As someone with both technical engineering experience and product design experience in the startup world, I regularly receive outreach from first-time founders and aspiring entrepreneurs. These conversations follow a predictable pattern that’s worth examining, particularly given how the recent AI boom has amplified certain misconceptions about building high-growth tech companies.
More …This essay examines the evolutionary significance of self-awareness and artistic expression through an interdisciplinary analysis of competing theoretical frameworks: the adaptationist perspective, which interpret these traits as fitness-enhancing social and cognitive capacities, and non-adaptationist views exemplified by Peter Watts’ Blindsight, which depict consciousness as a possible evolutionary byproduct or epiphenomenon. Drawing on neurobiological evidence for specialized self-referential processing, comparative studies of self-recognition in nonhuman species, and the cultural universality of artistic production, the essay evaluates the plausibility of these positions. The recent emergence of artificial intelligence systems that appear capable of generating sophisticated artistic outputs, despite what current scientific understanding suggests is an absence of conscious experience, introduces a novel philosophical challenge: whether creativity and introspection are necessarily tied to biological awareness. While current empirical evidence leans toward adaptationist interpretations, the rise of what appear to be non-conscious generative systems reframes the debate, suggesting that the cultural and symbolic role of art may illuminate human values more than it resolves the evolutionary status of consciousness.
More …I somehow graduated with a Cybersecurity degree specialization on my diploma. It was due to some graduate-level systems and hardware security courses I took. These courses provide a birds eye view of the cybersecurity field, and I had fun doing the homework assignments. The assignments were modelled after wargames and even had a leaderboard. Here is a list of short security projects and talks I did in school.
More …For the past two weeks, I’ve been doing 1 Leetcode problem a day, by hitting the random problem button. This is a bad strategy, since it’s inefficient at figuring out my weaknesses. The optimal strategy seems to involve working through a list of representative problems, categorized by topic, like the Blind 75. You would basically go through the entire list several times, looking at answers if you need to, until you can easily recognize the patterns. I did this back in early 2020, then I forgot everything.
More …Here is the accepted proposal for the distributed tracing project I will be working on this summer. Pythia is written in Rust and Jaeger is in Go. As I write weekly updates for this project, I’ll continue to post some here under the tracing tag.
Project Title: Enabling an automated instrumentation framework in a distributed tracing platform
Diagnosing performance problems in distributed systems is challenging. One reason is that it is hard to know in advance what instrumentation to enable that can help diagnose problems. Pythia is an automated instrumentation framework that aims to solve this decision problem. The approach uses the key insight that performance variation in workflows that are expected to perform similarly provides insight to where instrumentation should be enabled. This project will validate Pythia’s approach by integrating with a mature distributed tracing system to automatically enable instrumentation that can help diagnose performance problems, as well as evaluating the system in representative distributed applications.
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