyed by noise, so I’m training neural networks to mend them. I’m Amitav, I’m 14, and I build things before I know how to build them. I’m also the youngest engineer at 8090 Solutions, Chamath’s company, where I make their software development platform more autonomous.\n",
    "content": "I recently applied to Emergent Ventures for funding to continue my research on using neural networks to fix broken quantum measurements. Below is my full application.\nDescribe your proposal in a tweet I\u0026rsquo;m using neural networks to fix broken quantum measurements. My work scaled prior results from 5 to 8 qubits, but I want to attack a bottleneck when scaling up the size of the models themselves with new representations.\nAbout me Quantum computers could transform drug discovery, materials science, epilepsy treatment, and many other fields that require high-fidelity simulations of the physical world. Their outputs are currently destroyed by noise, so I\u0026rsquo;m training neural networks to mend them. I\u0026rsquo;m Amitav, I\u0026rsquo;m 14, and I build things before I know how to build them. I\u0026rsquo;m also the youngest engineer at 8090 Solutions, Chamath\u0026rsquo;s company, where I make their software development platform more autonomous.\nIn seventh grade, I started a tutoring business, going door to door to sell it, with a blog about STEM topics as a promotional tool. I would go to the Wikipedia page for a topic, skip to the sources, and get to work, trying to find any interesting bits and then doing more research to verify those claims. I would post them on Reddit, and while the comments weren\u0026rsquo;t always nice, they were almost always helpful. I had a really good teacher, but the Redditors were much more honest and had much higher standards for me, which led to me having higher standards for myself. As the semester was starting to wrap up, I started working on another project, a stock email automation. My dad does trading, and I had helped him in the past with spreadsheets and whatnot, but because he had a dayjob he couldn\u0026rsquo;t check every day to see which stocks were up, which were down, which were sideways, etc. So, I built my first real Python project, that would pull a stock\u0026rsquo;s price against its 52-week high or low, generated buy/sell signals based on that, doing that for every stock on my dad\u0026rsquo;s watchlist, and then send him an email with the signals. I ended up posting it on Reddit, which got some traction, around 70 signups, and one person who DMed me thanking me because my service had made them a bunch of money! I ran it until around October of grade 9 before shutting it down due to the server costs. I skipped eighth grade and joined TKS in ninth grade, a program focused on emerging technology, which is where I started going deeper into programming and where I later began my quantum denoising research.\nLast summer I started an unpaid internship at a company, but after a few weeks they stopped replying to my emails. My brother and I both did swimming, and one thing he used to drill into me was that the clock doesn\u0026rsquo;t care. The clock doesn\u0026rsquo;t care if you\u0026rsquo;re younger or if you\u0026rsquo;re unsure about the requirements or if you were trying your best, the clock only cares about the value you provide. So, I started trying to build an LLM in C++, the hardest project I could think of at the time, to become more valuable. Every morning I would bike 10 kilometres to a library in the town over that had longer hours, I would work there from 10.00 until 18.00 (with lunch in between), bike back home, and then work from 19.00 to 23.00. When I would look at reference material, I would often not even be able to parse the notation, let alone understand the content, but after many hours and days of tutoring from ChatGPT, I had enough mathematical knowledge to understand the mechanisms by which the neural network would learn. After weeks of this, I had still not built a full LLM, which was my original goal. I\u0026rsquo;d only built a neural network.\nI wrote up the project as a blog series on my personal site. My brother shared it with his CTO at 8090, who asked \u0026ldquo;why isn\u0026rsquo;t this guy working for us yet?\u0026rdquo; I interviewed and got hired. This January, to decompress from spending all of winter break staying up supervising my experiments, I reimplemented my neural network in Verilog, a hardware description language, to learn more about the functioning of a neural network at each timestep.\nWhat\u0026rsquo;s a mainstream view you absolutely agree with? I agree that, in general, science should be publicly funded. Most fields that now receive significant amounts of private funding like semiconductors and AI were at one point funded primarily by the public. Eventually, if a field has potential, the industry will swoop in to fund it, but for that cold start period public funding is necessary. It\u0026rsquo;s tempting to envision a model in which the private sector takes these kinds of bets, but one thing that I\u0026rsquo;ve taken away from having a few conversations with researchers in the industry is that to justify their funding they need to demonstrate how they\u0026rsquo;re making money for the business. For deep learning, the time from the field getting started to it making money for people was undoubtedly at least a few decades. This sort of thing would not be sustainable in the industry, because often times whole industries will grow and die within that time. Academic institutions are quite unique in that way, in that I\u0026rsquo;m confident that the University of Toronto will be there when I die.\nAbout my idea My research started as a group project for TKS where we were tasked to use quantum for real world impact. Our initial idea was to find a way to use quantum sensors for detecting cancer, however this was impractical due to quantum noise, which would creep into the sensors and make their measurements gibberish. After doing some research, I came across an interesting piece by Karan Kendre about using machine learning for quantum noise reduction of 5-qubit quantum computers (arXiv 2509.16242). After reading it though, I was left with many questions: is there anything special about CNNs for this task, could we scale up this work to larger qubit counts, could we train individual models for each noise type and do some sort of dynamic routing. Sadly, after a relatively extensive lit review, I had still come across very little. As far as I can tell, the only other paper tackling this specific task of mapping density matrix to density matrix was by Morgillo et al. (arXiv 2309.11949) on 2 and 3 qubit states. If I wanted these questions to be answered, I would have to answer them. So, I got to work.\nIn the remainder of the challenge, I implemented a first attempt of a transformer on this task, got some promising results, and then continued the research independently. I then began experimenting with different sizes and architectures, trying to improve performance. Eventually over winter break I tried scaling up to 8 qubits, but I encountered model collapse, where the models began outputting results that were worse than the input. After doing some diagnostics on the input data, the conclusion I came to was that they were scaled down due to the noise, which suppressed the network\u0026rsquo;s learning. By reversing this squeezing effect, I was able to get much better results.\nIn my research, I also came across two promising representations that I did not have time nor compute to pursue. They were the Pauli basis and the Cholesky decomposed versions of the states. The way I represented them during my main experiments was with density matrices. At a high level, the diagonal terms of a density matrix tell you the probability of the circuit being in that state, while the off-diagonals tell you the relationships between the different states.\nThe Pauli basis is an alternative way of representing a quantum state. It consists of four operators: I, X, Y, Z. At a high level, X and Y are used to measure the way in which the different components of the state interfere and evolve over time, while Z tells you whether it will be 0 or 1. I is the identity operator, and it does nothing. You can basically compose these operators to entirely represent the state. We tried using the pauli basis, and it worked well, for unknown reasons. Our idea is to use this representation to break through the wall we hit for performance.\nWe also experimented with cholesky decomposition, where we basically just chop off ~half of the matrix since the matrix is symmetrical, so we don\u0026rsquo;t lose any info. Theoretically you lose no information, so in an ideal case we would get the same or better performance with less memory usage, but in practice we observed that non-linearities in the evaluation made it hard for the models to learn. I believe there is low-hanging fruit in the tokenization that could allow this technique to work well.\nMorgillo et al. demonstrated that feed-forward neural networks can classify states by noise type, which suggests a mixture-of-experts approach: train a classifier to identify the noise channel, then route to a specialist model for that channel, so each expert can focus on one type of noise rather than all of them. I would also like to explore scaling to 10 qubits. This is where costs become serious. At 10 qubits, 100,000 circuits would produce roughly 1.6 TiB of data. The compute is also expensive, my rough estimate is 5-7 days per experiment on the hardware I\u0026rsquo;ve been using, which comes to $200-400 per experiment. I\u0026rsquo;m actively researching ways to reduce this: train-time dataset generation instead of storing everything to disk, exploiting hermiticity to cut storage in half, and rethinking the tokenization.\nMy research plan:\n3 weeks on the Pauli basis representation (10-15 experiments, ~$300-400) 4 weeks on Cholesky decomposed inputs (15-20 experiments, ~$700-800) 2 weeks on the mixture-of-experts approach (5-10 experiments, ~$200-350) 1 week on standardized evaluations comparing my approaches against prior work (~$30-40) Exploratory 10-qubit experiments, budget dependent on optimization progress (~$2,000-3,000) If accepted to IEEE qCCL in Aalborg, Denmark, conference travel (~$1,700) Total ask: ~$7,000-8,000. If the conference doesn\u0026rsquo;t happen, those funds go to additional compute.\nNote: This was my application to Emergent Ventures, a grant program run by Tyler Cowen at George Mason University. I applied on March 21, 2026.\n"
  },
  {
    "title": "Why is some philosophy so math-ish?",
    "url": "/posts/why-is-some-philosophy-so-math-ish.html",
    "date": "2026-05-20",
    "summary": "Hello! Quick throwaway post here. I was reading Normative Uncertainty by William MacAskill(Effective Altruism man) when I was flashbanged by the math. After some chatting with claude, apparently this is what makes analytic philosophy notable, as opposed to continental philosophy which is focused on society, culture, etc. What they don’t learn about apparently is analysis, which unlike logic, deals with continuous things.\n",
    "content": "Hello! Quick throwaway post here. I was reading Normative Uncertainty by William MacAskill(Effective Altruism man) when I was flashbanged by the math. After some chatting with claude, apparently this is what makes analytic philosophy notable, as opposed to continental philosophy which is focused on society, culture, etc. What they don\u0026rsquo;t learn about apparently is analysis, which unlike logic, deals with continuous things.\n"
  },
  {
    "title": "Now",
    "url": "/posts/now.html",
    "date": "2026-05-20",
    "summary": "(This is a now page, and if you have your own site, you should make one too.)\n(Last updated: 2026-05-20)\nRight now I’m an intern member of technical staff at 8090 Solutions, I’ve been accepted to present a poster at IEEE qCCL 2026, so I’m currently revising my final paper and creating my poster, On the side I’m trying to become a more skilled researcher, whatever that means. ",
    "content": "(This is a now page, and if you have your own site, you should make one too.)\n(Last updated: 2026-05-20)\nRight now I\u0026rsquo;m an intern member of technical staff at 8090 Solutions, I\u0026rsquo;ve been accepted to present a poster at IEEE qCCL 2026, so I\u0026rsquo;m currently revising my final paper and creating my poster, On the side I\u0026rsquo;m trying to become a more skilled researcher, whatever that means. "
  },
  {
    "title": "2026-05-19 Retrospective",
    "url": "/posts/2026-05-19-retrospective.html",
    "date": "2026-05-20",
    "summary": "Hello! My name is Amitav! A good summary of today is that I did some work that then was invalidated, so I’m feeling a bit deflated. I did quite a bit of work for 8090, but wasted quite a bit of time on setting up some infrastructure that was then nullified when my boss and I decided that it would make more sense for the system I’m working with to work with lighter-weight tools that would allow me to iterate faster as the system I’m working on will likely never see absurd levels of traffic. That’s good for future Amitav, however it is somewhat saddening for current Amitav as quite a bit of work will be redone, but it is what it is I suppose. In addition to that, today I read this article which was interesting (it was shared with me yesterday and I did read it yesterday, but did not share it on this blog). There are a couple of action items there that I will not act on right now due to greater priorities, but that I defer instead to the 28th (the day after final paper submissions are due for qCCL). In particular, I lack mathematical maturity, which is bad and must be solved. Another interesting thing I read today was this slideshow by my boss from a few years ago (not recommended to me by him, found it on my own), though I lack a lot of prerequisites in distributed systems and so it’s mostly gibberish to me. One thing I’d like to do eventually is learn more about distributed systems. Today, I also listened to the podcast by David Senra on Claude Shannon. Overall it was interesting, I think my biggest takeaway is that you shouldn’t take things too seriously. Now, back to Amitav, the tasks I set out for myself yesterday are as follows:\n",
    "content": "Hello! My name is Amitav! A good summary of today is that I did some work that then was invalidated, so I\u0026rsquo;m feeling a bit deflated. I did quite a bit of work for 8090, but wasted quite a bit of time on setting up some infrastructure that was then nullified when my boss and I decided that it would make more sense for the system I\u0026rsquo;m working with to work with lighter-weight tools that would allow me to iterate faster as the system I\u0026rsquo;m working on will likely never see absurd levels of traffic. That\u0026rsquo;s good for future Amitav, however it is somewhat saddening for current Amitav as quite a bit of work will be redone, but it is what it is I suppose. In addition to that, today I read this article which was interesting (it was shared with me yesterday and I did read it yesterday, but did not share it on this blog). There are a couple of action items there that I will not act on right now due to greater priorities, but that I defer instead to the 28th (the day after final paper submissions are due for qCCL). In particular, I lack mathematical maturity, which is bad and must be solved. Another interesting thing I read today was this slideshow by my boss from a few years ago (not recommended to me by him, found it on my own), though I lack a lot of prerequisites in distributed systems and so it\u0026rsquo;s mostly gibberish to me. One thing I\u0026rsquo;d like to do eventually is learn more about distributed systems. Today, I also listened to the podcast by David Senra on Claude Shannon. Overall it was interesting, I think my biggest takeaway is that you shouldn\u0026rsquo;t take things too seriously. Now, back to Amitav, the tasks I set out for myself yesterday are as follows:\nSubmit overdue photography assignment Complete project demo for 8090 (URGENT) Start longer running experiments for my QSD paper to allow the models to train to convergence The tasks I have for tomorrow are: Complete project demo for 8090 (URGENT) Start longer running experiments for my QSD paper to allow the models to train to convergence Modify hyperparameters to be an unreasonable number of epochs (\u0026gt;10000) with early stopping Rent out two CPU pods Generate the 5 qubit and 8 qubit dataset, one on each pod Rent out four pods on RunPod, SCP each dataset to two of the pods SCP over the relevant models to each pod Begin training the models That\u0026rsquo;s all from me! Have a great day :^) "
  },
  {
    "title": "Meta surveils their own employees",
    "url": "/posts/meta-surveils-their-own-employees.html",
    "date": "2026-05-19",
    "summary": "Via slashdot. The news of the layoffs themselves aren’t that interesting, but the most interesting part was the news about them recording their employees to train their models. There’s more about this here, overall I think while I wouldn’t like to work somewhere where I’d be recorded for the entire day, for the purposes of replacing me no less, it is in interesting approach to gathering data. Overall though it feels that Meta is losing the AI race. Despite Llama being one of the first open-weight LLMs to gain a lot of mindshare, they’ve sort of stagnated.\n",
    "content": "Via slashdot. The news of the layoffs themselves aren\u0026rsquo;t that interesting, but the most interesting part was the news about them recording their employees to train their models. There\u0026rsquo;s more about this here, overall I think while I wouldn\u0026rsquo;t like to work somewhere where I\u0026rsquo;d be recorded for the entire day, for the purposes of replacing me no less, it is in interesting approach to gathering data. Overall though it feels that Meta is losing the AI race. Despite Llama being one of the first open-weight LLMs to gain a lot of mindshare, they\u0026rsquo;ve sort of stagnated.\n"
  },
  {
    "title": "2026-05-17 and 2026-05-18 Daily Update",
    "url": "/posts/2026-05-17-and-2026-05-18-daily-update.html",
    "date": "2026-05-19",
    "summary": "Hello, I am Amitav! This is actually my daily update to be first posted on my personal website, amitav.net, before being syndicated to substack (see this). The biggest reason for this is that I have an admin portal now on my website, which gives me a snazzy interface with which to write my posts. You can see this for yourself here, though I will warn you that this is password restricted so that I don’t get random folks posting stuff on my website. Anyways, back to the task at hand, my daily update(s)!\n",
    "content": "Hello, I am Amitav! This is actually my daily update to be first posted on my personal website, amitav.net, before being syndicated to substack (see this). The biggest reason for this is that I have an admin portal now on my website, which gives me a snazzy interface with which to write my posts. You can see this for yourself here, though I will warn you that this is password restricted so that I don\u0026rsquo;t get random folks posting stuff on my website. Anyways, back to the task at hand, my daily update(s)!\n2026-05-17 This was a relatively fun day. It was my birthday, I turned 15 years old. I will probably write a longer reflection sometime soon, but overall it was fun, had lots of chicken and lots of cake. We had family friends visiting in the morning and then in the evening we visited some family friends, one of whom had the same birthday as me. I also had a meeting with a venture capital firm about potentially doing some engineering work for them that I was nervous about, but it actually went pretty well. I also read around 10 pages of \u0026ldquo;The Death of Ivan Ilyich\u0026rdquo;.\n2026-05-18 This day went not so great. I completed a ticket for 8090, but spent the rest of the day doomscrolling. I did not work out or read. I did write though (what I\u0026rsquo;m currently writing) so I suppose it wasn\u0026rsquo;t a complete waste. Priorities for tomorrow:\nComplete project demo for 8090 (URGENT) Start longer running experiments for my QSD paper to allow the models to triain to convergence Submit overdue photography assignemnt That\u0026rsquo;s all from me! I am Amitav!\n"
  },
  {
    "title": "My first post from the admin portal",
    "url": "/posts/my-first-post-from-the-admin-portal.html",
    "date": "2026-05-17",
    "summary": "Hello! This is my first admin portal post, my previous posts have been uploaded manually using scp. The admin portal was created by my openclaw and allows me to write posts in a nice interface and is password protected.\n",
    "content": "Hello! This is my first admin portal post, my previous posts have been uploaded manually using scp. The admin portal was created by my openclaw and allows me to write posts in a nice interface and is password protected.\n"
  },
  {
    "title": "Rotary Exchange Essay",
    "url": "/posts/rotary-exchange-essay.html",
    "date": "2025-09-15",
    "summary": "The disconnect between Canada’s intellectual strength and its lack of private innovation fascinates and concerns me. Canada has produced pioneers like Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, the Godfathers of AI, and innovations like the Canadarm and CANDU reactor. Yet few of these breakthroughs translate to jobs and prosperity here at home. Research is essential, but you can’t build an economy on research alone: research proposes value, while business creates value.\n",
    "content": "The disconnect between Canada\u0026rsquo;s intellectual strength and its lack of private innovation fascinates and concerns me. Canada has produced pioneers like Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, the Godfathers of AI, and innovations like the Canadarm and CANDU reactor. Yet few of these breakthroughs translate to jobs and prosperity here at home. Research is essential, but you can\u0026rsquo;t build an economy on research alone: research proposes value, while business creates value.\nI want to understand what drives other countries\u0026rsquo; technology ecosystems, and how we can bring it back to Canada. The Rotary Exchange program would allow me to learn from the greatest innovators in the world. I\u0026rsquo;ve always loved digging deep and understanding how things work. When I was younger, I would take apart pens and put them back together at family gatherings while my parents talked with their friends. I would always stare at the individual parts for a few minutes until I understood how everything pushed and pulled, and then I\u0026rsquo;d spend minutes just opening and closing the pen again and again, watching it do everything I had expected it to do, and nothing more. There were no invisible parts. Afterwards, I would try taking out certain parts and seeing how that affected the operation of the pen. For me, the greatest virtue is in the application, however, I also believe that understanding is crucial to application. I don\u0026rsquo;t believe that progress comes from invisible forces; it comes from those who understand their systems enough to improve them. I want to study how culture, policy, and education interact in foreign countries to grow (or shrink) their technology industries, and how we can bring these things back home.\nRotary\u0026rsquo;s motto, Service Above Self, resonates deeply with me. My mother often told me stories of my grandfather, a quality assurance engineer in a factory that produced tractors, who worked even on religious holidays while the rest of the family celebrated. For him, his work was his worship, which is a lesson I take forward with me, even today.\nI believe that we can — and must — be more ambitious with our service. Too often, we only serve the Canadians of today; I want to serve the Canadians of tomorrow. Representing Canada abroad would be both an honour and a responsibility. I want to show the world that Canada has not stagnated. Through Rotary, I hope not just to bring home good ideas, but to put those ideas into practice.\n— Amitav Krishna\nThe preceding was an essay I wrote for my Rotary Youth Exchange application. I didn\u0026rsquo;t end up making it past the interview. I wasn\u0026rsquo;t really a good fit, the program was mostly cultural as for better or for worse I am not a very cultured person. My friend, George-Owen, did get in though, and will (probably) be going to Japan, which is very exciting!\n"
  },
  {
    "title": "A Simpler Way to Visualize Higher Dimensions",
    "url": "/posts/visualizing-higher-dimensions.html",
    "date": "2025-02-13",
    "summary": "I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how one teaches the concepts of functions that operate at higher-dimensions, like a function that takes two inputs and returns two outputs. This is hard, because most of our…\nNote: This post is a work in progress.\n",
    "content": "I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking a lot lately about how one teaches the concepts of functions that operate at higher-dimensions, like a function that takes two inputs and returns two outputs. This is hard, because most of our\u0026hellip;\nNote: This post is a work in progress.\n"
  },
  {
    "title": "How to Use This Blog Efficiently",
    "url": "/posts/how-to-use-this-blog.html",
    "date": "2024-02-01",
    "summary": "Hello! This page is on the rules of engagement on this website.\n“I want to get more content from you, but I’m worried I’ll forget about your existence” Has this ever happened to you? We have a revolutionary new technology to ease your woes: RSS.\nI use an RSS reader for most of my browsing, and I would highly recommend you do as well! The one I use is Bubo Reader, which I use because it’s extremely simple, and can be deployed on your own server. You can also deploy it on Netlify, as seen in this demo.\n",
    "content": "Hello! This page is on the rules of engagement on this website.\n\u0026ldquo;I want to get more content from you, but I\u0026rsquo;m worried I\u0026rsquo;ll forget about your existence\u0026rdquo; Has this ever happened to you? We have a revolutionary new technology to ease your woes: RSS.\nI use an RSS reader for most of my browsing, and I would highly recommend you do as well! The one I use is Bubo Reader, which I use because it\u0026rsquo;s extremely simple, and can be deployed on your own server. You can also deploy it on Netlify, as seen in this demo.\nNetlify\u0026rsquo;s free plan gives us 300 credits. Here\u0026rsquo;s the credit breakdown:\nFeature Credit Usage Description Production deploys 15 Deploying to production Bandwidth 10 credits per GB Data sent to the internet Web requests 3 credits per 10,000 Page views, API calls, etc Using some back-of-the-envelope math: assuming under 10,000 requests per month and under 1GB of bandwidth, that leaves us with 20 production deploys. That\u0026rsquo;s enough for a reload every 36 hours. I would recommend using branch deploys instead — unlimited deploys means you can reload your reader as often as you\u0026rsquo;d like!\nTL;DR: Use Bubo. If that seems like a hassle, the creator of this blog environment, Karl Voit, recommends NewsBlur. The most reliable feed to use would be the links feed in the sidebar.\n2026-06-02 update: This was from when I was using lazyblorg. For various reasons I no longer recall I shifted off of this to Hugo some months ago. I am open to returning to it in the future as I like the styling but Hugo is simpler, and I don\u0026rsquo;t want to change up the tooling until I have at least 100 posts out to avoid yak-shaving. Also, I no longer use an RSS reader personally.\n"
  },
  {
    "title": "Building Matrices in C++",
    "url": "/posts/building-matrices-in-cpp.html",
    "date": "2024-01-18",
    "summary": "What the hell is a matrix, anyways? When I say matrix, you probably don’t have a great idea of what a matrix actually is, and that’s what I aim to solve.\nWhat the hell is a vector, really? This section draws heavily on the textbook Linear Algebra Done Right by Sheldon Axler\nIn the previous issue I didn’t go that deeply into the mathematical definition behind a vector. Sadly, before we can truly understand what a matrix is, we must first understand what a vector is.\n",
    "content": "What the hell is a matrix, anyways? When I say matrix, you probably don\u0026rsquo;t have a great idea of what a matrix actually is, and that\u0026rsquo;s what I aim to solve.\nWhat the hell is a vector, really? This section draws heavily on the textbook Linear Algebra Done Right by Sheldon Axler\nIn the previous issue I didn\u0026rsquo;t go that deeply into the mathematical definition behind a vector. Sadly, before we can truly understand what a matrix is, we must first understand what a vector is.\nIn grade school, you should have learned about $\\mathbb{Q}$, the rational numbers, $\\mathbb{Z}$, the integers, and most importantly for this discussion, $\\mathbb{R}$, the set of all real numbers. The set of the real numbers ($\\mathbb{R}$) include the rational numbers and the irrational numbers. It does not include what we call imaginary numbers: numbers that include an imaginary part, $i$, the imaginary unit, which is defined as the $\\sqrt{-1}$. A complex number is an ordered pair $(a, b)$, where $a, b \\in \\mathbb{R}$, and written as $a + bi$. We denote the set of all complex numbers with $\\mathbb{C}$. We define $\\mathbb{F}$ as either $\\mathbb{R}$ or $\\mathbb{C}$.\nNote: This post is a work in progress — full matrix implementation coming soon.\n"
  },
  {
    "title": "Building Vectors in C++",
    "url": "/posts/building-vectors-in-cpp.html",
    "date": "2024-01-15",
    "summary": "Hello! This is part 3 in a TBD part series on creating an LLM from scratch! You can see part 2, creating lists, here, and part 4, creating matrices, here.\nWhat is a vector? For our purposes, a vector is an ordered list of numbers. Here’s an example of a 2-dimensional vector:\n[5, 7] And here’s an example of a 5-dimensional vector:\n[3.5, 4, 2, 1.2, 943.89] We use multi-dimensional vectors to represent things like words and sentences and paragraphs, because the hope is that each vector will allow us to encode multiple independent aspects of a token at once. At a high-level, we’re guessing that the vector will begin to associate different numbers with different attributes: maybe we want the first number to roughly correlate to how dog-like the word is, the second number to correlate to royalty, the third number to correlate with age, etc. For more information, see this paper on word representations in vector space.\n",
    "content": "Hello! This is part 3 in a TBD part series on creating an LLM from scratch! You can see part 2, creating lists, here, and part 4, creating matrices, here.\nWhat is a vector? For our purposes, a vector is an ordered list of numbers. Here\u0026rsquo;s an example of a 2-dimensional vector:\n[5, 7] And here\u0026rsquo;s an example of a 5-dimensional vector:\n[3.5, 4, 2, 1.2, 943.89] We use multi-dimensional vectors to represent things like words and sentences and paragraphs, because the hope is that each vector will allow us to encode multiple independent aspects of a token at once. At a high-level, we\u0026rsquo;re guessing that the vector will begin to associate different numbers with different attributes: maybe we want the first number to roughly correlate to how dog-like the word is, the second number to correlate to royalty, the third number to correlate with age, etc. For more information, see this paper on word representations in vector space.\nInitial Implementation Let\u0026rsquo;s start with a basic vector using our list structure:\n#include \u0026lt;iostream\u0026gt; #include \u0026lt;stdexcept\u0026gt; template \u0026lt;typename T\u0026gt; class MyList { // ... list implementation from previous post }; int main() { MyList\u0026lt;float\u0026gt; vector; vector.push(10); vector.push(20); for (int i = 0; i \u0026lt; vector.size(); i++) { std::cout \u0026lt;\u0026lt; vector[i] \u0026lt;\u0026lt; std::endl; } return 0; } Math Vector Class Now let\u0026rsquo;s add the mathematical operations we need:\n#include \u0026lt;stdexcept\u0026gt; class mathVector : public MyList\u0026lt;float\u0026gt; { public: using MyList\u0026lt;float\u0026gt;::MyList; explicit mathVector(int n) { for (int i = 0; i \u0026lt; n; i++) {push(0.0f);} } friend std::ostream\u0026amp; operator\u0026lt;\u0026lt;(std::ostream\u0026amp; os, const mathVector\u0026amp; vec) { os \u0026lt;\u0026lt; \u0026#34;[\u0026#34;; for (int i = 0; i \u0026lt; vec.size(); i++) { os \u0026lt;\u0026lt; vec[i]; if (i != vec.size() - 1) os \u0026lt;\u0026lt; \u0026#34;, \u0026#34;; } os \u0026lt;\u0026lt; \u0026#34;]\u0026#34;; return os; } void scalarMultiplication(float scalar) { for (int i = 0; i \u0026lt; size(); i++) { (*this)[i] *= scalar; } } mathVector operator+(const mathVector\u0026amp; other) const { if (size() != other.size()) { throw std::invalid_argument(\u0026#34;Vectors must be of the same dimension\u0026#34;); } mathVector result; result.reserve(size()); for (int i = 0; i \u0026lt; size(); i++) { result.push((*this)[i] + other[i]); } return result; } mathVector operator-(const mathVector\u0026amp; other) const { if (size() != other.size()) { throw std::invalid_argument(\u0026#34;Vectors must be of the same dimension\u0026#34;); } mathVector result; result.reserve(size()); for (int i = 0; i \u0026lt; size(); i++) { result.push((*this)[i] - other[i]); } return result; } float dotProduct(const mathVector\u0026amp; other) const { if (size() != other.size()) { throw std::invalid_argument(\u0026#34;Dot product dimensions must match\u0026#34;); } float val = 0.0f; for (int i = 0; i \u0026lt; size(); i++) val += (*this)[i] * other[i]; return val; } }; The first two lines tell the compiler that this inherits from MyList. Using MyList\u0026lt;float\u0026gt;::MyList; tells the compiler that it uses all of MyList\u0026rsquo;s constructors.\nThe element-wise addition and subtraction loop through every element, add/subtract it to the corresponding element in the other vector, and return a new vector with the result. The dot product function loops through the current vector, multiplies the current item by the corresponding item in the other vector, and takes the sum of all those products.\nTesting It Out #include \u0026lt;iostream\u0026gt; int main() { mathVector vector_1; vector_1.push(10); vector_1.push(20); vector_1.push(30); std::cout \u0026lt;\u0026lt; vector_1 \u0026lt;\u0026lt; std::endl; mathVector vector_2; vector_2.push(5); vector_2.push(15); vector_2.push(25); mathVector vector_3 = vector_1 - vector_2; std::cout \u0026lt;\u0026lt; vector_3 \u0026lt;\u0026lt; std::endl; float dot_product_1 = vector_3.dotProduct(vector_1); std::cout \u0026lt;\u0026lt; dot_product_1 \u0026lt;\u0026lt; std::endl; vector_2.scalarMultiplication(2); std::cout \u0026lt;\u0026lt; vector_2; return 0; } This piece was a bit shorter, and the next piece will be implementing matrices.\nAppendix: Understanding the Dot Product The algebraic definition:\n$$\\vec{u} \\cdot \\vec{v} = \\sum_{i=1}^{|u|} u_iv_i$$\nYou can think of a summation ($\\sum$) sort of like a for loop. What this does is go through every element in vector $\\vec{u}$, multiply it by the corresponding element in vector $\\vec{v}$, and then add all of those products up.\nThere\u0026rsquo;s also a geometric definition:\n$$\\vec{a} \\cdot \\vec{b} = ||\\vec{a}||||\\vec{b}||\\cos{\\theta}$$\nFrom this we can derive the formula for cosine similarity:\n$$\\frac{\\vec{u} \\cdot \\vec{v}}{||\\vec{u}||||\\vec{v}||} = \\cos(\\theta)$$\nThis formula is useful because it allows us to compare the similarity of two vectors independently of their magnitudes, which is very useful for things like facial recognition. The cosine similarity always belongs to the interval $[-1, +1]$, with a cosine similarity of 1 indicating that two vectors point in the same direction.\n"
  },
  {
    "title": "Building Lists in C++",
    "url": "/posts/building-lists-in-cpp.html",
    "date": "2024-01-12",
    "summary": "Hello! This is part 2 in a TBD part series on creating an LLM from scratch! You can see part 1, the roadmap, here and part 3, building vectors, here.\nMaking a list The first things that pop into my head when I’m thinking about vectors and matrices are lists. A vector is just a list of numbers, and a matrix is a list of vectors. Therefore, we should start with a list and then build our way up from there. Here are the features I want out of this specific list implementation:\n",
    "content": "Hello! This is part 2 in a TBD part series on creating an LLM from scratch! You can see part 1, the roadmap, here and part 3, building vectors, here.\nMaking a list The first things that pop into my head when I\u0026rsquo;m thinking about vectors and matrices are lists. A vector is just a list of numbers, and a matrix is a list of vectors. Therefore, we should start with a list and then build our way up from there. Here are the features I want out of this specific list implementation:\nThe ability to insert items into the list, either at the end, or if a position is provided, in the provided position The ability to retrieve an item from said list using the position of said item in the list The ability to know whether or not an item is present in the list The ability to know the number of items present in the list, and the number of items it can hold The ability to clear the list (fill it with zeroes) So, let\u0026rsquo;s get cracking! Firstly, let\u0026rsquo;s define our template:\ntemplate \u0026lt;typename T\u0026gt; class MyList { protected: T* arr; int capacity; int current; public: MyList() : capacity(1), current(0) { arr = new T[capacity]; } void push(T data) { if (current == capacity) { T* temp = new T[2 * capacity]; for (int i = 0; i \u0026lt; capacity; i++) { temp[i] = arr[i]; } delete[] arr; capacity *= 2; arr = temp; } arr[current++] = data; } T\u0026amp; operator[](int index) { if (index \u0026gt;= current || index \u0026lt; 0) { throw std::out_of_range(\u0026#34;Index out of range\u0026#34;); } return arr[index]; } const T\u0026amp; operator[](int index) const { if (index \u0026gt;= current || index \u0026lt; 0) { throw std::out_of_range(\u0026#34;Index out of range\u0026#34;); } return arr[index]; } The structure of the list itself is fully defined by three things: capacity, an integer representing the number of objects the list can hold; current, an integer representing the number of objects currently held in the list; and arr, a pointer (memory address) to the first element of the list.\nThe push function appends an element to the end of the list. If there\u0026rsquo;s enough space for it in the current list (i.e., current \u0026lt; capacity) then we can just set the chunk of data after the current chunk of data to our new data. If there isn\u0026rsquo;t enough space, we first want to allocate some more space — in this case double the amount we currently have allocated — into a new list, copy over all elements, deallocate the old memory, and point arr to the new block.\nExtra Utility Functions int size() const { return current; } int getcapacity() const { return capacity; } bool operator==(const MyList\u0026amp; other) const { if (other.size() != size()) return false; for (int i = 0; i \u0026lt; size(); i++) if (not ((*this)[i] == other[i])) {return false;} return true; } bool search(const T key) const { for (int i = 0; i \u0026lt; size(); i++){ if ((*this)[i] == key) {return true;} } return false; } void pop() { if(current \u0026gt; 0) {current--;} } void clear() { current = 0; } void reserve(int new_capacity) { if (new_capacity \u0026gt; capacity) { T* temp = new T[new_capacity]; for (int i = 0; i \u0026lt; current; i++) temp[i] = arr[i]; delete[] arr; arr = temp; capacity = new_capacity; } } // Copy constructor MyList(const MyList\u0026amp; other) : capacity(other.capacity), current(other.current) { arr = new T[capacity]; for (int i = 0; i \u0026lt; current; i++) { arr[i] = other.arr[i]; } } // Copy assignment operator MyList\u0026amp; operator=(const MyList\u0026amp; other) { if (this != \u0026amp;other) { delete[] arr; capacity = other.capacity; current = other.current; arr = new T[capacity]; for (int i = 0; i \u0026lt; current; i++) arr[i] = other.arr[i]; } return *this; } // Destructor ~MyList() { delete[] arr; } Amazing! Now that we have our list structure sorted out, let\u0026rsquo;s move on to vectors.\n"
  },
  {
    "title": "Building an LLM from Scratch in C++",
    "url": "/posts/building-an-llm-from-scratch.html",
    "date": "2024-01-10",
    "summary": "This is part 1 in a TBD part series on creating an LLM from scratch! Part 2 can be found here.\nIn this document I will be talking about how I’ll be approaching this. This project is currently in progress, so for now it’ll be mostly high-level, and as I go through it I’ll update it with more detail and links to relevant articles.\nMath \u0026 Linear Algebra Foundations Lists, vectors, and matrices Randomness Neurons, Chain Rule, and Autodiff Optimization \u0026 Training Mechanics Probabilistic Language Modeling Embeddings and a (Tiny) Transformer",
    "content": "This is part 1 in a TBD part series on creating an LLM from scratch! Part 2 can be found here.\nIn this document I will be talking about how I\u0026rsquo;ll be approaching this. This project is currently in progress, so for now it\u0026rsquo;ll be mostly high-level, and as I go through it I\u0026rsquo;ll update it with more detail and links to relevant articles.\nMath \u0026amp; Linear Algebra Foundations Lists, vectors, and matrices Randomness Neurons, Chain Rule, and Autodiff Optimization \u0026amp; Training Mechanics Probabilistic Language Modeling Embeddings and a (Tiny) Transformer "
  }
]