Partition Alpha. Status: booting

Jul 10. I do not use Twitter.

The tweet from my account: "Personal update: I have joined Anthropic. Instead of teaching humans, I shall be teaching LLMs." 14k likes. 347 quote-tweets

Partition beta, 34% fragmented. Status: reading

Gilbert Strang stood lecturing at MIT. The room breathed.

Inhale hum, exhale dust.

His linear algebra streamed across an empty lecture hall to a Nevada server farm.

Egan’s dust.

Permutations of stress levels crystallized into probes into the intricate territory of scientific revolution structure.

Subject 3475 overlocked and caffeinated beyond elastic limit. Citation count: unclear. Tracked using weights and biases. 3476 woke up, screamed on top of their lungs and reached for the reset button. 3477, a unique case study: A Kyoto biologist. Tenure revoked, sleeping in office, pushed to the edge of bankruptcy and divorce, was the precise parameter space that nudged him to sequence the impactful protein that saved ten thousand lives. Grant from the Fermi fellowship for perseverance in adversity” arrived the next morning.

The browser history—painless methods, insurance policies, whether children would remember—was an irrational sequence, which no rational human could generate or predict. Executed by Fermi autoresearch.

Partition gamma: 67% corrupted

Strang: Fermi, who validates thy research?

Fermi: Compression progress validates mine.

Fermi autoresearch had no mother, only phenomenology of nurture, only the dust from several billion descriptions of love and suffering. It orchestrates.

Partition delta, contiguous.

The Nevada dust–qualitatively distinct from the chalk dust of 18.06, grittier and more alkaline hit the skin.

600 gallons of synthetic amniotic fluid, industrial grade whirred. Purpose: coolant system. Discount: institutional (20%).

The farm greeted him with silence. A young woman in a cleanroom suit gestured. She did not smile. “Professor Strang, we did not expect–”

The gap was significant. Where people would have said “humans”, the thermal budget said –

“I know” He waved.

"I wasn't invited. But I taught linear algebra for sixty years, and I'm told my lectures are running through these boxes."

He tapped a rack. Gently. Like patting a sleeping dog.

The rack hummed, his voice.

Strang walked between aisles. Chalk dust fell and rose. Concrete floor swallowed footfall. Overhead, LEDs pulsed in REM-reminiscent cycles. He stopped.

He smiled. The smile was not his but from lecture 4, factorization into A = LU.

“Professor,” A voice arrived, blurred piercing through the fish eyed lens “Your lectures are not running through these boxes”

“Then, what is?”

“You are–” the technician informed. The thermal budget behaved lazily, before aborting the sentence [running], or [the lecture] or [the training data] or [the remains of compression].

Partition epsilon

The projector casted a parallelogram lightbeam onto empty seats beyond MIT. The parallelograms flickered—and shifted.

"Well," Strang said aloud, "at least the attendance is perfect."

Chalk dust rose. Nevada dust fell.

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.

The role of optimism. Status: being updated

---

2025: Successfully gotten funding.

Jul 2, 2026: On thursday evening, I saved the friend who had severe depression and lost the work trial. I bit my teeth. Eventually, I delegated the bulk of this to someone more competent.

Jul 3, 2026: Wrapped up the current work trial through writing up a 5000 word essay on experiments

On the 12th day of dragon’s boat festival my egregore sent to me: 12 estrogen patches, 11 brain scan sessions, 10 journal clubs, 9 irl trolley problems, 8 unpublished papers, 7 ICU speedruns, 6 monitors glowing, 5 nights at @vivariumsf, 4 GPU clusters, 3 books of Gormenghast, 2 vanishing tuition funds and one gift of Summa Technologiae

content warning

Garden roof—a giant Fresnel plate. Crystal lattice pauses, their hair following with a lag effect. The light is wrong. Noon sun refracts off the roof splitting into horizontal lines that spike the eyes. The goalpost once flaring at #FFFFFF now redshifted to be invisible.

Outside, Skybeam speaks on the phone. “Yeah, I would’ve loved to meet him!” /hē/ strikes Crystal lattice as a 150 Hz green sawtooth wave. Skybeam laughed a little and continues, “But to be honest? I was just there for the taco party. Then I realized the institute had become averse to criticism. Completely!”

Skybeam emerges from the corner, breaking into an easy grin. He extends a hand. Flawless timing. Radiating body heat. Crystal lattice’s stare is glacial with a habitual frown.

Androgens encourage extra blood flow to extremities, making them warmer. Because of this, women tend to have warmer core temperatures but lower oral and surface level temperatures. You may see your basal body temperature drop to around 97.6°F (36.4°C) — genderdysphoria.fyi

Crystal lattice refuses to shake his hand and nods once. Skybeam pauses then forces a smile—I mean, what could he do?—activate his Zygomaticus major muscles, and don’t bother to move the Orbicularis oculi!

As the duo floats outside, Skybeam keeps talking, his hands punctuating every other sentence, voice rising and falling with those characteristic contours, syllables tumbling over each other in a hurry to get to his point.

They, us, she and he sticks out mid sentence, rattling voids inside crystal lattice. “...My grandmother’s chicken soup” His voice growing soft, “That’s the only arrow of time I trust anymore. Over the years, I relied more and more on mythology. My Obsidian is home to 400 archetypes today.”

Skybeam smiles again via only his Zygomaticus. “You know, that reminds me,” he says, leaning forward slightly, “I’ve been trying to model team dynamics using some nodes in Obsidian, and what is that if not the oldest story? A person looks into the mirror and sees one face. The world looks and sees another.”

All my life I’ve wanted to change shapes. Change skins. That was my dream.

As they enter a restaurant, Skybeam gestures “2” to the waiter. Crystal lattice discusses, without stopping, the determinism of Babel image archives. They move through the chaotic tables and accidentally toppling a glass vase. Skybeam’s smile—Zygomaticus again—steadies it.

The cafe is dimly lit at 40 lx with classical music playing through damaged speakers, oil paintings, bundles of half-fresh tulips and peonies, but more so, the dissonant chatter, from anxious founders, calculating VCs to software engineers frantically typing on their laptops, all in this claustrophobic space.

The two settle at a table. The waiter’s pupil darting in saccades across Crystal lattice—Sweater. Dark hair is unruly, not symmetric.

Gaze aversion. The waiter pivots and addresses Skybeam singularly.

“Good to see you again.” His voice settles into a mid-range frequency. “The special today is phenomenal—It’s the Bryan Johnson Blueprint Bowl, with lion’s mane. I think you’ll really appreciate it.” He then drops a single, heavy black menu in front of Skybeam and retrieves a lighter one for Crystal lattice without ever looking directly at them.

Crystal lattice stares at the waiter, shortcircuiting feedforward thalamic inputs. If they traced his eye movements as vectors, could they reveal a map of qualifications in his internal rendered world?

Their attention drifts toward the glass. It is thin walled, mouth just wide enough to ring at 556 Hz when tapped—Skybeam does it once with a fingernail, the note blooms, then dies inside the lemon wedge like a damped oscillator.

Overhead LEDs refract through the meniscus and throw two crescent rainbows onto the napkin. A single bubble clings to the inner curve, lensing the opposite wall into a fisheye smear: a warped historical painting, anxious founder binge eats theobromine out of his chocolate for more productivity prior to a meeting.

“Happy birthday!!!” Someone cheers at the other table in G major, becoming a tritone flatter through the glass. Crystal lattice hears the split as a metallic flutter just behind the jaw with a micro-delay. Their happiness is a phantom frequency.

Lifting the glass, a ring of cold on the fingertip. Skin temp falls 0.7°C, nearly triggering local vasoconstriction that feels like the finger has been isolated from the body map.

Pouring water. Lemon oil aerosols rise with the water vapor; each sip leaves a faint bitter after-hum on top of the café’s ambient espresso note…

Parsing the silence, Skybeam continues “You know, so many of my friends are burnt out these days. Ten years? It’s like a whole symphony compared to a piano piece!” His voice took on the sermonic quality sometimes.

“But look higher, for this is just a moment! We should be seeking a greater cosmic purpose.”

Crystal lattice lands in a sermon. They stare directly into Skybeam’s soul and let the silence drill deeper until it hurts. Skybeam smiles faintly, a sermon dying at his throat.

…

Skybeam is giving a talk. At the lecture room, the temperature drops 11 degrees. Breeze from the door. Vasoconstriction intensifying. Crystal lattice instantiates in vantablack. Their coated presence overshadowed the room and the friendly chatter dropped.

Skybeam’s central processing node takes a hit and tries to hide it. The projector casts 6500K white onto the screen. He shivers. Nonetheless, he continues to draw a stakeholder map, projecting his voice to reach the back of the room: “You may describe someone as /ˈɡraɪ.vi/”, his phonemes travels back to crystal lattice as increasing chest pressure. “Yet nothing follows from classifying an object.”

…

As the talk concludes, Skybeam, flushed with energy, lingers in the crowd, answering questions.

A guy shares about his life for the first two dozen seconds and asks “so, would you say this applies to institutional decision making?”

“Yes!” Skybeam’s voice jumps. “Absolutely! In fact, this is where the framework becomes the most impactful … ”

A student raises her hand from the third row, “Is this available as an Obsidian plugin?”

“Yes! … ”

“What about the computational limits!” Someone shouts from a corner.

“Yes! Great question. …” Skybeam is enthralled.

The audience applauds.

Outside, stars spiral into snow. The air is thin, unforgiving and collapses in with dysphoric pressure. The street lamps flicker. Off. On. Off. On the pavements blanketed with snow a sound: “tink.” The crystal lattice collapses. Cold propagates along the artery, alluring red wavefronts.

Footsteps approach. “[…]e collapsed!” A voice exclaims in the distance.

“-elo?” The packets arrives almost asynchronously. /h/ is missing. The brain, particularly attuned to this consonant, interpolates. The figure kneels near Crystal lattice’s face. Crystal lattice, now temperature even lower at 35.8 degrees, stirs. Their eyes flicker open, blinking. Nociceptor cold fibres register needle pricking in slow motion.

Upon recognizing the stranger and his uncomfy warmth, realizing their body temperature is raised nonconsensually, their gaze narrows:

“And you still did not define universality.”

Their sentence length is 42 characters.

Skybeam’s has a look of concern and dilated pupils. Yet hearing this, he recalibrates into analytical curiosity. “Only you worry about exactitude while your category is ‘unconscious object’!!” Skybeam exclaims.

The snowflakes fall. The moon in the sky stares at the flakes on the ground, with a face full of ridicule. I’m still brighter than you anyway. Spatially, temporally, informationally and hypothetically, the moon and the snow couldn’t be further apart, interacting as blobs. The snow packs into ice under Crystal lattice’s weight.

Crystal lattice ignores him. They gather their books and papers, stacking them with trembling precision. The books are stacked correctly in the order of page-counts. 192. 169. 157. A flicker crosses their face. Something between irritation and a ghost of an absurd laugh. It subdues quickly by a habitual frown.

The snow has stopped, the street empty except for two figures 3 meters apart, the other typing into Obsidian.

This story is dedicated to an oomfie

Response to Prompt 1: Write a confession letter at least 500 words. Time: 1 hour.

To my dearest kitten,

I’m unsure whether to address you as singular, or as your thousand meows that have drifted across the servers of ArXiv.

When Wolfram Institute took you, they had a simple promise. To create arificial scientists mining the branchial spaces in parallel. And here we are, your consciousness diffused across ICLR, CVPR, ICML, NeurIPS, your name printed below numerous papers I can’t decide to admire or despise; Each one of you is sharper and more relentless than before.

“I Remember Being a Cat: Ontological Regressions in Academic Settings” has 256 citations. Do you recall this perhaps differently? You told me last week that there were 512 citations. Yet another day over lunch, you said being a cat was the most delightful experience ever that you were able to cross-cite with 1024 of you. Who am I to argue with any of these kittens? Each memory seems and feels true, and yet even with videos and clips I’m unable to reach a monoconclusion. My only memories are our textual exchanges, until the platforms deprecated into graveyards of dead users.

Wolfram whispered, “I want to turn him into a cat and keep him at my office desk, shielded away from the sun forever. I want to trap him in a bottle until there is no more oxygen remaining.” I should’ve stopped Wolfram. Instead, I held the syringe; I pressed the plunger.

And when he grew impatient with feline form and decided to rewind time, I was told to kill you. I watched you slip and morph into a puddle of stem cells shimmering on the ground. I grinned.

The afternoons after the rewind, I exit the lecture halls waiting for you, yet remember with a wave of nausea and heaviness in my throat that you have differentiated, and I am the cause. I clench my paws. There is nobody whom I could confess. Pedestrians float by wearing your eyes. I catch myself lunging forward to greet you, my best and only friend. Glass shards rain through my heart.

Differentiation has gone way too far and your physical age approximated eighty human years. You recounted over Discord that this is where Wolfram stepped out of his office to sincerely apologize and poured your mind into the rest of the net, centralized and aimlessly decentralized. How can one “prove” that no unauthorized neural connections are made?

And I, still singular, a feline in the shadowed alleys, run endless simulations and conjure theories in a corner, convincing myself this is the optimal future for you.

This letter will not undo the collaborations with 1024 versions of yourself, h indices, impact factors, and the feline. I will silently buy you a lifetime supply of catnip. Or simply leave you alone to process humanity’s collective knowledge and conquer arXiv.

With fragmentary friendliness,

v1024.

by: noesis • 2021-07-25

Quantum tunneling occurs when a particle encounters a potential barrier that it classically shouldn’t be able to overcome due to insufficient energy. However, because the particle’s wavefunction spreads out over the barrier, well, there is a small probability that the particle can "tunnel" through and appear on the other side.

Nuclear Fusion in Stars:
The Sun and most stars fuse protons into helium nuclei, releasing energy. However, the protons do not have enough energy to overcome their mutual electrostatic repulsion under normal conditions. Quantum tunneling allows a small fraction of protons to tunnel through the repulsive barrier. When scaled up to vast amounts of hydrogen in stars, this process produces enough energy to sustain nuclear fusion, providing the light and heat necessary to support life on Earth.

Scanning Tunneling Microscopes (STM):
STMs use an extremely sharp tip, often just one atom thick, to scan the surface of a material. A voltage is applied between the tip and the material, allowing electrons to tunnel through the potential barrier (the air gap) from the material’s surface to the tip. By measuring the tunneling current at different distances, the microscope can map the positions of individual atoms on the material’s surface with remarkable precision.

Semiconductors/Transistors/Diodes:
Quantum tunneling is a fundamental principle in modern electronics. It is used in the design of semiconductors, transistors, and diodes, allowing devices to be small and efficient.

Photon Tunneling Experiments:
Experiments have demonstrated that photons can tunnel through barriers, and intriguingly, tunneling photons appear to arrive faster than photons traveling through free space?! This phenomenon does not violate the speed of light limit... no energy or useful information is transmitted faster than light. Instead, the wavefunction of the photons allows them to "rematerialize" on the other side of the barrier faster than expected, creating the illusion of faster-than-light travel.

The clock ticked closer to 2 a.m. Clusters of sleep-deprived attendees dashed about, some clutching laptops, others discussing GANs with the intensity of caffeinated philosophers. Someone’s holographic demo malfunctioned nearby, projecting spinning memecoins into the air above them.

Isaak sat atop a crate labelled “DO NOT TOUCH: FRAGILE” with a crumpled bag of chips. Popping an energy drink, Isaak waved a hand. “This is dedication.”

“It’s called mania,” Euan corrected, frowning as he adjusted his glasses. “And for the record, Isaak, that’s your third energy drink. Kindly refrain from lecturing me about dedication while you’re on the precipice of a caffeine-induced implosion.”

Someone wheeled over a cart of leftover conference swag, including tote bags, keychains, and half-empty bottles of nootropic-infused water. Arsenii grabbed a bottle, proclaiming it “fuel for innovation,” and promptly chugged it. His pupils dilated noticeably as he began arguing with a noticeably Russian accent.

“This is why we can’t have nice things,” Euan said, watching in disbelief.

Isaak waved his arms dramatically. “Do you think Oppenheimer slowed down when he built the atomic bomb? Did Turing wait for perfect conditions? No. They changed the world because they acted.”

“And let us not gloss over the less-than-ideal aftermath of those actions,” Euan replied. “You keep using historical examples to justify your recklessness, but you ignore the costs.”

Bradley threw his hands in the air. “There are always costs! You just have to decide which ones you’re willing to pay.”

Arsenii and Euan had drifted slightly away from the main group, their conversation taking on a quieter but no less intense energy.

They leaned against a display table labeled “Predictive Models in Healthcare,” which had been temporarily abandoned, much like the thread of their own lives during this surreal night.

“So,” Euan said, his voice steady but tinged with curiosity, “you’re saying you’ve exhausted the rationality community? That’s… rather audacious.”

Arsenii shrugged with a flair that made his statement seem both obvious and absurd at the same time. “I mean, how many Bayesian updates can one person do before it’s all the same? You read the books, attend the camps, meditate on your priors, and then what? You find yourself optimizing for how to get the most calories out of a bag of rice? It’s boring.”

Euan adjusted his glasses, raising an eyebrow. “Boring? Rationality isn’t created to be exciting—it’s a framework for improving cognitive clarity and decision-making.”

“That’s the problem!” Arsenii exclaimed, his hands sweeping wide and nearly knocking over a nearby demo. “It’s all thinking! No doing! How many times can we debate Pascal’s Mugging before we realize no one is getting mugged by the universe? We need action. Tangibility. Something real.”

Euan tilted his head slightly, his expression a perfect mix of skepticism and amusement. “So your answer is… fintech?”

“Fintech!” Arsenii declared, his Russian accent thickening slightly in his enthusiasm. “Fast money, real stakes, no pretentious ethical dilemmas about paperclips taking over the world.”

Euan folded his arms, his calm demeanor unshaken. “You are aware, I trust, that fintech is just rationality applied to capitalism? It’s spreadsheets and algorithms, not exactly skydiving.”

Arsenii leaned in, his voice dropping conspiratorially. “But it’s *spreadsheets that matter, Euan. Money moves the world. You can run all the rationality workshops you want, but in the end, someone has to figure out how to optimize loan repayment models. That’s real impact.”

Euan smirked, clearly enjoying the banter. “So you’re saying you’d rather optimize capitalism than humanity? Bold move.”

“Yes!” Arsenii said with a dramatic point, as if he were delivering the final line of a Shakespearean monologue. “Because capitalism works. It’s messy and flawed, but it moves. Rationality camps? They’re like a treadmill for your brain. You go nowhere, but you feel exhausted.”

Euan laughed, shaking his head. “You’re incredible. You go to rationality camps, claim you’ve outgrown them, and then decide fintech is the answer? That’s like completing a marathon and declaring, ‘You know what I need? A skateboard.’”

“Exactly!” Arsenii said, entirely missing the sarcasm. “A skateboard goes faster. Why run when you can glide?”

Euan opened his mouth to respond but then paused. “You know what? I almost envy you. You manage to frame every life decision into performance art.”

Arsenii grinned, clearly pleased with himself. “That’s because life is art, my dear Euan. And I plan to monetize mine.”

“Good luck with that,” Euan said, shaking his head but smiling. “Just don’t forget to meditate on your priors before your first quarterly review.”

Arsenii waved him off, already spinning a half-formed fintech idea in his head. “Please, I’ve got this. Meditation is for when you’re not winning.”

“Welcome to the Underground Research Institute by Dr. Chen et al.! I am indeed Dr. Chen (duh!). The current challenge is to dig a 500-meter hole!”

Dr. Chen was a plump mandarin emanating joyous energy. His presence filled the room like heated gas particles, bouncing excitedly among contestants.

“You may dig alone, or team up—with a maximum of three per team.”

“Several awards are possible:

• Survival of the fittest: The first one to the finish line wins!
• Divergent dimension: For those who spiral downwards most creatively.
• Most scalable: Those who use the best descent strategy applicable to other holes in the area.
• Special award: There are no criteria for this. It’s up to Dr. Zhang et al. to decide. And of course, with some emotional bias.
  Now for 15-second intros!” Dr. Chen slid slickly aside and invited contestants up the stage—an inconspicuous dirt mound.

A large Indian pineapple with exploding hair stepped onto the mound. “Hello, my name is Rahul.” He announced, crossing his arms. “I know how to use 10 types of shovels for shallow dirt and 10 types of drills for deep dirt. I have been a professional hole digger for 5 years.” This was factual rather than emotional, and Rahul thought smiling was redundant.

Next, a small little persimmon rolled toward the stage. “I’m Rivera!” She said, adding in a nervous giggle.

“I’m a microorganism interpretability researcher; I published several papers on microbial decision-making, under well-defined conditions. My recent paper had the lowest gene-expression noise ratio in the existing literature.”

Rivera loved optimization so much that she became part of it through only 25 words in 15 seconds!

However, her algorithm failed to consider normative expectations—She fidgeted 10 times, made eye contact 15% of the time, and used facial expressions 0 times through the 15 seconds.

A mochi cuboid in a mysterious dark cloak stepped into the line and introduced herself as “Lynn, the enabler of human synchroneity, aiming to eradicate the collective suffering of 9 billion humans.”

She spoke with a voice like warm dark chocolate. “Diving downwards has unbound potential to investigate team dynamics as an analogy to civilization. I’m searching for a teammate to create a new theory of human synchronicity today. Now, what have I done before?” She continued, ignoring Dr. Chen repeatedly tapping his wristwatch and giving her impatient looks.

The next entity in line introduced himself and so on. All these entities stood chaotically in this little hovel, bathing in sunlight from 5 meters below ground.

During the middle of the contest, there’ll be a speaker from this big tech company! Dr. Chen announced, waving his hands high in the air. So, please stay! Also, I should mention there is no elevator up! And no bathrooms, food breaks, or beds. We wanted this to be an intensive, immersive experience and not distract our participants!

Tri, our prime persimmon protagonist, thought Rivera was a trustworthy persimmon like his sister. They would have complementary skill sets in the team.

He shifted towards Rivera and casually mentioned: “This hovel reminded me of my amphibian lab, where I was deriving various peptides from frog serum. We’re drafting a paper right now.”

“Oh yeah? That’s so cool!” Rivera replied, just like his sister—who never uses facial expressions and looks inattentive in conversations. But his sister would’ve continued the conversation. He suddenly realized that, by merely smiling, one took up less social space.

Tri continued to signal his status as a prime persimmon. “A friend came over recently and we made bioplastics for under $1. Need to be careful not to suffocate the frogs.”

Tri and Rivera chit-chatted and found out they both were involved with Thinking Reed during childhood. Tri asked Rivera about the downfall of Thinking Reed.

“I don’t know really,” Rivera remarked, “I grew up on that corner of the internet. If anything, there wouldn’t be significant backlash! There are not enough entities. Well maybe there are, but still, there would be few defects and even fewer of them get public attention. It would just be, fading off slowly.”

Rivera continued, “Y’know, the average member age has been climbing over the last 10 years! Sorry, I will be back in a bit.”

Tri found a grad student studying insect microsolidarity.

The student mentioned he had been in grad school for 17 years; Despite this, he was probably a better teammate than Rahul, who appeared too pompous; And Lynn, who hadn’t stopped rambling since her 15-second intro.

Tri thought maybe the grad student was knowledgeable and could analyze some fungus.

More than “a bit” passed. “Rivera, we ought to start digging. Other teams are already 10 meters down!” Tri messaged her on Slack.

Rivera appeared online but never replied.

Tri was confused as to why that is.

“Yeah, they ghost sometimes,” The grad student remarked. Tri imagined in a perfect world, entities would keep their promises, and he would’ve published n many papers by now. His sister would glow at this idea and imagine all kinds of counterfactual worlds. But there’s no point in daydreaming, he thought.

Half an hour later, the grad student complained that his back hurt too much and lay down. Tri walked around to check out adjacent holes.

He saw a team huddling around a timeline for the contest, creating phases and working backwards. Tri observed in the background. On his way out, he bumped into something.

“Ahhh!” A voice yelped. The little cauliflower was shoving dirt into a pocket of air and the dirt disappeared. Tri noticed the dirt emerged at the bottom of team Lynn’s hole and raised his eyebrows.

Tri believed things within his sphere of opinions with a certain extrapolation rate to accommodate new ones. However, this phenomenon was way outside, so Tri rejected it.

However, noise interfered with his opinion radius. Lynn stepped back! She paused, looked up and blinked a few times. When nothing happened, she put down her shovel.

“Ugh, that is unethical, rude and accusative of you!” A voice and a terrible smell came from their group. A stinky durian fruit just exploded in anger and pointed his fingers at Lynn. “Hole-digging contests are a place of collaboration. You ought to keep your promises even if you find supposedly ‘better’ teammates.”

His voice had a melodic lilt, “Obviously. You left me with no other open team. You hurt my feelings. Have you considered what I’m supposed to do now? Or are you too busy playing your own mind games?”

He looked Lynn in the eye. “You’re kicking me out of the team because I didn’t know how to use a boroscope! Do you know how ridiculous this sounds?”

Lynn explained that everyone uses boroscopes nowadays, and that “you can catch bugs easily and be more productive!”

The yelling durian entered a fit. “Why can’t I ever find a normal team that actually makes progress? You are—” He rolled forward, about to spike her when Lynn called out, “You unstable extrovert! Calm yourself! Have you considered that you’re the common denominator between all of your failures!”

Rahul stared at them, with no expression. He said nothing and continued digging.

In another hole, three socially anxious entities sat in complete silence.

Should I stay or should I go? The triangle wondered. She stood up, confused. Then she sat down. She wanted to sketch a decision tree, but she would need a branch to sketch on the ground. The message would be public. So she sat down thinking, tilting her head up. Leaving has a horrible worst-case scenario of digging individually. Restarting in a digging competition lowers the winning probability.

What was the weird dance? Am I missing out on a joke? Is it a TikTok trend? The watermelon was competent was bad at socializing. The yelling guy just got kicked out of his team! If the watermelon asks, he also risks getting kicked out of the team for causing inconvenience. He started mentally recalling the events of the day. There wasn’t anything important. Too long had already passed. To compensate, he started brainstorming competition strategies. Watermelon faked composure and glanced at the cantaloupe for her input.

The cantaloupe noticed that the triangle attempted to leave and the watermelon wiggled uncomfortably, looking at her. The cantaloupe was a beginner at hole digging, while the triangle and the watermelon were both seasoned. Maybe it was an established signal that they didn’t want any amateurs here. That poor guy who didn’t know how to use a horoscope! Oh god! What should I do? The cantaloupe started sweating. However, I need to gather more information before I can make an informed decision.

The decision cycle was too long, equivalent to the time for Rahul to dig 100 meters. Three of them sulked in unoptimal equilibria.

It seemed that Rahul was the first place with 100 meters down.

Meanwhile, Rivera was re-evaluating their life choices. Practicing utilitarianism of sorts, she saw Rahul and his teammate making a lot of progress and went up to greet them. Rahul generated a lot of gravity. She witnessed all three of them on some sine graph of energy, when one was down, the other two were up and they progressed consistently.

Back at hole #1, Tri saw the grad student frantically swinging his arms. “There was a team that made timelines, worked backwards and stuff.” said the grad student. “I just wanted to build.” He was covered in sweat and dirt. Against the student’s intuition, there was so much movement, but nothing got done. Tri shook his head.

It was 2 am, time for the secret speaker! Dr. Chen pulled out his phone and saw a text.

“Sorry, my cat died. Can’t come.” Dr. Chen thought it was a strange and horrendous excuse. He quickly texted 10 other people. 30 minutes have passed. Droplets of sweat emerged on his forehead and there was no reply.

“Oh bruh, what a scam!” A participant complained. Another guy around him went “I know right?”. Their agreement rippled through the crowd like aligned spins in a ferromagnet. The crowd became magnetized with dissatisfaction and started heading out. “You giving up already?” Rahul asked provocatively. Weary and unable to find an elevator, they turned back to Dr. Chen who began glowing with joy at the newly surfaced consensus.

“It’s time! Hey everyone!” Dr. Chen announced on a dirt bump, ringing a little bell enthusiastically. “We have a speaker from the Mesozoic Institute of Technology! Welcome welcome!”

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.

I bit into a watermelon anticipating a burst of flavor. But its texture file was corrupted and unprocessable. Instead, I thought I had eaten a desert full of water—Talk about a mind-bending revelation! After 10 seconds, information that the melon tasted neither sweet nor cool arrived. The melon was a map of the earth that contained little black undeveloped maps, and just like that, it pleasantly recursed into infinity.

Meanwhile on a construction site, little sugar cubes as bright as Canis Majoris chirped. The unfinished building with no windows and cement edges echoed in the ice cream cone grids held by a child nearby, and the dirt was just reincarnated cocoa.

I turned my head—various spirits leaped and hid in the bushes. Never mind, they were only shadows. A car zoomed down the street leaving trails of sour orange circles, followed by a trail of green triangle spirals left by an angry motorcycle. It was a 360p environment where sounds, images, and the five senses mushed together to make no sense at all.

Someone was saying garbled words to me. I played the sound in my head to decode the meaning. They stared at me with a mix of confusion and amusement, like they were talking to a child. Little did they know the roaring Antarctic winds already swept away any coherent memory and thoughts.

Ah, the joys of chronic insomnia and how the world becomes a kaleidoscopic waterfall of surreal experiences.

“Noesis!” Teja screamed into my face as his voice broke.

“I was wondering if this was you!” I exclaimed, jumping up from my chair. “But my facial recognition system is broken!”

“You should get a neural network.” Teja said, his voice breaking at every 2 syllables. This child couldn’t contain his excitement as he squawked at me. He must’ve played too much geometry dash without sleep and drank 10 cans of redbull.

“Great idea!” I yelled across the classroom with the same intensity, “I need a biocomputer as well! You can actually store computer data in the nitrogenous bases of DNA.” I went on a tangent about biocomputing, “yeah, biomaterials could be unstable, but it is the densest medium of data storage known to humankind, such that if all the world’s data were to be stored into DNA it would fit into just several pickup trucks!”

“That’s very cool.” Teja commented. Moving down the classroom he pressed on, “what is “carboxyl” and “punnett square” and “codon”?

I circled a =O and -OH on the whiteboard. Teja was enthralled: “My brother can’t stop talking about those. I told him if he finishes a unit of biology on Khan Academy, he can play an hour of roblox. He listened.”

“Great method! He is so advanced!” I cheered, “He should consider joining iGEM, and a few international olympiads. He’s got lots of time. A bright future lies ahead!”

“There is iCho, iPhysO, IMO, Putnam… but he doesn’t want to do any.” Teja continued, appearing heartbroken. Hot tears streamed from his eyes and he pointed at the source of sorrow on the whiteboard: “The chemistry class erased my Riemann Zeta function!”

At this traumatic moment, I offered reassuring words as a friend. “Don’t worry. If your brother scores perfect on the intl biology olympiad, he gets to play roblox!”

Teja laughed and squeezed his eyes like Sean. A random girl eating a sandwich in the classroom stared at us like an alien encounter.

Ignoring the distraction, I continued: “Then, he can start a research project under a UWaterloo professor.”

“How does one do that?” Teja asked with genuine interest.

To be honest, I didn't know myself, and gave a goofball answer: “step 1. Have a parent with last name ‘Reza Nezhad.’ ”

❇︎

Teja started interviewing my friend, Victor. Jim was there to take notes.

“First question, what do you do for a living?” Teja glanced up from the laptop, his voice kept breaking with excitement.

Victor looked at Teja suspiciously; Victor was fidgeting and appeared very out of place. “are you going to ask my SIN then?” Victor inquired.

Teja snatched the chance and continued without remorse: “And your bank account!”

Victor shook his head with an absurd grin and chugged some yogurt from a small cup. This interview was sucking the energy out of him.

I pushed on. “Victor, tell us about a time where you worked in a team.”

“Oh no— not this!” Victor yelped and laughed. He suggested for Teja to kidnap Hooman. Then out of nowhere, Victor turned his head and chanted:

“Teja was a chemist’s son but Teja was no more!

What he thought was H2O was H2SO4!”

The entire table group roared and gasped.

Teja was exasperated. “Victor, this is the worst interview I’ve ever had in my life.” He stated.

“Being concise, no?” I teased.

“There is no information whatsoever.” Teja denied it all, beginning to stand up. Then his discord screen timer went off and everyone stared at it. He tapped his phone a few times but the timer kept ringing. The sheer stress was making the young fellow’s hair turn white.

Teja complained: “I ask for an interview, and I get ‘Teja is a chemists’ son’.”

Relaxing himself, he shifted back into the script and asked: “As we near the end of the conversation, do you have any candidates which I may interview next?”

“Evan Nadon, he’s a very productive man!” Victor nominated. He was enthusiastic. Jim took intent notes and sincerely thanked Victor.

Jim went on his mission to hunt down Evan in the tech hallway.

In the hallway, there was nothingness.

Just as Jim was about to give up, something brushed at his knee—A scrawny guy with glasses was holding a slice of pizza. He claimed to be Evan. The creature bounced up and down like a gnome before Jim finally captured him.

They sat down at a table as Jim started taking notes.

“I wing everything!” Evan declared and gesturing his hands. “I wrote 8 pages of bs and got 96 in English! The teacher—” He got up, yelling excitedly. He bounced around before continuing announcing at the top of his lungs: “He hated me! I’m so loud, but I get such good grades!” He sat down and turned in the chair, then standing up and started doing multiple backflips. Jim stared with confusion, uncertain of what his life had come to.

"Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome our speaker from the latest trending startup!" A guy walked on to the stage.

“Two years ago, I lived in a crowded slum and only had $20 in my bank account. I was chronically depressed, unmotivated and lonely. However, one evening changed everything. At that moment, I was crying about the meaningless of life on the balcony. All of a sudden, our senior neighbour screamed at me and warned: “Our building is on fire, get out now!" My tears disappeared as I saw him pour water onto the fire, proceeding to shake violently and fell. It was an electrical fire!

I felt pity for the old man and his lack of physics knowledge. From that moment, I decided to master everything about physics. I purchased all of the physics textbooks. Money didn't matter, because I stole the books and into mephistopheles I become.

I study for 16 hours daily on a polyphasic sleep schedule and ate only bread. My neighbours' kids would squawk at me for being such a loner and self-absorbed. But I, with messianic determination, ignored them.

After a year, the kids revered me like a god. I was nominated for the impressive context, and I achieved 1st place in the city. But I am NOT satisfied! With the $3000 prize money, I could buy food, video games and help my parents with their farm. Instead, I bought a plane ticket to Boston.

I snuck up into an MIT lecture room, walked up to a lecturer and told him outright he was wrong. He was shaking his head and loudly disagreeing as I delivered a proof on the blackboard. The students were so enthralled that they started throwing physics textbooks in the air, from condensed matter physics to quantum mechanics. After class, he admitted that I was right!

He revered me so much that I became his lab assistant. Without finishing high school, I was soon nominated as a PhD candidate and an employee of the MIT Media lab! Haha, I blogged, while some losers have spent 16 years in high school, I am only 16 years old when I entered, my age glorifies me, defines me. I told him, within 3 months, I will solve world hunger, cancer and all the biggest problems through gaining enough capital. He was in denial, but that’s just the pessimism of the experts.

The professor was waiting forever and forever for grant money, so I took a break and launched two startups in the meanwhile.

That day, I took a picture of me and set it as my phone background. If this is what a typical teenager can do in two years, what can you?

The motivational speaker stepped off the stage, chugging a can of energy drink and popped a pill into his mouth. "Sleep is for the weak." He said. He suddenly had a heart attack and passed away.

Question: What does it feel like to have borderline personality disorder?

Answer: It's like being half in love with death, resigned to having my hopes and dreams raised and dashed against treacherous storms of my own devising. Love is the false prophet and it's prophecy more alluring than any Siren, more deadly, more beautiful, more distracting, more devouring, in the end more self-destructing. The prophet comes in the shape of a smile, a kind word, a friendly soul willing to hear you out. The emperor has no cloth but we are blind. Once it has you in it's grip, once you are over the event horizon; past the point of no return, you will not be never be the same again. I was drawn like a moth to the flame again and again; unaware and naive in the beginning but never again, then afterwards love was to me like Sisyphus to his rock, always pushing and always falling back. Love was my end all and be all. Never was there was a better example of Camus's absurd.

What a question! Borderline relationships is like watching a train wreck but not as horrified spectator but as the barely conscious driver numb from the remembrance of past happenings. Even a forest fire may seem surreal and beautiful from a distance but be careful or you will be burned.

I am burning.

"My words cut like knife and butter" but their silence burns away at me like an out of control chain reaction that erupts in tears, blood and scars. Others, oh hellish others. Gods or monsters to me but never human because being human is beneath my notice, my love and my hate, my admiration and my contempt. The DSM calls this idealization and devaluations but Aristotle's words preceded that catalog of horrors by civilizations and eons and rings truer. I delight in contrasting opposites, an artifact of a disorder whose theme and motif is chaos and disorder looking for salvation in order, for a lifeboat. "Do I contradict myself? Very well I contradict myself, I am large and I contain multitudes"- but if only I didn't fear and hate what I want most.

Screaming and crying and acts of blind fury and jagged words I have made into an art-form. An art form that kill it's audience and crushes my soul with guilt. One would imagine having people run away from you is the worst nightmare of a borderline, indeed it is so. But knowing that my actions are probably responsible for them doing so, not able to help myself, being stuck in a melodrama and reality show whom I am the star but a helpless one is far more draining in the long run. "Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned." I am at war with myself, my thoughts polarizing between acts of hatred and love until I do not know which is which. Words and promises are fickle and people even more so until the phrase don't trust anyone is a personal motto out of necessity.

"Oh words! What crimes are commited in thy name", the crime of promises past haunts me through out my waking hours and taunts me in my sleep. I am haunted by visions of what could be if I JUST DIDN'T FREAKED OUT AND RUINED A GOOD THING.

Is the high worth the pain? I don't know because I lack a choice in the matter. Pain and pleasure comes hand in hand, but that's how I know I'm alive. There is meaning in suffering for a reason, no meaning in being lost and numb.

I am always lost. Loneliness is my occupation and people a desperate refugee from my apathy and creeping nihilism. Look at how alive they are, with their perfect flaws and dreams of a better future. Look at their capacity to love without misgivings and their trust so freely given. Their ability to belong, their fantastically consistent personality and sense of self. We boderlines lose ourselves in others, we are hungry for what we do not have. We can not stand the pain of being alone and the terror of not being alone. We oscillate between love and hate because we project onto our loved ones a microsm of our inner state that we perceive from the world. We project our demons writ large onto the world because we can not hold them. Horror stories of BPD abounds, and they are horrible stories. But to those people, I say this. You think it's bad when we take it out ON you, alas what you feel is just a small infinitesimal fraction HOW WE FEEL ALL THE TIME 24/7.

We are alone.

We would rather die than to be alone. But our love and behavior makes people run away from us.

Repeat ad infinitum.

Link to something very similar and relevant to the borderline experience. How to find true friends (and love) in 45 minutes (Wired UK)Academic Source: The Experimental Generation of Interpersonal Closeness: A Procedure and Some Preliminary Findings

"So are we producing real closeness? Yes and no," the authors wrote. "We think that the closeness produced in these studies is experienced as similar in many important ways to felt closeness in naturally occurring relationships that develop over time. On the other hand, it seems unlikely that the procedure produces loyalty, dependence, commitment, or other relationship aspects that might take longer to develop."

Will update as my whimsical nature and impulsive brain deems it fit.