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Life, stickers, things I’m fascinated by, fiction, lists—
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Enjoy this paper simulator :D
Disorganized chaotic notes continued below:
Epic people that I haven’t met:
To avoid drama, I’m obligated to tell you that my friends are not on the list! The bullet points mean they’re unordered!! :D
Nicky Case
Kipply Chen
Joscha Bach
Steve Wozniak
Richard Feynman
Alexandra Elbakyan
Linus Pauling
Stephen Wolfram
Steven Benner
Filip Kaliszan
Aaron Swartz
Cedric Villani
3Blue1Brown
John Conway
Scott Aaronson
Sam Altman
Rana el Kaliouby
Jean Piaget
Ashish Xiangyi Kumar
Akhil Sharma
Jennifer Egan
Kurt Vonnegut
Vladimir Nabokov
June Huh
Significantly inspiring people:
Meeting these people has had a ferromagnetic effect on living life. X usernames are listed and you should treat them as unordered.
@amplifiedamp
@viemccoy
@adic_9
@bmorphism
@InquilineKea
@esther_confused
Dashel from Lost Ones
Favourite informal moments
Discovering lesswrong
During remote learning in grade 10, my wonderful CS teacher, Mr. Schattman, sent us the article The AI Revolution on WaitButWhy. I was no longer reading text on a depressing broken 720p screen; I was standing on top of a mountain, watching the next hundreds of years unfold brilliantly.
"Whoaaa— This Eliezer guy is so cool." I muttered to myself while typing his name into the search bar. Plus, I was recommended to read his Harry Potter and Methods of Rationality several times in Discord. The next thing I knew, I was reading LessWrong deep into midnight. The writing. . .just clicked and put my thoughts into words. I was awestruck by “carving reality at its joints” with various in rationalist jargon, and ecstatic at how many people had the same thoughts. (I think Don’t throw your mind away and Time-Time tradeoffs are very iconic posts). While certain school classes caused much boredom akin to physical pain, I felt so happy—warm and fuzzy—when reading this website; It was like having a genuine, personable conversation. That year, LessWrong Community Weekend took place on Discord. I got up with excess energy very early one summer morning to attend this cryonics session. My internet friend (who used to be involved in rationality in high school) shared with me a wealth of wowable links about Heaven is Terrifying, homomorphic encryption, The Measurements of Decay, Cold Takes, the Codex, Visakan, and fascinating stuff!! After years, I finally joined a Kitchener-Waterloo rationality meetup, dragging a curious, innocent school friend along. There, we pointed at various objects in the room and babbled in broken Toki Pona. “Me yellow!” An Asian girl giggled as she pointed at herself. The rationality community has clear flaws. I made all of my grade 11 English assignments sound like LessWrong posts and my teacher thought it was unreadable. (My philosophy teacher gave my assignments 99%). I asked some random programmer to rate the rationality community (Many such cases). He replied: “Rationalists are this weird group of people who talk about philosophy using very big words. There are rarely any images, videos, code, or execution on their website. Not to mention, effective altruism is going downhill.” So, I like to think of the rationality community as an extended family. It's nice to hang out with them occasionally without worrying about my productivity. But overall… finding the site is one of the best things that happened to me.
Hopscotch app.
Hopscotch was a children’s block coding app. I instantly got immersed in the app, creating games, social media simulations, and physics experiments. Grade 5 me knew all the Hopscotch updates like how the user Kiwicute is leaving the app to prep for the SSAT, when 3D programming was first invented on the platform or Real Funky 63 encourages us to build in public. One afternoon, as I discussed a new coding technique, I was punched in the face. "You are a freak!" The girl interjected. I grabbed her by the arm in an attempt to defend myself. She screamed for her parents and teachers and told everyone that I was a twisted, cruel bully. She was a sociopath; I was a happy, clueless nerd.
“Bullying is unacceptable! You make others feel bad about themselves!” The teacher scolded, glaring at me. Words, images and injustice rushed up to my throat and jammed. I’m so horrible at words! I stammered: “She, hit me first!”
“Liar!” The girl proceeded to proved her point.
For the next two months, teachers monitored my conversations with parents. Teachers materialize like ghosts during recess, suck me away to a cold, dim room where they torture me. They made me feel my existence was imposed on society and utterly meaningless. During many afternoons, I would sit in a corner, watch other kids run lively on the playground and contemplate death. I soon got sick of it. These corrupted teachers expect me to wither. But no, I will rebel! If life was a video game, I choose to “play it on hard mode” (I wrote in my notebook back then). The girl's parents were happy, these teachers got additional pay, and a submissive child was the least of their concerns. With enough incentives, authorities easily penalize innocent nerds and crush their sanity. Nerdy children might vomit when they imagine these hierarchies and mind games. However, they must learn about social dynamics, to question authority, motives and express themselves clearly. I'm glad to have learned my lesson early on.
Surreal Insomnia experiences
Inception: I was unable to exit a dream after “waking up” 10 times
3rd person mode: After falling asleep, I was observing myself sleeping from the ceiling.
Contextual loss: A cylindrical container was on a table. There was no thought, just perception and unpleasant disconnected intuitions. I forced myself so hard to recall basic premises: I’m sleeping on a bed + People usually sleep in their rooms → Therefore, I’m in my room. People’s items are in their rooms, Thus, this should be my waterbottle… and I didn’t believe it. It felt like I was viewing a bunch of unfamiliar objects. Everything was a mess of causes, effects, shapes and sounds. Faces appeared and I felt like looking at strangers. Is this what people with dementia feel? There was sadness.
Interconnectedness: After countless days of no sleep, sounds take on colours and shapes.
Visualization: While sleeping, I could examine objects in ultra high-definition. One sleep-deprived day, I started listening to a studying playlist and a vibrant surface unexpectedly appeared in my vision (1). It was like adjusting a metallic, blurry cellular noise surface in blender. Then I was passively traversing along an attractor (2). It was massive, hazy and transparent. I was dragged in and out of the “edges” seamlessly. Soon I was flying towards an expanding, flowing light blue attractor while continuously changing fields of vision (3). There were also cold fractals that flickered at around 240Hz (4). How does the brain create such amazing visuals!
I do not exist: After unpleasant painful interactions with sleep medication, I could barely breathe, or think for days. It got so annoying that my parents reluctantly sent me to the emergency room. I waited. Finally, a doctor looked at me. I was in too much pain to say any coherent sentence. He looked at me with disdain and cursed that Chinese people didn’t speak English. “You’re biased!!!” I wanted to shout. I couldnt’t report him because my life could depend on the doctors. I was reminded that I was after all a random nobody within the constraints of biology and physics. I need to keep fighting and staying epistemically humble.
Growing up on the internet
During the pandemic, I spent lots of time chatting with people on the internet. People describe me as community-oriented. Some circles I spent time in were, the Quora “gifted community”
Other events
Exploring the outer ruliads with Amp’s friends
1 am quantum physics/hackathon presentations in high school
Neurohackathon at AGI house
Collaborating at Founders Inc.
Forecasting at Lighthaven
Bet on Love!
Cool places in meatspace
Noisebridge
AGI house
University Town Library in Shenzhen
E5 and E7 building at UWaterloo
Simons Institute at UC Berkeley
Banana lounge
Timecube
Arcadia
Unnamed hardware incubator in Mountain View
Flatiron Institute
Favourite media online
The MLST podcast
Episode with Connor Leahy
MLST is a high signal-to-noise podcast. Connor shows authenticity without excessive ego. Talks about how the rationality community ~= autistic smart people. He runs an epistemology team at his startup and rejects the argument that if all humans died today, the earth would become a much better place. He is a deontologist though he doesn’t have a great argument backing it up, He presents potentially inaccurate opinions in this precise and verbally creative way - like most rationalists - and uses a lot of reactions, saying LOL and LMAO verbally and mixes colourful swear words. I suppose the purpose of reaction is to indicate his degree of care so the other person in the conversation knows to keep talking. It’s a spectrum from being quiet, to being interestingly reactive, and being verbose and offer no new information.
Notes on Work by Weike Wang
Weike names the various patterns about work in the Chinese-American diaspora.
Several interesting points:
>Whether overworking ever destroyed the moment of brilliance and this mindset
is conditioned by class status. This is quite common in the rat-communities.
>Setting a well-scoped goal of knowing enough Chinese to explain what she does in-depth
to her family.
>“Workaholics” enjoy the feeling of expanding their abilities like marathon runners.
Book Review: Going Infinite by Zvi Mowshowitz
You can't be "not good enough" to skip (or drop out of) college by Kipply
Kipply’s blog resonates. To this day the best option for me still keeps changing,
with many inspiring people in neurotech/techno-optimism suggesting to finish
as an average-case halo effect, though impact can be done without credentials.
Puella Magi Madoka Magica
Caelum est Conterrens
Arc of a Scythe series
Blog roll that I grew up on:
Esther is a Confused human being
Terrence Tao’s blog
Shtetl-Optimized
Astral Codex Ten
The Redstarts by Ashish Xiangyi Kumar
Snapshots of high school
Zoom room (grade 12)
A: Why are drug costs so high?
B: it is because of capitalism! This is because of colonialism.
C: Which is due to human society, a minor side effect of the universe existing.
A: Hey… we can’t fix that— We’re supposed to do a gap analysis!
A: If you guys ever post something, don’t tag me on LinkedIn.
What people are doing in the classroom (grade 11)
1 person browsing Genshin Impact discord server
1 person playing physics simulator from the 2000's
5 people actually working
1 person trying to burn plastic CD
1 person soldering out of boredom
2 people talking about vitamin water
2 people talking about stock market
1 person just restarted the entire project
