"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
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