Being a biology olympiad champion was not an antidote to the pang of loneliness, dissecting his cardiac essence with scalpel-like intensity. As Endif walked across campus, at every corner, he came across clusters of friends laughing and intertwined. His visual field blurred and the emotional noise-to-signal ratio overflowed.

On a depressing evening, a virtual greeting card appeared in his inbox. Endif raised his eyebrows and clicked.

“To Endif, the intense nerd” The greeting card was fully immersive with the ambience of a pristine boreal forest. “May I introduce myself as c5h9no4, a fellow nerd.”

“I want to tell you a story. In 1853, Netochka Nezvanova invented a mechanical device capable of plotting the integral of a function decades ahead of anyone else. The early automated ability to solve differential equations could’ve sparked a revolution in physics and engineering, a vision that burned in Netochka’s quiet intense eyes. But Netochka was lonely and broke. No experts cared to reply to her outreach. She died a nameless nobody in some Siberian forest.”

Repeating the same mistake is dumb. Let’s connect Netochkas of the world to allow flourishing in their ultimate form

c5h9no4 was a glowing molecule floating in the air. They covered Endif’s eyes and took him out on a run. When Endif reopened his eyes, hundreds of geeks waved to him under the sun—a whorling liquid ball of pineapple fire. After a lasting night with the sorrow of the soul, Endif entered a world with awesome heat and intense clarity.

“The world is a dark forest where high-potential nerds hide behind trees fearing ridicule.” The molecule expressed. “If we act as an ant colony that discovers such nerds in the wild and bring back a trail of open source projects and public communications, an intense geeky diaspora building hard sci-fi will emerge.”

Fast forward 2 months, Endif was in a well-lit, wooden room with a dozen young energetic geeks. He was sitting on top of soft dry grass. The room smelled faintly of pine. Everything in the room resembled a microforest.

A futuristic girl flashed out of a purple square portal and projected network diagrams onto the wall. “If a mesh is sufficiently connected with each node’s bandwidth utilized, information can be routed efficiently. Two peers can share detailed models quickly. But in a hierarchical network, a manager could only pass on a shallow understanding.”

To increase social connectivity, Endif climbed out the window and leaped to an adjacent cluster, landing in a pile of soft leaves. He jumped with delight through a genetically engineered tree hundreds of meters tall!

Endif came up to an enby artist with flowy brown hair who was drawing manga on MS paint. Surprisingly, they were also gazing intently at a derivation for the non-recursive Fibonacci formula. Seeing Endif’s expression, they commented, “Yes, I am an artist but also a human fascinated by pure math.”

“My friend calls Stephen Wolfram for hours every weekend to live code” A random voice interjected. “He rarely sleeps and works until 4 am.”

“Oh, one of our project acquaintances had non-24-hour sleep and doctors refused to acknowledge it.” c5h9no4 commented.

“Bruh actually? I heard somewhere that the average human's circadian cycle is 25 hours.” Another voice chimed in. “The big consequence is that most people are night owls. Also, Mars colony.”

This guy was never seen sleeping and only ate cans of Pringles instead of having breakfast, lunch, or dinner.

Endif, exasperated, started obsessing over productivity by working 100 hours per week, spending his days pouring over endless Yudkowsky and the Codex. One day this Polysleep guy sat next to him with a tray of junk food. “Working yourself ragged is not a virtue!” He admonished. “The goal is to achieve impact over the long term, not per day. Have you ever wondered what your tasks would be like if there was an AI optimizing your life?”

Endif pondered and guessed: “Polysleeping like you to be productive 120 hours a week?”

“Wrong!” Polysleep guy asserted. “By focusing on top goals, I can goof around all the time. My AI assistant Abraham first uses NLP and Maslow’s hierarchy to interpret my long-term goals. Then, it generates probabilistic subgoals influenced by historical data. It solves Markov Decision Processes to restructure items to incentivize long-term actions optimally. For example, I get 50 Photons for vc-ing with a fellow nerd, 1 for thinking about what to eat, and 2 for spending my day on Instagram.4 By simply looking one step ahead and maximizing pseudo-reward, I can self-actualize. Abraham actively assesses my progress and moves me forward, optimizing for human flourishing rather than engagement. We also have coffee chats with Freud, Erikson, B.F. Skinner, Piaget, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and many others trajectory models on the platform.”

Polysleep guy talked way too much and could not stop fidgeting for one single second! Dear God, he was pure mental chaos, stuffing 100 chocolates into his mouth, beatboxing, banging his head, and calling friends as he co-worked beside Endif, despite a clear sign that said “< 30 dB”. Endif moved to a separate cluster but Polysleep guy bounced around the clusters and bugged Endif every 5 minutes. He was so annoying yet kind of quirky.

Endif saw an AI model named ‘Vincent’:

Let A be the character's age (years); Let C be the career age (years); A = 18, C = 0.

0 ≤ C < 7: Explore your passions! Get heartbroken and rejected from careers to realize you’re after all not interested in everything.

7 ≤ C < 10: Let P be path age (years), P = 0. Alternate between honing skills alone and working under a mentor. Your standards will always exceed your skills but notice gradual improvement.

10 ≤ C < 12: Meet awesome people. Increase your chances of being in the right place at the right time. Start a project with the coolest people around you and take leadership roles.

12 ≤ C < 14: At P = 7, you’re finally able to convey your visions with skill. The time of your life!

14 ≤ C < 16: Oh no! Your career trajectory is trending downward. Um, you might encounter a few nontrivial health problems.

17 ≤ C < 19: The age where you’re not so productive.

C = 19: Oof, you die.

C > 19: You become internationally recognized.

What an awful life! Endif selected Erikson.

“Ready to tackle challenges? There are 8 stages in my theory.”

Current conflict: Intimacy v.s. Isolation.

“Let’s go Endif!” Polysleep guy cheered and shrieked while rolling his r’s, “I’m betting 100 Photons on your prediction market!”

A friend got featured on national TV under the headline “Get ready to break some records!”

“In late 2024, we’re bringing together 1000+ of the world’s most innovative, ambitious youths in Waterloo, Canada.”5 He stated to the reporters.

Networking events sound stressful! Endif thought. His stress was instantly replaced by reward anticipation due to his neural implant. At the event, he was super-stimulated and chatted with everyone. Back to Lightforest, he felt another high and accomplishment. Then, Endif felt like crashing down the hedonic treadmill. He kicked the wall with tears, screamed at the lack of change, and was on the fringe of giving up. The geeks at Lightforest were highly empathetic and taught him that true change could take years.

A geek bitterly posted that Lightforest was a toxic cult that didn’t get him money, a job, or a girlfriend. “This community is full of scammers!” The internet jumped to conclusions, despite hundreds of members who did groundbreaking research, joined or started their organizations, and improved thousands of lives! It’s a rare cluster of people who truly cared about bringing sci-fi to life. Some geeks remarked that if Lightforest had early success, it would acquire big organization problems and a suffocating fear of failure…

The trees in the forest flourished, synchronized to a golden hue, and held out their branches with full openness to embrace the snow. One evening, Endif gazed out at the sparkling snow illuminated by the streetlights. He had come from darkness into a bright sci-fi world with geeks.

But yikes! He made a dumb mistake in his recent synthetic biology video, which had already been viewed by millions! Instead of cringing like before, he smiled gently at the stochasticity of life. While his desires always exceeded his skills, he was making compounding progress and felt energized.

Nerd isolation is a type of involuntary and subjectively limiting suffering. Let’s ignite the Netochkas of the world. We shall build Lightforest, a decentralized geek diaspora, glowing brightly to bring hard sci-fi to life.

Measurements of Decay by K.K. Edin. Describes speedrun from pure philosophical abstraction to applied quantitative trading. From one person to global company, from unemployed to constantly hustling, from true neutral to neutral evil. Invariant: human misery.

The City Coat of Arms Describing a city-scale scope-creep lasting centuries long.

Journal of My Other Self Poetically written. Having chronic illness in Germany a writer is life goals!!! I had already written about this in previous note.

Recoltes et Semailles Scripts written by Grothendieck after voluntarily leaving the field of mathematics. This is interesting to read in comparison with Shape of a Life, Shing Tung Yau's biography where he builds differential geometry infrastructure for 20th century mathematics. Both people lead by intuition, and then rigour. Interestingly, the Recoltes et Semailles translations differ wildly, possibly presenting as feral academic journal...

Flowers for Algernon Peak application of stage psychology. I have already ranted about it on substack, "a direct manifestation of psychometrics and 1950 dominant stage psychology theories" with a hasty ending.

Lu, Reshaping by Madeleine Thien Have ranted about this on Twitter ~Sept 2025. Is one a reliable execution-first Asian, or seen as a compliant, passive person devoid of risk-taking? I think I share neural structures with the author.

Signs and Symbols Vladimir Nabokov Everything is a cipher, and he is the theme...The silhouette of his blood corpuscles, magnified flit over the vast plains...A colleague said he tried to fly. What he really wanted to do, is to tear a hole in his world and escape. I really just like unreliable narrators. Every time when I befriend a new individual, they're at the edge of what I could cognize. People would fall out of the circle, just like non-fiction unreliable narrators.

The Picture of Dorian Gray Craving beauty and youth transfers into relationships. See the turning point: "The beautiful passage— Thou knowest the mask of night is on my face, Else would a maiden blush bepaint my cheek For that which thou hast heard me speak to-night—

was declaimed with the painful precision of a schoolgirl who has been taught to recite by some second-rate professor of elocution." This quote is showing:

1. Idealization-devaluation inflection point
2. The commonest thing in the education system where elegant physics and mathematics become boring to many

Description of Scents in the general category of "Superstimuli" in Dorian Gray: And so he would now study perfumes and the secrets of their manufacture, distilling heavily scented oils and burning odorous gums from the East. He saw that there was no mood of the mind that had not its counterpart in the sensuous life, and set himself to discover their true relations, wondering what there was in frankincense that made one mystical, and in ambergris that stirred one’s passions, and in violets that woke the memory of dead romances, and in musk that troubled the brain, and in champak that stained the imagination; and seeking often to elaborate a real psychology of perfumes, and to estimate the several influences of sweet-smelling roots and scented, pollen-laden flowers; of aromatic balms and of dark and fragrant woods; of spikenard, that sickens; of hovenia, that makes men mad; and of aloes, that are said to be able to expel melancholy from the soul.

At another time he devoted himself entirely to music, and in a long latticed room, with a vermilion-and-gold ceiling and walls of olive-green lacquer, he used to give curious concerts in which mad gipsies tore wild music from little zithers, or grave, yellow-shawled Tunisians plucked at the strained strings of monstrous lutes, while grinning Negroes beat monotonously upon copper drums and, crouching upon scarlet mats, slim turbaned Indians blew through long pipes of reed or brass and charmed—or feigned to charm—great hooded snakes and horrible horned adders. The harsh intervals and shrill discords of barbaric music stirred him at times when Schubert’s grace, and Chopin’s beautiful sorrows, and the mighty harmonies of Beethoven himself, fell unheeded on his ear. He collected together from all parts of the world the strangest instruments that could be found, either in the tombs of dead nations or among the few savage tribes that have survived contact with Western civilizations, and loved to touch and try them. He had the mysterious juruparis of the Rio Negro Indians, that women are not allowed to look at and that even youths may not see till they have been subjected to fasting and scourging, and the earthen jars of the Peruvians that have the shrill cries of birds, and flutes of human bones such as Alfonso de Ovalle heard in Chile, and the sonorous green jaspers that are found near Cuzco and give forth a note of singular sweetness. He had painted gourds filled with pebbles that rattled when they were shaken; the long clarin of the Mexicans, into which the performer does not blow, but through which he inhales the air; the harsh ture of the Amazon tribes, that is sounded by the sentinels who sit all day long in high trees, and can be heard, it is said, at a distance of three leagues; the teponaztli, that has two vibrating tongues of wood and is beaten with sticks that are smeared with an elastic gum obtained from the milky juice of plants; the yotl-bells of the Aztecs, that are hung in clusters like grapes; and a huge cylindrical drum, covered with the skins of great serpents, like the one that Bernal Diaz saw when he went with Cortes into the Mexican temple, and of whose doleful sound he has left us so vivid a description. The fantastic character of these instruments fascinated him, and he felt a curious delight in the thought that art, like Nature, has her monsters, things of bestial shape and with hideous voices. Yet, after some time, he wearied of them, and would sit in his box at the opera, either alone or with Lord Henry, listening in rapt pleasure to “Tannhauser” and seeing in the prelude to that great work of art a presentation of the tragedy of his own soul. When I was first prototyping with scents someone recommended me sensuous applications right away, followed by, as neutrally stated as possible, wine industry

Medea Greek Tragedy. I also wrote about this in substack

How to Lose the Time War A poetic book which shows a rare, healthy sapphic dynamic.

Sorrows of Young Werther Read in 2018, it's about unrequited love. If I was a historical period, I would claim late enlightenment to early industrialization/romantic era. This is very much like postrat, right? Alternative (unranked) choice would be the turn of the 20th century to early cybernetics. This is also like, disillusionment ages. Another... choice would be 1990s - the present for computer engineering ingenuity!

All Will Be Well, Yiyun Li. I could not make a romance out of Lily’s story. Could anyone cry for 3 days and 3 nights? What right did I have to tell the boy to express his heartbreak more poetically... So many tears, sorrow only dessicated me, tears came to an end, dessication persisted.

Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates I listened to the fantastic reading by Akhil Sharma. There are some people who think in terms of ethics, which I do not relate to, ingested in small amounts this is interesting.

Confessions of a Shinagawa Monkey Ultimate love, ultimate loneliness.

Puella Magi Madoka Magica Trolley problems as anime. One perspective: Attempting to understand human values from a purely statistical point of view, presenting obviously wrong scenarios and scrutinizing what exactly is wrong For all the happiness you wish somebody they could be granted with equal misery. Came across this because I was on lesswrong.

Needy Streamer Overload Translated from a Japanese blog post by the developer of the game: Maybe this feeling is just a moment of hormonal adolescence. In two or three years, she might be stable, working part-time at a café and aiming for vocational school. Maybe she’ll attend night school, surrounded by friends with similar sensibilities. By 18, she could be a perfectly ordinary woman, adapted to society. Her chest fuller, her bones harder, these toy-sized lolita clothes wouldn’t fit anymore. What we reject now might just be a passing confusion, and she may never wear frills again.

“They taught us only cute, beautiful things. But once my chest started to grow, everyone’s eyes changed. Suddenly sex and romance became normal topics, gross ones. No one thinks it’s strange. Girls are expected to accept crude words from boys, and if you get angry you’re told you’re no fun. Common sense gets rewritten into vulgarity and everyone accepts it. No one keeps dolls anymore. When they’re lonely, they talk to someone of the opposite sex through their phone.”

On the table: miso soup, salmon, rice. Her mother had made it. She really is human, after all, eating ordinary dinners like this. Repeating the ordinary, little by little, she’ll probably get closer to ordinary too.

Inside Mari MtF transition manga, highly depressing.

The Call of Cthulhu Read several chapters and found the horror unconvincing, so I stopped reading.

Eternal Hospital The idea is not novel, but the English translation is just like insane Chinese literature.

Deep Undercover: My Secret Life and Tangled Allegiances as a KGB Spy in America Aside from how attention-seeking the title is, I read this in 2018 and find the temporal setting really interesting.

Haven't finished reading:

• Permutation City
• Dream of the Red Chamber. It's really long...
• introductory Chinese History. Just getting into the topic.

• Linus Pauling and the chemistry of life ⭐
• Living Proof: Stories of Resilience in mathematics ⭐
• Ben Barres Autobiography ⭐
• Shape of a Life
• Permutation City ⭐
• Accelerando (reading)
• Hormone Hunters, the Discovery of Adrenaline
• Ender's Game
• Measurements of Decay
• The End of Eternity
• Flowers for Algernon
• At the Mountains of Madness illustrated by Gou Tanabe ⭐
• Solutions and Other Problems
• How to Lose the Time War
• Arc of a Scythe series
• Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman ⭐
• The City Coat of Arms
• The Savage Mind
• Summa Technologiae
• Temporary Autonomous Zones
• Cute accelerationism
• Gormenghast Trilogy (paused)
• Ontology of Childhood, Viktor Pelevin
• Journal of my other self ⭐
• Signs and Symbols
• The Picture of Dorian Gray
• The Count of Monte Cristo Follow me on Goodreads!

Shortform (Befriend me on Curius!)

• Audrey Tang - Lessons learned from Contributing to Open Source Communities ⭐ - I really liked the neural patterns of Audrey but don't have more sources from them
• Take Your Time, Nicky Case ⭐ - Nicky Case is awesome and has been my primary influence since teenage
• Notes on Work, Weike Wang ⭐
• Coming out simulator, Nicky Case ⭐
• Falken Blog - Why Envy Dominates Greed
• Doctors Are Not Scientists
• Going Infinite, Book Review by Zvi
• Driven by Compression Progress
• Is scientic genius a thing of the past
• Karen Uhlenbeck Abel Prize Interview
• In and Out of Love with Math, Alex Kontorovich
• Review of Great And Desperate Cures
• Why we don't have hobbies: A day in the life of a "time-poor" Filipino
• Posts from Underground by Nova Nevedoma, a parody of Notes from Underground
• surfaces.cx, lainzine
• Cleanest Air within the Yamanote Line Circle - feels like a parody, but it's genuine. Words can be used in paradoxical ways both the semiotics and the symbolic could clash, quoting Le Guin
• Don't call yourself a programmer
• Map of Online Communities, xkcd
• I had a dream, by Shtetl Optimized
• The Thing About Debating by Ashish Xiangyi Kumar ⭐
• Searching for Outliers by Ben Kuhn
• John Moffat
• Machines of Loving Grace (the poem)
• Ten Things You Don't Do in Dubai - BBC News
• From Afghanistan with Love

Other media:

• Nadia the Secret of Blue Water
• Iran, 1 and 2 on Geocities
• Jiabin Huang Awesome Tips

Want to read:

• Cryptonomicon
• 万历十五年
• Left Hand of Darkness
• The Day Lasts More Than a Century
• Divine Comedy
• The Floer Jungle
• Hikikomori, Adolescence without End