Dia Del Padre (I don't speak Spanish)

Guess who's back in your inbox? Me, that's who.

(This one's gonna be kinda long, so I won't feel bad if you don't read it all. Just know that I warned you.)

Everyone at this school gets a diploma. Boring. You know what they don't get? Intramural championship t-shirts. I successfully reached the athletic performance level required to attain a championship title in the respectable sport of kickball. Sports rarely go my way, but they did this time. 

Our research cohort trip to Arches was quite enjoyable! We went to a place called Dead Horse Point at sunset, which was one of the most spectacular views I've ever seen. It was like an island in the sky: you drive on a two lane road out to the top of a mesa, and then you're a thousand feet above the ground, all the way around. Majestical, ehh?

If I had to translate the way I've felt the last couple of weeks into a geographic formation, I'd probably choose a mesa. In honor of Father's Day, instead of telling you how I really feel and letting you know exactly what's been going on, I'll tell you about something completely different that will leave you guessing as to what I mean. Don't worry: just like emotional convos with your dad, you still might get a feel for what I'm talking about. Mine's not like that, though, so sucks to be you guys. Happy Father's Day. Love you, Dad.

Also, because I believe in sticking it to the big guys—psychologists Kahneman and Tversky, in this case of hedonic editing—I'm gonna give you the positives (after further review) first for the benefit of your entertainment.

I think there is only one place in the entire world where minding your own business means you're fair game for someone to tell you that they're praying for you. Of course, I happen to live in said location, and in any other circumstance, it would have been a sweet sentiment that would have boosted my faith in the human race. I'll let you decide how to feel.

I was sitting in a Costa Vida with one of my close friends. She and I are relaying to one another our current woes in life and talking about some really hard and emotionally vulnerable stuff. We'd probably been chatting for about 45 minutes when a man walked up to us. I guess he'd overheard some of our conversation. In his late 40s or early 50s, he seemed like the type of guy to have a very stable accounting career and several nieces and nephews whom he calls every third weekend. 

We did not know what this button-down clad fellow was going to say, but we quickly found out when he opened his mouth and said, "Excuse me, sorry, but I just wanted to tell the two of you that I'm praying for you. My first thought was, "Weirdo," but then I thought, "That was harsh, that's actually kind of sweet of him." This feeling of generosity quickly ended as he said, "But I've got to tell you something else." He launched into one of the most insane monologues I've ever heard in my life. To prevent carpal tunnel syndrome, I'll write out some of his quotes in a bulleted list so that you can scan them and laugh (or gasp) if one catches your eye. Afterwards, I'll make some attempt at a holistic explanation.

• "Look this up... the percentage of people who graduate from BYU married is the same as the acceptance rate for BYU Law School."
• "Out of 16 million members, 10% of them are between the fertile ages of 18 and 30."
• "There aren't enough men like you with a temple recommend in one hand and a W-2 in the other."
• "Men have no problem getting married! At any point, they only have to preside, provide, and protect, that's all. Women have it worse. They have to make themselves desirable somehow."
• "It'll all work out in eternity. Open Isaiah 4:1. *makes us read it, aloud* See how that says the ratio will be 7:1? and they'll be strong and independent, too."
• "God has no problem seeing his children suffer... did you know that 50% of people live in abject poverty? See, I think he's alright putting one of his favorite daughters through life without marriage."
• "How many proposals have you turned down? 1? Oh, you're doing better than most! *turns to me* How many times have you popped the question? None? See, that's the problem right there! Not enough men like you marrying girls like her."
• "Tell you what, I could get you married every month for the next 10 years."

I know there were more one-liners, but I can't remember them. Honestly, I was just curious how far he was gonna go. Immediately after, he said, "see you two later," then walked directly across University Avenue, not at the crosswalk, mind you, but in the middle of the road. God only knows where he was headed.

This was a very one-sided conversation. We provided hardly any input for him to go off of, and he clearly wasn't listening very closely to our earlier conversation because his comments were only tangentially related. He must have projected a lot of ideas onto us while he walked over to our table. We are guessing that he thought we were siblings or cousins, because my friend and I look similar enough that it's a feasible assumption.

He didn't have a thesis, as far as we could tell. Our best guess is that he was attempting to explain that I should have no problem being happy and getting married (maybe to seven wives), but my female friend should be alright not getting married if it doesn't happen in the next 24 months, since God also lets people starve and die in wars and stuff. She also should understand that she might not be desirable in this life and that God would be choosing that for her, but she shouldn't be too sad because she'll eventually be paired up with someone when she dies. I should know that my job is just to go out and get married and it should be really easy since I have all of the prerequisites: a W-2, a temple recommend, and missionary service and that I should have no trouble at all since that's all every woman wants anyway and that I obviously don't need to consider anything else besides her current temple recommend status.

Have no fear. I don't believe anything this guy said, and I have survived an experience with a Provo, UT crackhead trippin' on nothing more than life itself. This dude was absolutely crazy.

If you're not LDS, none of that probably made sense to you. I don't have the volumes required to detail the cultural undertones that jumped like grasshoppers on coals, so you'll have to excuse my lack of explanation.

It was a bit ironic though, because he said everything he did with no knowledge of what's been going on in my life recently. Like I said, it was only tangentially related. His comments didn't make me feel any better about the situation he knew nothing about.

-----

You'll have to interpret the next part as you will. I promise I'm alright, though. Such is the fun in being the one with the pen; you don't choose what the reader hears, only what they see.

I've done it before, but I'm going to praise Mac Miller's album Circles again. I've listened to it a lot lately because I feel like it speaks to me in a way that other things don't, and recent circumstances have made it all the louder. I've mentioned single songs before, but I want to discuss the album as a whole this time.

Enter Will's explanation of his favorite album ever.

Circles is completely different from the rest of Mac Miller's music. It isn't swaggy white boy music, it isn't flex-my-money anthems, and it isn't a bunch of party songs. Circles is a conversation, with quiet, intimate vocals and smooth delivery. Mac Miller talks to himself from different parts of his life, different times, different moods, different headspaces. He writes, "You're feeling sorry, and I'm feeling fine." As the listener, you can't tell which voice is which, because spoiler alert, they're all his. His thoughts are woven together with no effects, no complicated harmonies, and no way to tell them apart.

Vocal homogeneity represents the core message of the album. Circles is about cycles and patterns, and it's for the people in them. Whenever given the chance to change, Mac hears his earlier self: "This is what it looks like, right before you fall," and thinks, "I cannot be changed, no, trust me, I've tried." 

He wants things to be different and knows that it's his life, but can't find a way to get out of the hole he's dug for himself. "Got the cards in my hand, I hate dealin'," is a lamentation of something he can't change, and "I made it, but I hate once I build it, I break it, that might just break me down" is regret for what he could have done differently, but didn't. These two forces combine into the trap of Circles. You get yourself to where you are, and now you have an internal responsibility to keep going and not waste the incredible life you gave yourself. It doesn't make sense, though, because you're trapped by it. The reality your past self set up becomes inescapable for your current self, who becomes the past self in a week or two.

A lot of Mac's lines have dual meanings. You can read the entire album as inward facing, but you can also read it as an outward attempt to explain to someone else how he feels about himself. He hopes that his relationships with other people will help him manage things, and he seems to make a reference to Ariana Grande or Nomi Leasure, both of whom he had a very close relationship with: "All I ever needed was somebody with some reason who can keep me sane." He needs a kind of connection where he can feel understood, so he looks for it in other people, since he doesn't have that with himself. It's hard to express what that kind of absence feels like.

Of course, the last chord of the album is resolved by the first chord of the first song, making the entire thing one big circle and starting the cycle over again. Sound familiar? Yeah, a clock. "Like the hands that keep counting the time," he says. How about the song named "Hands"? Or the last song on the album, "Once A Day"? Oh, and of course, there are 12 songs on the album, one for each number on a 12-hour clock face. He's just highlighting the time that passes between the versions of himself.

Why do I find this album so beautiful? Well, Mac Miller took some really hard human emotions and put them to music. The music says things better than he can, and he knows that, so there are parts of the album where he doesn't bother talking, 'cause he'd ruin what the silence is trying to scream: "This is alright, don't worry about doing anything. Just let the time go by." I've had a couple of these silent moments lately, and they're really powerful. For a few minutes, I think I heard the silence whisper.

-----

A good sense of pattern detection is both a blessing and a curse. I notice the same cycles happening in my life repeatedly. Some of them are positive, and some of them are negative. I can guess at what causes them, and I do what I can to make them into ones that I'm excited to see again, but it is hard. I sometimes feel kind of stuck.

I think one line from "Good News" makes very acute sense to me: "I'm so tired of being so tired. Why you gotta build something beautiful just to go set it on fire?"

I think I am tired of being tired. I don't know how to express myself well enough to make anyone else understand how I feel, but I don't know how to fix that. I feel like I come across as overly critical of the world, and maybe I am, but it's one of the only ways I can make sense of what confuses me. I'll trim off the criticism as I realize that it's okay.

As far as I've recently become aware, I do feel things. I even feel what most people refer to as emotions, and I've felt a lot of them this week. Normally, I'd prefer not to feel them, so I ignore them. Unfortunately, I can't help it this time, even though it's just another cycle that I've seen before. It's discouraging when the same things break every time you think they'll change, and I think that's what Mac Miller was getting at. I hate that I can't say what I mean when I'm in front of people and that what I try to say comes out wrong. I hate that I can't tell people how I really feel. I hate that writing emails and poetry are the only methods that give me some semblance of an ability to convey meaning with words. Okay, maybe I don't hate it, but I wish I could speak like I write. That would be nice. I'd be practically unstoppable. While we're at it, I wish that I could let people read my mind and understand how I feel, because that would be so much easier than trying to ramble on about how I see things. I wish there were more silences where things made sense because there was nothing to make sense of. I wish I could point at the stars more often and think about nothing other than the space between. I wish that the hands that count the time would hold mine on their way past, just so I knew when they were gone. Ew, that was a little poetic. Enough of that.

I don't want to say too much because this doesn't feel like the right setting, but I will say this: fighting yourself sucks. A lot of people do it, and you probably don't realize how dramatic it is.

(Again, I'm alright. I promise. These are just my reflections on the last couple of weeks and what I've been thinking about, and writing them down helps me figure them out. Seriously. Do not call Therapeutics Anonymous, as that would be a waste of their emergency resource department. Plus, they probably wouldn't be impressed by your case.)

-----

Anyway, enough emotional sob story blah blah blah. In other news, my hackathon is going really well. The school is very supportive and we have enough of a reason to think it'll actually happen. A significant BYU figure has agreed to do the introductionsa and welcome everyone to the competition. I'm excited to see how it goes. We might even get state government involved, which would be great news for the quantum ecosystem here (and for the stability/longevity of our event).

Research is good, I'm working on the actual data part now, so maybe soon I'll be able to predict the fires that have claimed Utah's drier areas this week. Wouldn't that be cool? I've got 2D simulator engine working. It currently runs on quantum principles, but the computer still does the computation. In the future, we'll hand off the calculations to nature through the use of a quantum computer. I'm slowly getting used to full 40-hour weeks.

I've really enjoyed a book I'm reading, and I think I'll be done with it by the time I write another email. It's about probability, but it's written in an engaging style that makes the topic usable and understandable for people without prior training. I'll talk about that next time.

I think that's all I've got to say, so I'm going to go to sleep. Well, I'm gonna wait for my laundry to finish, then drive home, then go to sleep. #freelaundryatmom's

Sorry for the novel,

william

A Lamentation to Henry Ford

Dear Henry Ford,

My feelings for you are twisted, contradictory, and deeply intense. I write this short letter to you, not for your benefit, but for my own: to sort through the confusing emotional state I find myself in.

In the turmoil of the 1910s, you instituted the 40-hour work week at Ford Motors and doubled the wages for your workers. You saw a massive increase in productivity, which led you to continue the practice; I'm sure your workers appreciated it. Don't get me wrong: 8-hour days are significantly better than 10- or 12-hour ones, but I don't think you understood the gravity of that simple change.

Over the next 20 years, people copied you, Henry. They envied your success. They too gave their workers a strict schedule, as formalized by Welsh reformer Robert Owen in 1817: "8 hours of work, 8 hours of recreation, 8 hours of rest." 

What I don't think you realized was that your choice to put that rule in place forced the hand of the United States government. In 1938, the Fair Labor Standards Act codified the 8-hour workday into federal law. When those bigwigs imagined the American dream, they saw Ford Motors on a glistening throne of gold, surrounded by the angels of General Motors, DuPont, General Electric, and U.S. Steel.

8-hour days were your commandment, Henry, and your people obeyed. Not only did they obey, but the last century's worth of American laborers have been christened with the 8-hour workday. They spend their entire lives wasting away, drones mindlessly following the rule that you so carelessly tossed at your plaything, your entertainer, your manufacturing machine. We're not dolls, Ford, we're people.

Without you, America would have moved forward still—albeit with a slower reformation of labor rights—but the damage wouldn't have been so deep. I much prefer scrapes to stitches, and the 40-hour work week has since become the wound we cannot close. 

It's thanks to you, Henry Ford, that I have to wake up at the very reasonable hour of 8 AM, take a 15 minute bath in the warm sunshine of a picturesque valley, and exercise my God-given right to think, all in an attempt to solve some of the most interesting problems I have ever heard of. 

It's your fault, Henry Ford, that I am trapped. I have no choice but to be paid a very normal amount for the time I put in, be forced to socialize with other motivated researchers, and receive particularly noteworthy mentorship from people who care about my development.

There is no one to blame but you, Henry Ford, for the completely and totally typical life that I now live. For now, gone are my night-to-mornings watching the moving pictures, jesting with my closest of acquaintances, and waking up at noon. I hate you for that, Henry Ford.

When you stood at the Gates of Heaven, I hope God looked you in the face and said, "Nice try, buddy. You're to blame for the 40-hour work week, and somehow, it made its way up here. Even I'm on salary—to think, it could've been healthcare."

If you send a return letter, I won't read it. I'll be busy. Working.

All the worst,

-Will

---

As you might have guessed, I have begun my initiation into adult life by starting a full-time job. I really have nothing to complain about, as it's exactly what I want to be doing anyway, but I still feel like I've lost some of my sweet freedom. I can't just leave 'cause it got boring and go find something more interesting to do. I have to, like, focus on one thing for long periods of time, which isn't my favorite activity. I don't really have coworkers to mess around with. There's no time when there isn't work to be done, since the nature of research is to keep moving forward. There isn't a set of required daily tasks; you just have to go where the wind takes you.

Speaking of moving randomly, that's exactly what my research is about. I'm using quantum random walks to simulate the movement of things like fires and pandemics. Don't worry, that's just the flashy title and fancy words we use to describe to impress other scientists. It's super simple, and if you don't believe me, I'm about to change your mind. Don't turn your brain off if I mention anything you've never heard of, because I promise it isn't difficult.

Think about a drunk person, stumbling around. He (or she, what's wrong with you?) will walk until he falls over. The direction is totally random, each step isn't related to the others. Some of his steps are big, some are little, but there's an average size that they kinda hover around. Let's say you start a timer, say, 30 seconds. How far is that guy gonna get in 30 seconds? Well, he's going to do a fair amount of backtracking, but you can probably draw a circle to estimate how far he's gonna wander until he falls over.

This is basically a classical random walk. Every step has an equal chance of moving left, right, up, or down. Since they're equal, whatever you're tracking can move backwards in the same direction that they just came from. Since the step lengths tend to cluster around whatever that average length was, they can be sampled from a bubble over the average, called a normal distribution (or a Gaussian, if you know physics well).

If you let that guy walk around a million times, taking those steps sampled from his distribution of step sizes, you get something called Brownian Motion, where the most likely ending place is around where he started.

Since drunk people are abundantly available, this is an experimentally testable result.

There are a few math rules you can pull out of this situation. The most important one is how long it takes him to get far from the center. It turns out that the spread (standard deviation) of this situation is related to the square root of how long your timer was. You'd expect the occasional drunk person to get pretty far from the start if you let them walk for a long time, but not very often. How far do they get, assume they can take a certain number of steps in the time? Square root of the step count on average. Let a walker take 100 steps, and on average, it'll only end up 10 steps away from where it started.

This is all well and good, but when viruses and fires move, they don't go backward. Our best equations to calculate where they're going to move demonstrate that they spread out at the same rate that they take steps. If you let a virus take 100 steps, it will, on average, end up 100 steps away. This makes intuitive sense, doesn't it? To predict these crazy things, we can either get a ton of data to solve an equation, or simulate the network and starting configuration according to the rules we set up.

If we tried to use Brownian Motion (the square root one), it wouldn't match up with the known behavior of the fires and pandemics that ruin our lives. Luckily, there is another approach. By modeling these walkers as waves, we introduce an incredibly useful property: interference. 

When two waves hit each other, they combine. You've probably seen this in a swimming pool. But they don't always get bigger. They sometimes cancel each other out. If you hit a wave with its inverted twin, they combine to zero. This is how noise cancelling headphones work.

Remember how I said that pandemics and fires don't travel backwards? We can just set a rule in our simulation that says, "Every time the wave moves, put a negative on the direction it just came from." Then, when the wave tries to spread to that spot in the following step, it cancels itself out, causing it to move in other directions instead.

This is why quantum computers are really useful: they work with waves instead of definite values. Turns out, humanity has been pretty stuck on these types of problems for a long time. They've tried using Brownian Motion (and a whole lot of other really complicated tricks) to solve the issue of predicting compounding networks. Ask people who trade stocks where their stock prices will be in a year. If they're right, they're either rich, or in charge of the market. With a quantum computer, I can (hopefully) improve the modeling and simulation of really terrible events that kill people and stuff. Of course, I'm not actually pushing anything forward, I'm mostly just rederiving the same things that the real heroes are figuring out. I'm just a full-time drone, remember?

Anyway, that's what I'm slaving away on. I'm headed to Arches with the 25-student research cohort that I'm a part of tomorrow, so that will be fun. My old work buddies and I won the intramural kickball semi-finals yesterday, so we've got the finals today. Wish us luck. We want those t-shirts.

See you later,

-(W)i(LL) (<-- that's for Jacob)

Amaze Amaze Amaze

I have something to share.

"What's two plus two?" 

-Ryland Grace's computer system, Project Hail Mary

The above quote is the opening line of my new favorite movie. It pretty much sums up how I've felt interacting with technology this week. I've learned a bunch of super niche, random knowledge that I will never ever need to know unless I'm held at brain-point by an AI who says, "If you can't tell me what a bootloader does, I'm gonna end you right here because I know you don't care". Naturally, I'll explain what I mean by this, and why you shouldn't care at all and simply be entertained.

Many years ago, we moved to Lindon. Our lame-ahh seller took everything needed to power the home audio system we used to have, except the speakers. Why you would take everything except the part that makes the sound, I have no idea. I was thus given the speakers, since we had no use for them without the rest of the system. I looked them up, and discovered they weren't just any old set of speakers—they were audiophile speakers. Audiophile speakers are meant for audiophiles: people who care wayyy too much about creating the highest quality sound possible. In other words, I have a pair of super-high-end speakers.

I knew I wanted to figure out how to use them. Sometimes I play guitar through my computer (yes, you can do that), but my Macbook speakers make it sound sad. These would be a huge upgrade. Plus, I could listen to music that actually sounds right. I started researching. I quickly made a discovery. I had no idea that the world of speakers was so complicated. I assumed you just plugged them into the aux cord and they made noise. Nope. Not even close. Turns out you need an amplifier (I should've guessed), which has several really important specifications you must understand to prevent blowing the speakers up. I learned about impedance—pronounced im-PEED-ance, not im-puh-dence, made that mistake—and wattage minimums and maximums. I figured out what type of amplifier I needed for the speakers I had. Unfortunately, they are very expensive.

I did the scrappiest thing I knew how to do. I went to the BYU Surplus sale, and overheard an employee saying it was the busiest one he'd seen in years. Of course that would be the one I went to. They have soooo much random stuff in there. It was kinda cool to see a bunch of old technology just collecting dust cause nobody knows how to use it. Well, not everyone. I pretend to. I found a few amplifiers and looked them up. It turns out BYU had some extremely high-end amplifiers, although they were a bit dated. They would (hypothetically) work with my speakers. I bought the amplifier and a really weird cable for $20 and brought it home.

I quickly realized the giant metal box I purchased had absolutely no controls, meaning everything it outputted would be at full power. Not good for me. I learned that I needed a preamp to control the signal going into the amplifier. The amplifier turns the music's electrical signal into the voltage that moves the diaphragms inside my speakers. Luckily, I already had one of these, ironically, for playing guitar through the computer. This time, I would be turning computer-speak into sound, not sound into computer-speak. I bought speaker wire, hooked everything up, and prayed that a fire wouldn't start instantly upon hitting the power button. I connected my computer, opened a song... silence. I could hear static, but that was it. I found out about this really weird thing where playing dual-channel audio compressed to mono cancelled any symmetrical sound out completely. I was testing a song through a different input method, and for some reason all the vocals were totally gone. Vocals are recorded at the center of the mix, so they play the same amount in the left and right channels. When those signals travel down their wires and get smashed together into one signal, they completely annihilate each other, leaving only silence. Weird.

Long story short, after several hours of bashing my head in, I determined my Mac had a software bug that was preventing it from outputting any sound to a USB device. Absolute ragebait. I tested so much useless stuff. I brought the whole setup back to my apartment, wired everything up, plugged in my other computer... and of course it worked perfectly, first try. Now I have the most beautiful sounding set of speakers I've ever heard. Sabrina in 4K.

I've been scouring Facebook Marketplace, KSL, and Ebay for the last 18 months, keeping an eye out for my holy grail of computers: the Macintosh SE. This computer is from 1987, and I love the way it looks. I like that computers used to be made to make life easier, not harder. They were tools for a very specific purpose and only did what they were meant to. Although I love modern computers, we've lost some magic by making them too useful and feature-rich; now it feels like I can't do anything without a power cord plugged in. I'm not actually free, I rely on six foot copper wires. Anyway, I found one for sale. A guy in American Fork was selling one with a working keyboard, mouse, and internal SCI. I bought it. It looks stunning on my desk.

I have big plans for this device. I need to flash an operating system, and I think I'm gonna buy a really specific tool to make that easier. I want to be able to talk to the 1987 Mac and control my 2026 Mac Mini. I want to be able to ask questions to AI through the vintage computer. Guess what? It's doable. Turns out that serial connections have barely changed in 50 years. With a null modem, my Mac Mini can talk to my Mac SE and vice versa. This complicated sounding adapter connects the listening port of one computer to the talk port of the other. This lets me send data between devices, which means I can control one with the other. I am extremely excited about this. Learning to interact with these old computers teaches me why new computers work the way they do, and I have learned so many tiny things I would have never known otherwise.

Speaking of computers, my full-time research starts soon. I think I've decided on what I'm going to study, and you might be a bit surprised. I am too, but the more I think about it, the more right it feels. I think I'm going to study quantum computing (duh) as a tool to model climate change (huh?).

I also had a meeting this week with a guy starting a roofing company. He wants me to join as a founder and help him with the tech side of things. He's confident in his ability to sell the product, but he needs someone to build the technical aspects of the business. The tool we'd build would scan roofs and connect contractors to homeowners, particularly through automated texts. This does solve a problem, and I think I'd like building something like that. However, it feels kind of like just another way to get rich. As much as I want to get rich and have a giant mansion and five yachts, I would much rather work on something that helps heal the world. Bothering people to get their roof replaced so that I can make a cut of the profit? That doesn't fix anything. That doesn't make the world better for the next generation. Developing quantum models to combat excessive carbon in the atmosphere? That does. That might save the world from ourselves. There are enough people making lots of money and doing nothing useful with it. I feel like I should try to figure out a way to use my talents to benefit other people and hope that the green compensation comes as a side benefit. I do however have to eat every day, unfortunately, so I will have to find some way to supplement my schooling.

I think that's all from me tonight. My eyes are tired and I'd like to go to sleep.

will

Isn't It Weird That Only Odysseus Survived?

"There's a roach in the pool... he's swimmin' in it... he's still aliiive."

This sentence, pulled from a popular short-form video, was not originally about me. However, I think it applies pretty well. Except the part about swimming. I can barely swim.

I am still alive though. These emails just started to slip my mind, so I need to get back in the habit, starting now.

School went well! I got higher grades than I expected, which is good for my GPA and my mental health. I got all of my final projects done, including the absolute nightmare that occurred a day after it was due: I realized that I hadn't completed a project, made the presentation, nor filmed my actual spoken presentation of the slides and it was totally due the night before. I stayed up till 3 am finished that stupid project and filming that presentation. I'm sure I looked stunning in my hoodie, hair completely ruined and all. The project was a Mathematica code notebook (I hate that software) that could use quantum computer simulation to figure out which stocks in a specified group meet the risk threshold and provide the highest profit. It works with real data, and is verifiable against past data. I don't know if I'd totally trust it with my money yet, but it is cool anyway.

Speaking of stocks, I've been fixated on investment lately. Not that I have any money to use, but The Big Short really flipped something in my brain. Economics is kinda cool. Thanks @jacob_hiatt for the impromptu economics lessons you've given me.

I am also learning so much through problem solving lately. At work, I'm building this super-crazy edge computing network that can run AI wherever I want. It's like having an army of AI agents that do stuff for dentists. I am very proud of it, but I can't say too much. Come talk to me. Wink.

I also am learning that I really like hackathons. We went to another one in Lehi this last weekend and competed against a ton of lifelong, incredibly talented (and most notably employed) developers and code writers. We didn't win the 10K prize, and we didn't really expect to, but I learned so freaking much in 24 hours. I stayed up all night again, since these hackathons kinda require it. 

This last hackathon was much more startup-focused, which was an interesting shift in mentality. Our other hackathons were academic; they were demonstrations of super niche technology that only nerd companies care about. The hackathon in Lehi was not like that. A company connecting roofing contractors with customers wanted a tool that could estimate a roof replacement in seconds without needing an on-site measurement. Our tool connects to a Google service that estimates solar availability to get satellite imagery of the roof. It then analyzes the imagery using computer vision and machine learning, connects to market data, and provides an estimate for a full roof replacement on any roof in the country that day. It also generates a 3D model of their roof and calculates the different pieces needed for their own roof: hips, edges, eaves, that sort of thing. I know wayyy more about roofs than I think I'll ever need to. Our tool could very easily integrate with solar companies or road construction to provide more data to those who need it. I also set it up as a textable phone number via SMS so anyone anywhere could text the bot and find out how much their roof would cost to replace. Pretty cool.

I also learned that business people, especially tech business people, like to flex how much money they have, and use a lot of fancy buzzwords like "monster in capital allocation," "accelerating time-to-value," "data moats and synthesizing unstructured data silos," and "operationalizing AI at scale to unlock non-linear productivity gains". I'd consider myself slightly experienced in AI, and I could not actually tell you what a single one of those sentences means. Oh, and they love to talk in sentence fragments and leave lots of spaces between them.

Look at LinkedIn for best-in-class examples.

Huge cost-to-value ratios. Not just a software. An infrastructure. Thousands of sentence fragments. Very few actually interesting things. Minimal intelligent, personal content.

Since I've finished my post, how about a pointless vague question? What defines your sentence structures?

That is what the business world felt like yesterday. I hope that it isn't all like that, or this is going to be a very dull and mundane future. Ego isn't my favorite thing, and it was on full display yesterday. I would like to note that there is a difference between confidence and ego. The Dunning-Kreuger Effect is a great example of this. I saw a lot of people on the right end of that distribution, but I also saw a lot of people on the left end. It's always about motion and movement, not about improving anyone's lives.

Personal projects update: I'm dropping Mac on Mac for the moment, since it hasn't helped me do other tasks yet. I'll revisit it later. It was very helpful in teaching me how agents work, but I want to get some other things done first. A centralized Jarvis-like agent would be more helpful, so I'm looking at how I'd use that.

The personal project I'm most excited about will actually help me in the next few weeks. I am working on an AI research tool. I want to be able to manage my research project, invite collaborators, and track my progress. I found that nobody's built a good tool for this; existing tools only do part of the flow. Notion's great, but I can't do everything I want inside of it. I also feel like it kind of has a steep learning curve. Maybe I'm just Notion-stupid right now. I like systems that are really easy to use, and I want to make something to help me do more work. I suck at research. I just get too bored and find too much to read that I get overwhelmed. I need help finding good papers without bothering a busy professor. I want software that looks beautiful and is fun to use, not something that makes me want to tear my eyes out after hours of work (cough cough OverLeaf). Unfortunately I hit some code-writing limits because of the hackathon. Lame.

I want this tool for my research program starting in June, as it will seriously help me accomplish something meaningful this summer. I want to make the Summer of '04 a good one. #IYKYK

I have been listening to a heck of a lot of Sabrina Carpenter and Outkast this last week. Weird blend, and I've got no clue why, but it is what it is. I especially like Go Go Juice and Roses. You might think that Outkast wrote Go Go Juice and Sabrina wrote Roses, but you'd be wrong. It's the other way around.

I'm reading my uncle's book. It is quite good. It's called Crisis Engineering.

I feel like there's probably a fair amount more that I should say, since I haven't sent one of these emails in a while, but I can't think of anything right now. I'm going to get back to work now that my merge on GitHub has passed all of its checks. Email me! I have way more time to respond and/or hang out now that I don't have scholastic duties.

Bye-bye,

Will