Essays

See also my Book Reviews.

(Not) Spoofing Hotmail

July 21st, 2023

In which a friend and I try and fail to spoof an expired email protocol.

Sartorial Display

July 1st, 2023

Wearing clothing deliberately.

The Legacy and Experience of MIT: Safetyism, the Nixon enemy list, and the loss of innocence with Luke Igel

June 16th, 2023

Luke and I talk about our experience at MIT and its history.

Energy Practice as Longevity Intervention

March 18th, 2023

Cultivating energy capacity can increase your subjective lifespan.

Implicit-explicit gradient of nondual awareness or consciousness-as-such

March 17th, 2023

“You are standing in front of the mirror, and all you can see is what appears in the mirror. The mirror simply reflects what is in the room, without changing any of the objects. The brightness of the room is global awareness. The amount of furniture is phenomenal content. Nondual awareness is the mirror, and it contains everything open to your perception.”

*Technology is not inevitable

March 8th, 2023

Claims about the inevitability of any given technology rest on bad foundations and are unhealthy for broader discourse.

Automation and Institutional Friction

February 19th, 2023

In which I argue that technological feasibility is not enough for automation to happen.

Objecting to Decision Theory

February 9th, 2023

A friend and I share our beef with decision theory.

Do what you want to become

January 19th, 2023

A snippet of thought, about careers and ways of being.

*Choosing a therapy

December 8th, 2022

I provide my opinion on a small subset of modalities, informed by two years of (nonprofessional) exploration. Helpful for people trying to navigate therapy or ‘self-healing', or if they are me two years ago.

How Open Source Machine Learning Software Shapes AI

September 27th, 2022

A 4k word blog post version of my thesis.

Dairik Amae on Zen and Practice

September 14th, 2022

A discussion with a former Zen monk turned teamaster.

Governing the Decentralized Commons

December 12th, 2021

Taking an Ostrom-informed digital constitutionalism lens to Web3. This also serves as an introduction to my project with Metagov.

Pruning in Brains and Machines

December 10th, 2021

“At one point, you and I were just a fertilized egg cell inside our mother’s womb. Over the next eight months, we grew a brain. When our mother gave birth to us, we were wet and confused.” A group essay for MIT’s 6.881: Tissue vs Silicon in Machine Learning. Featuring microglia eating synapses, Amdahl’s Law, and the Lottery Ticket Hypothesis.