Posts

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. {{REDACTED FOR CAREERIST REASONS}} I 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. ...

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. Today 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. ...

A-t-on besoin d’artistes ? (Translated to English) Do we need artists? Taken from the art notion section of the 1996-2025 Philo Bac prompts One 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: ...

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: ...

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!

Hello! My name is Amitav! Today 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: ...

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. Describe 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. About 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. ...

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.

(This is a now page, and if you have your own site, you should make one too.) (Last updated: 2026-05-20) Right 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.

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: ...