Hello, world! ;)

I’ve attempted a blog on and off ever since my computer science teacher suggested that I should start one back in 7th grade, but none of my attempts ever proved especially fruitful. Recently, several factors that have proven relatively conducive to a spirit of trying new things — including the rapid arrival of a new year and the relative freedom of second semester senior year — have inspired me to try my hand at it one last time. Given that 2025 in particular is of notable personal importance (bringing the end of high school, the onset of adulthood, and my first year at university), I’ve been left with some profound personal development and a lot to reflect on.

The seeds of this endeavor, however, were planted much earlier: underlined by the rapid development of a newfound interest in writing brought about by engaging with several books, historical documents, and (perhaps most appropriately) a few perceptive blog posts and essays scattered throughout the internet. In the past, I used to dismiss writing in favor of a more STEM-focused pursuit of technology and engineering, but I’ve come to realize the written and spoken word is, in many ways, more powerful. After all, assembly may have landed the Apollo spacecraft, but it was Kennedy’s speech that inspired men to do so great a thing¹.

There’s an adage known as Sturgeon’s law, or the 1957 declaration that “90% of everything is crap.” This law only seems to have amplified in the age of the endless feed, where the sensational yellow pages of the 20th century have morphed into addictive short form video, social media, the 24/7 News Cycle, and the absurd opinions of strangers that do nothing but provide stark evidence of the Dunning–Kruger effect. Our precious attention and mind space is fought over by several conflicting actors seeking to push their own agendas. With improving large language models and the prevalence of bot accounts, content online is not even guaranteed to be the product of our fellow man (see the Dead Internet Theory). I don’t think it’s 90% of everything that is crap; I reckon it’s closer to 99%. That is to say that without an active effort to seek out information, only one in every hundred pieces of content encountered is worth anything (and even that feels a little high).

What can be done in the midst of such a polluted information space? Obviously, the solution is to throw an ever-growing amount of compute and piles of venture capitalist cash at deep learning models until we finally reach the point where the Internet can be reduced to AI agents interacting with AI generated content served to them by AI algorithms for maximum engagement². At which point, humans need not apply, and we can render this whole ‘society’ thing obsolete. Until then, I’m tempted to take my high school English teacher’s advice to “just write.” Writing is far more than a purely rhetorical tool; it’s a method for articulating complex thoughts that and presenting them in a comprehensible way in a manner that, ironically, reminds me a little of the act of writing clever programs. Of course, it’s all the more powerful if such arguments are written with persuasion and flow, but that belabors the fundamental point of this undertaking.

High quality writing is alluring because it presents not just arbitrary data or occurrences, but a critical analysis and a fundamental picture of the world. The computer scientist Alan Kay once said, “A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points,” meaning that the act of reading insightful ideas is especially pertinent. But it is only in the few precious hours when I put pen to paper (or, more accurately, hand to keyboard) that I can cut through the constant contradictory background noise and laboriously turn the jumble of loosely connect ideas floating around in my frontal cortex into a personal point of view that is somewhat cohesive, comprehendable, and (hopefully) compelling. I think George Orwell put it best:

“If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them.”

With that said, I won’t make any promises about this blog’s future content; frankly, I don’t even know. My last attempts almost entirely focused on my technical endeavors, and I’ll surely continue that trend in many a blog to come, but I’m tempted to explore a wider ranger topics pertaining to my multifaceted interests this time around. Perhaps my intentions are, on a fundamental level, selfish — part of a Maslowian desire to self-actualize or to prove that I, for a fleeting moment, was really here, with everything I’ve done and all the insights I’ve discovered. At the very least, I might train my mind and become more focused and articulate in the process.

I wouldn’t be surprised if many of these posts amount to essentially long-form elaborations on the notes I’ve written to myself, scrawled in slips of eco-friendly paper torn from a cheap pocket notebook and shoved in a Manila folder I keep in my cupboard, or hastily typed into my Notes app and the .txt files sprinkled throughout my file system. Clearly, they were important to me at the time.

And who knows? Maybe someone, somewhere will derive some value from this little venture of mine. If even a single interesting half-thought transpires from these writings, that would be enough.