Lately there's been a growing tension inside of me. Specifically, the tension between knowing my own path and feeling the sting when others don't see its value. I delayed my graduation by a year to live in Japan. I put all my effort into propping up an Autonomous Vehicle team, giving me less time to Leetcode, less time to prepare for interviews, and less time to optimize myself for what the market wants. I see others my age getting into FAANG, and I think to myself: perhaps I've made the wrong choices over these past few years? It's natural to think that way I guess. I'm human after all. However, despite this, I always end up asking myself whether I regret anything that I did. And every time the answer is always no. So let me answer my doubts once and for all. I chose to live in Japan because I knew the experience would shape me. I chose to revive an entire Autonomous Vehicle team, and continued to build a self-driving car from scratch NOT because it was the right career move, but because I wanted to build something bigger than myself. These aren't misguided choices, they're the choices of someone who is living deliberately. Someone who chose depth over optimization. Do I hope to prove my critics wrong someday? No way. My deepest satisfaction won't come from proving them wrong. It'll come from looking back at my 20s and knowing that I took on challenges that mattered, that I didn't shrink myself to fit someone else's scorecard, that I always took opportunities that called me. So to anyone who tells me my choices are misguided, my answer to you is this: I took the scenic route :)

Dead internet is coming... I wonder what we'll all do instead? One interesting thing: Dead Internet Theory stems from the idea that there are secret organizational bodies coordinating a curated internet meant to brainwash the population. In reality, the real dead internet will come from a decentralized hivemind of people imagining up crazy scenarios for some useless reasons, brain-rotting the population instead. Not a coordinated brainwash, but an uncoordinated brainrot, aha.

AI Art is not real art... at least in its current form. For the sake of keeping this brief, let's stick to visual art. I often hear claims that current diffusion models, trained on a large corpus of captioned text, has the ability to generate artistic pieces that rival that of many, if not a large majority, of artists, today. To that, I say no way. A friend once asked me how I could tell a piece of art was AI-generated. Two words: expression and intention. Art is not as simple as just a basket of different lines and colors that come together to resemble patterns. Instead, every stroke, every color choice was intentional. An artist doesn't simply combine patterns together for the sake of making something look appealing. They add patterns with intention, an intention to express their thoughts, their experiences, their opinions... their way of seeing the world. An AI model today cannot make art out of intention. It fundamentally does not think of creating art the same way we do. An AI model views the world as a multi-dimensional "line of best fit" on our understanding of reality translated into linguistics. It's way of reasoning is fundamentally pinned on thinking in language, but we as humans don't think like that. Some of us might have an internal monologue, but how can you explain the feeling of not having the words to explain something? Better yet, how do you tell an AI model to express its feelings in art if it has none? The way I see AI Art today is the same way I say its usage in coding: it is a good tool to get a project going and overcoming my anxiety when I succumb to blank page syndrome. AI art also raises the bar for artists. If you are concerned that AI will replace your job because it can draw lines, color, and shade faster, just remember this: art was never about drawing straight lines, it was about expressing something. Use AI to help you express your intentions in a more effective manner. Yes, there will probably be a large cut of the population who could care less about art, and I guess AI art would fool most of them. But I believe that fundamentally we all view art not just as it is, but at a meta-physical level as well. To have AI art replace all art in this world would be synonymous with removing this world's emotional capabilities of expression, and the fundamental structure of the human psyche probably won't let that happen. I am not shutting down the idea that perhaps AI could create art in the future. If a future AI model is fundamentally built to have the ability of expression, experience, intention, imagination, and emotion, then perhaps I will consider its generated art as real art. At that point, I would probably start considering it as an actual being... PS: My art is not AI generated. For those who are not artists, that's like giving us the finger.

I don't know. But for now I'm going to live my life for the sake of adventure. And one way to seek adventure is by learning new things. Developing myself. Keeping up the grit. Why? Well so far that's led me to meet some pretty awesome people. People that can make my life even more adventurous.

There are two types of robotics people. Those who believe Wall-E is just around the corner, and those who will tell you we're no where close. They both have merit. One sees the the newest papers coming out of Gemini Robotics, or the latest models from OpenAI, and says, "Sooner or later these models are going to be in all our robots! They're going to fold our laundry, wash our dishes, make food... The future is here!", forgetting that it takes time to deploy robots to consumers -- that just showing results is only 30% of the way there and the rest is about making it repeatable. The result, a unicorn startup turned into history's biggest fraud case. Meanwhile, the other sees the graveyard of robotic startups and the empty wallets of irresponsible VCs, and says, "Wake up. Robots aren't going to take over our lives anytime soon. They still struggle with driving on highways, talking to humans, and climbing stairs!", forgetting that there are dozens of very smart, competent people working to solve these struggles day-in-day-out -- that everyday there's always a chance that all of sudden they go from pragmatic realists to forgotten veterans being left behind.

First post... It's weird considering the fact that I always wanted to write about random things to random people, but now that I've forced myself into this position, my mind has gone pretty blank. Must be something a lot of people feel when they first start off their blog. Today marks my 23rd birthday. Back when I turned 20 I wrote a reoccurring calendar event on my phone titled "Your Beginning". It's a motivational note to myself that would spam as an alert on my phone whenever it was my birthday. I will not share the exact details of what I wrote to myself (it's too embarrassing), but here's some lines that sum it up pretty well: - "On this day you decided to throw away your overwhelming humility. In place of it, a flame. A flame of arrogance, confidence, and dreaminess" - "On the days following, I hope to still see you meticulously planning your every move, utilizing the nooks and crannies of tech to craft your dreams. We want to be an architect of the future, right?" Looking at the messages I wrote, I can't help but look at what I wrote with the same feeling my mom must've felt when I told her I felt "mature". Words were one thing, but did I really think that just saying/writing things was really going to get me anywhere? In the three years since, I'd say I've done pretty well for myself. I took on the challenge of leading a team of students to build an autonomous vehicle, growing the team from 5 to 80 people (job's not finished), I did a crazy number of internships, with one of them unexpectedly sending me to Tokyo for 8 months, exposing me to a whole different culture and lifestyle, and I took a whole month off to explore Japan/China with some close friends of mine from High School. No, I am not trying to tell you I am better, do not take it that way PLEASE. I'm just trying to say that after all that, I realized that words weren't the secret sauce to my adventurous life, getting out of my bed was. So here I am, writing more words to introspect myself. Not just words this time, but a whole blog page to keep writing about myself for years to come. Why do I want to write so badly? Perhaps no matter how much I tell myself there's no point in writing my thoughts down, there exists an urge deep down in my unconscious to write. Only time will tell why I truly wanted to write a blog, but until then, I have some words for myself: - You intend to document what you think, I hope that this blog will never evolve into anything other than that. - You are not a philosopher, and you have no right to tell others how they should think. - Please please please stop with having your head in the clouds. Don't write about what you're about to do, just do it!!! I hope that my future self will forever standby these principles. I do not want to become a know-it-all. I do not want to become narcissistic. And above all, I do not want to be chronically bed-ridden. Funny enough, the first post being about me judging myself for writing in the first place sounds like the most cliche way to start off a blog. I guess no matter how much you want to be different, you will always converge back to the mean.