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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 The 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: ...

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): ~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 & paperwork ...

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.