Personal archive
Writing
Thoughts, findings, and ideas for future work. Search the archive, browse everything together, or filter by type.
Beating a Broken Bureaucracy: Make Yes Easier Than No
Excessive bureaucracy, especially when completely incompetent as a whole, very rightfully irritates many, because it directly affects one’s life in one or more meaningful aspects. When you are not in any position to...
LLMs Can Discover Cures for Diseases
Many people argue that large language models (LLMs), in their current form, cannot discover cures for diseases like cancer because they are trained to predict tokens rather than understand or interact with the...
Natural-Sparsity Acceleration for Ternary LLMs
Tests whether the natural zeros in pretrained ternary LLMs justify a bitmap/sign GEMV engine over five-trit packing. They help only when zeros are common and weight reads are expensive.
Some Startups Exist to Solve a Problem, And Others Exist to Be Startups
I’ve been working with computers and technology since I was around nine, and I’m now nineteen. Most of that time has been spent privately tinkering with and building software across web development, backend systems...
Unshackled From Money, Free to Pursue Our Dreams
Lionel Robbins defined economics in 1932 as "the science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses," and this definition remains highly influential...
Hardware-Aware Additive Quantization for LLM Inference on AMD Zen 5
Many quantization methods prioritize reconstruction quality and adapt the resulting representation to available hardware. This proposal instead begins with a specific hardware primitive and derives the quantization format and kernel around it. Permaq is my...
I Don’t Think LLMs Are the Final Architecture of Superintelligence
Modern LLMs are increasingly multimodal, so calling every LLM purely "text-based" is no longer entirely accurate. Images, audio, video, and other inputs can also be represented and processed by these systems. However...
An Agent-First Compiled Programming Language
Elon Musk recently said, “The next step is getting rid of “source code” entirely and just making an efficient binary directly with AI.” I largely experimented with this idea through my Athena project a few years ago, in which fine-tuned large language...
Internationally Deployable Public Emergency Medical Infrastructure
This proposal succinctly explores the possibility of research and engineering work focusing on a form of internationally deployable public medical infrastructure designed to provide immediate, rapid, safe support when a person experiences a life-threatening...
Running Oversized GGUF Language Models On Low-RAM Hardware Using System Memory Mapping
I briefly covered the idea of running oversized language models on your own hardware in my previous post, but I think it's deserving of its own. The problem with local LLMs right now is that they're too dumb for...
Increased Feasability of Local LLM Inference On Consumer Hardware
Local LLM inference on consumer hardware has been in a weird place for a while. You can certainly run smaller, quantized models locally, but they are very often less intelligent than a brick. Hardly anyone is using...
Employers Shouldn't Be Proud Of Overworking Their Employees
There's a difference between critical, high-stakes deadlines for groundbreaking technologies that can positively transform the world, and a highly bureaucratic, often fundamentally unnecessary corporation that...
Analysis On The Potential Of Aerospike Space Propulsion
This research article evaluates aerospike rocket engines as a potential successor to conventional bell nozzles. It argues that aerospikes can maintain higher efficiency across a wider range of altitudes through altitude compensation, overcoming a key limitation of traditional rocket nozzles. The paper finds that historical aerospike programs were constrained primarily by materials and manufacturing limitations rather than flaws in the concept itself, and concludes that modern advances in additive manufacturing, high-performance alloys, and computational design have made the technology increasingly viable for future launch vehicles and spacecraft.
The Often Misplaced Focus of Americans And Our Dying Infrastructure
It goes without saying that every country has its own set of unique problems and obstacles, and many Americans wouldn't be wrong in pointing out the obstacles that foreign countries face. However, simultaneously, in...
Analysis of Swatch's “Bioceramic” Material: An Apparent Balance Between Luxury and Practicality
Bioceramic is a proprietary ceramic-polymer composite material developed by Swatch, combining approximately 2/3rds zirconium-oxide ceramic with 1/3rd bio-sourced castor oil polymer. The ceramic component preserves...
Properties and Future Applications of Aluminum Oxynitride Ceramic
Aluminum oxynitride (ALON) is a transparent polycrystalline ceramic material that combines broad-spectrum optical transmission with high hardness, mechanical strength, and thermal stability.1 Originally developed for...
Space Is The Final Frontier
Space is the final frontier of exploration. Like Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, a Russian rocket scientist once said, "Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot live in a cradle forever." The sun's expansion and Earth...
Shanghai is the best city in the world
I've lived in China for close to 8 months now, and will continue to live here until at least 2029 (though I will travel back to America during this time every so often). I think Shanghai is the best city in the world...
Your Native Language Is Proof You Can Master Anything
If you ever need direct evidence that practice + feedback makes perfect, and that working on or studying one thing for a long time will make you proficient in it, simply look at your ability to speak your native...
Programming With LLMs Has Become So Powerful
This is already common knowledge at this point, but large language models have changed the programming game so incredibly, you no longer need to write code by hand to build an entire software ecosystem. If you are a...
University Leadership and Creativity
One of the many things I've noticed in my time in university thus far has been that university leadership in general, as well as many of the higher-ranking admins, genuinely believe that they are fueling creativity...