2 years later almost to the dot (2026-05-29): still rings true

all my closest friends are progressing in their careers

• frank and sheryl are at openai. ryan chi is also at openai
• alex gu also is entering openai
• oliver ni is at cognition
• carl guo, kevin der from mh, frank's roommates are at anthropic fellows
• tanay, jeremy, daniel are at chipagents
• leo is at google
• april is entering a phd at stanford, becca is entering a phd (sure it's at warwick but it's with an amazing mentor), kales is entering a phd at harvard
• emli is at dbrx
• wtf am i doing??

i just rotted away... i feel like it's been 4 years of overwhelming shame

• shame that i didnt pick the right research groups and mentors. they all fell by the wayside, i dont know how to feel about idan and zhang-wei, they're nice people but i just feel bad.
• shame that i didn't talk to enough people and understand how the modern ai stack / ai people doing non-wrapper things works
• shame that i didn't take ai seriously and now i don't know what to do now that the scaling part i can feel the window of opportunity is closing

and how do i make myself work? i actually realized that i find this really fun once i get into it, but to start out it just feels dreadful

• i spent months languishing away in my room not working on my meng because i didn't know how to start
• the kicker is that ai assistance is so powerful that if i just engaged with it for 5 minutes it would've been better

now i rejected a tesla offer for phonic.

• i feel like this is one of the most agentic decisions and processes ive done in my life
  • and yet, i wasn't the one who reached out! it was moin who probably dm'ed half of mit on linkedin
• i'm excited. but profoundly scared

I've spent the bulk of my days in college rotting away in confusion. Confusion about thriving in classes, getting an internship, a job, a research position; the way well-adjusted people seamlessly integrate themselves into society; but also the lack of direction in planning my next steps. Some might call this "brain fog", but I think it's a slightly different sensation.

Some things have felt less blurry to me than others. Linguistics is clearly defined to me, because I felt able to visualize at once the topics I was studying and how they interacted. Our language is formed from collections of sound—the machinations of a complex system we call the human body—and sometimes of gestures, even of fully-fledged hand signs in signed language. From this we get phonetics; and these noises interact in myriad ways (phonology), composing themselves into meaningful blocks (morphology), for which we place them in utterances (syntax) to convey meaning (semantics). We can zoom out from the tiniest variation in sound, to the largest change in meaning, and at any point we stop and smell the proverbial flowers—how these changes affect our perception of others, how this well-tuned system defies simple explanations.

I don't think I can say the same for machine learning, or CS in general. There are too many nooks and crannies; too many places for new knowledge to hide. 客観的に見て、this might be why it's so compelling, why it's so difficult--so many thoughts, so little time to explore.

Sophomore year, I took a linguistics class which was all about agency (more specifically, agenthood in ergativity). Did you know that many languages have a system where the difference between "I fell (accidentally)" and "I fell (intentionally)" is baked into the grammar? Did you know that this line of thinking is so pervasive that we believe now that regardless of how grammar forms, the agent gets introduced in a specical position?

• If you think about it, this makes sense.

I find myself in the passive a lot, asking myself: this happened to me, I don't know how to proceed.

hard to do things, and muscle my way into good places

in my first two years i fell into a pit

• befor ethat i had a goal, if a vague one: get into a good college. this meant doing so many little optimizations

• when i got into college i realized:

  • nothing matters that i thought would, and so much more does
  • the world is so unoptimizable
  • i didn't have people breathing down my back (i'm really grateful for this tho), so now i don't really know what to do
  • i was optimizing for maximum pleasure of those around me

• i'm still in this pit imo,

• maybe it wasn't a pit but it was simply that the stage lights turned on and i was caught naked, that the training wheels of high school were ripped right off and now i'm learning about all the little ways cracked people push themselves to be better, and something within me instinctively rejected this. like i wasn't allowed to be doing things liek that, i can't do public speaking, i can't network, xyz.

• behind this i'm deeply afraid that i'll be unsatisfied and working so hard for so little pay, and i want to have the freedom to financially support my whole family

• people who ahve the luxury to do what they really wnat to do

anyways, this was a semi-coherent rambling