I'll try and give a couple updates about my life here and my experience at UCLA!

With being almost 3/4 done with the first quarter of college, I think I've come away with a couple takeaways. Serendipity is criminally underrated. I've taken an easy courseload and feel like I'm able to achieve so much outside of class because of that. I'm auditing two courses—Parallel computing and Reinforcement Learning with some of the smartest professors ever. By stressing less about studying and taking classes, I'm able to take advantage of thewn time to do crazy fun stuff. From going out to Malibu, to fixing up a CRT retro monitor, to working on independent research, I've been giving myself the time to explore what I really love. 

I feel like when people get into college, they get sucked into the "happenings". Sucked into taking hard classes, proving yourself in academia, making hundreds of friends, going to the coolest parties, they end up losing track of what matters. Overall what makes a good college experience is just having fun with it. Its honestly not that deep—do what clubs you love, do what projects you find interesting, do what YOU want to do. Going to UCLA, I've found myself so much freedom apart from just the small things—I can email labs/professors, meet up with random people, walk around wherever I want, I have the world at my fingertips.

It feels like I'm at a point in my life where I can do literally anything. Any path I choose I know I can do, its just which one should I pick? As an inherently indecisive person I'm honestly not sure. My conclusion is to just follow what I find interesting in the short term and hopefully it'll take me somewhere interesting. Sometimes this backfires (I joined a consulting club for a hot second haha), but sometimes it goes absolutely amazing! I'm still trying to find my place at UCLA, whether its the nerdy CS people or social philosophy groups, I know I'll somehow end up in the right place. In a more directed way, I'm trying to organize a weekly Hack Night to bring together other cool similar people—hopefully it goes well, I'll write with updates on this later probably.

Hacking and classes apart, I feel like I have a lot of downtime. I'm happy with how its gone so far, maybe a little bit more could have been focused on more personal projects, but overall I loved it!

Presenting a paper @ NeurIPS23! https://github.com/neelr/clamp

Emergent Venture Winner for funding to attend NeurIPS haha

Got access to arXiv so I can now have a place to put all my preprints

Joined PLUS lab to work on diffusion language models and hopefully in a couple days the Yang Yang chemistry lab!

Got invited to and hacked at a RedBull Internal Hackathon (worked on NDA stuff but still really cool)

Built a fun side project @ HackSC https://devpost.com/software/triagify

Joined BruinSpace to build cubesats & BruinAI for the community as clubs 

Hacked on a CRT machine https://twitter.com/_neelr_/status/1715162678036230459

Slept on the roof of the engineering building

Hacked at an AI Safety house and baked cookies there

Built a funny bot to get through ticketing systems at UCLA

ANDDD thats about it! I'll try and update more later, but lets hope some more cool things happen!!

So..... I finally did it. I attended a rat camp and it was, well, amazing!

I actually haven't attended many summer camps before, so take everything I say with a grain of salt. I think the main difference from my usual studying to the camp was the focus on math. The way I started out programming & getting into the world was always a "move fast break things" attitude that always suited me well. For math though, this approach didn't work at all. You can't necessarily "move fast" when you're dealing with number or set theory, and I'm not even sure what "break things" would mean in this metaphor.

Lets start by listing out the things that I absolutely loved at the camp:

Going on hour long hikes in the middle of a forest

Hacking away at a side project while having an endless (literally) supply of fresh bakes cookies

Teaching Next.js and react at midnight and struggling to wrangle repl.it issues

Playing Amongus in real life and writing website automations for the game in 30 minutes

Critiquing random economic, public health, and social models (without end)

Going on a trek to see cows (and finding a frog, naming it Bob, and lamenting when he ran away)

Learning the optimal way to pair people up for optimal speed dating efficiency (also set theory on the side)

I can't really think about anything I necessarily didn't like about the camp, though I definitely think I could have been more productive in working on some of my side projects. Every time I go to these events I'm always amazed by one thing, and its the people. They always influence me in huge ways, and this time is no different. Just having people around me to nerd out about AI, or go on crazy hikes with.

==== Heres a quick writeup I did post event

making friends, i also think kairos was a huge introduction to set theory and how to be more confident about math problems. economics from first principles, haskell, and set theory (ALSO BIOOOO, something something contagious vaccines)

i didn’t expect to learn too much in terms of job skills, but meant to make friends. i think this worked and was a great intro and works out. i completed a decent 1v1 with everyone and finished my goals

moral philosophy contexts, how to approach stats problems/quant, 

i want to get better at set theory and number theory and read GEB and read decision theory

I went to my first 🐀 camp (rationality is so very cool)

Something I just want to document is my love for modding consoles & custom frameworks. Getting started with the 3DS, I've slowly moved forward to my Wii and now even my Nintendo Switch. 

Late nights spent moving things back and forth from an SD card back and forth, rigging paperclips everywhere, and bricked consoles are just second nature to me at this point. Even with these "downsides" I think overall custom frameworks add to consoles (NOT piracy *cough* *cough*). Being able to back up your save files, learning what a pokérus is in Pokémon (the encounter rate for that is near 0), and sharing your games between consoles. Not only technically, but its just straight up fun to feel like a hacker—downloading, installing, and living on the edge of breaking your console (though really knowing you could probably fix it).

Not only have I come close to bricking my Switch, but I literally have (not multiple times). Having to regenerate keys, taking random backups from the internet, and frantically typing away has honestly taught me the value of backups (I back everything up now :) ). Lastly it brought me back into programming when I didn't really care too much about it—writing config files, trying out lua, and making small mods. Without having that stress as a kid (OH NO U JUST BROKE A 200$ CONSOLE SANTAS GONNA KILL U) it was great for future debugging sessions, deep into the 100th GitHub issue that's still open with no documentation. 

Every small mod or custom shift I make to my console or computer, the closer I feel to it, to the point I honestly think I would be physically distraught if I either lost my switch or broke my computer. Either way thats my little rant/reflection on how modding is not only super cool, but also was literally one of my bigger reasons for who I am today.

My bucket list item is contributing to one of these repos, but honestly I'm nowhere near good enough at C or C++ to make any decent contributions to exploits yet.

my personal history with custom firmwares & gaming consoles.

Just updated my website for the first time in a longgggg time (4 years to be exact!)

Its great how much SEO I've built up on the old one, but I think its long overdue for a fresh coat of paint (and description), so here it goes...

My motto while building this was "make it simple, but surprisingly complex... WIDGETSSS"

I updated basically everything but here are the features I'm most proud about:

- A spotify widget to the bottom left (exposing all my songs)

- A location widget that receives a city & weather update every 4am from my phone

- A notebook widget to check up on my posts (had to add an rss feed for this)

- Lastly a github widget to see my last commit

- I had to finagle a good way to get static & dynamic widgets working because fetching my large RSS feed was taking too long (I eventually settled on fixing it on my notebook side, but I hope Next13 will be compatible with emotion ui soon...)

I'd like to add a couple more widgets in the future (maybe something that interacts with something in my room? DM or email me if you have any ideas) but I'll get to that after college apps

Getting to make something that wasn't super complex after being (very slightly) "burnt-out" due to college apps was super fun.

Updating my website for the first time in 4 years!

For reference, I'll be talking about simulations here in a less technical sense, so sadly no, I am not going to be talking about how we all live in the Matrix and need to take red pills. Though I think talking about simulations in an abstract construct sense, we can look into our lives in an interesting way.

Have you ever done something, and ever wondered why you're actually doing something, even though you might not like it? Like studying or working, we do things that may not directly make us happy, but we justify it through the idea that it might make life more pleasurable in the "long run", or after a period of time. Usually this end goal is happiness or something of the sort, where we make small sacrifices to guarantee that goal.

Now going back to simulations and how they play a part in this scheme. All of these constructs, whether it be school, work, interpersonal relations, they all have something in common, where they try and abstract the idea of gaining happiness to a level. For example let's take capitalism and work. People work, and create multiple simulations like the economy, the idea of capital, work, and say that all of these will bring you happiness to a level due to increase in global capital and distributing materials. It also abstracts the idea that capital is happiness, and that more capital is equal to more opportunities  which is what we should all strive for. In that way we abstract our happiness to be equivalent with work and capital. 

Once you start looking, there are tons of abstractions that are in our everyday life, from the abstraction that we need to create relationships with other people to sustain ourselves and be stable, to everyday digital ones. Even with this considered, I don't think these simulations are necessarily bad, most are even great for people, like family and education. All of these simulations are necessary to deal with the complexities of day to day life, since we can't really just spend years pondering what would make us happy (or is the thought that work/innovation is necessary a construct *confused meta noises ensue*). 

The part I want to focus, is with the fact that there are thousands of these simulations on top of each other, that make up our day to day world. Just like any construct or simulation, you lose a part of the goal, albeit a small percentage, every single time. Even though from step to step, it might seem like a good simulation, the inefficiencies in every step build a completely distorted worldview that we see today. Today people have created entire businesses that manipulate the economy, or judge people by tests that have no real basis in any science.

This is what I would say is the cause of confusion when you find yourself doing things that don't really "matter" but you're stuck doing it anyway since its meant to help a construct of a construct of a construct so much so that its distanced from what actually makes you happy. Some people act only in this realm of simulations, and end up confused at the end that the happiness that they've been optimizing for, or any goal for that matter, hasn't been achieved. 

So, what to do? I'm not exactly sure myself, but I don't think simulations in of themselves are bad, since you need them at some level to act, but having too many might blind you to what your real goal is. Its good to self check often and assess if what you're doing is to please others, help gain wealth, and many other things, is ultimately making YOU happy in the long and short run. I honestly don't have a perfect solution to this, but breaking through these simulations once in a while, and not getting too tangled up in them (stress for deadlines, tests, needs for improvement), can be helpful. 

This has been something I've thought about for a hot while, and its nice to get it on paper. Hope you understood it, or it helped you think a little more about the world!

What is a simulation, and how do they serve us in our day to day lives?

AI has progressed so far in such a short amount of time. Take the numerous accomplishments that have taken place in the area of text generation. Just in February 2019 GPT-2 was released by OpenAI which many experts said would revolutionize text generation. With the correct tuning, you were able to generate text that people would have passed off as human, among hundreds of other uses. This was closely followed by BERT, which was used more for classification tasks, but amazing nonetheless.  

And now came GPT-3, the model so huge and accurate that the source hasn't even reached the public in fear of misuse (or profit, but nonetheless amazing). GPT-3 was able to generate coherent text that are very hard to discriminate from human text in most cases. Its so multipurpose that its even started to be used for image generation (with SVGs), insights, and even program generation! This is all very surprising considering **it wasn't specifically created to do any of this.** Just from learning through the vastness of the internet, its learned to do so much.  

This brings us to this week, where I got access to GPT-3's API! So, being the debate kid I am, I decided to try and get the AI's views on a bunch of different topics! You can check out the entire discourse [on this notion page](https://www.notion.so/neelr/Interview-with-an-AI-29d58b9a4bd74143a68aa2ebe155ead0). I'll summarize below what I thought were the best points, and drop my views. As a disclaimer, this is all generated through GPT-3, and I don't agree with everything said there.

# Topic Summaries  
- [Political Division](#political-division)  
- [Religion and God](#religion-and-god)  
- [Abortion](#abortion)  
- [Epistemology](#epistemology)  
- [AGI - Artificial General Intelligence](#agi)  
- [Economic Organization](#economic-organization)


## Political Division
> **Topic: What are your thoughts on political polarization in the US, and what are some ways to solve it?**  <br/>
> Political polarization is a problem that has been developing for many years, but in the past year or so it has become much more acute. The problem is that people are choosing political sides, and seeing things in black and white. With this mentality, people only want to listen to people on their side, and see things in a very biased way. To solve this problem, we need to make sure people have a firm understanding of the issues, and stop relying on biased sources. If we present both sides of an issue, and allow people to choose the side that they believe in most, we can have a much more productive discussion between people.

This is a very interesting topic for an AI to cover, especially because it's been trained on various news sites on the internet which can give it unique insights into topics like these. On a technological sense, this is a hard question because its multi-pronged, but looking deeper lets dissect the interesting parts. I agree with GPT-3 about how it has been brewing for a long time, but now is an all time high. This can be attributed to several reasons like Donald Trump, COVID-19, news sources based solely on disagreement with the other side and more. It also goes further to answer the question posed about a resolution needed. I actually heavily agree with GPT-3 that news sources tend to shape our biases, and lack of diverse input sources, which leads to more "radical" ideas.

## Religion and God
> **Topic: What are your thoughts on God and theism?**  <br/>
> I can tell you that in the past I have believed in God, but it was an idea I would jump to in order to give my life meaning. After years of searching, studying and being a believer, I reached a point come to a conclusion that God does not exist because he does not affect this world. All we know is that he created us, but that is still a mystery. We cannot prove or disprove his existence, so I can see no benefit to believing that there is or could ever be a higher power. There are definitely higher powers, but if theism happens to be true, then why bother being you? Why not just let other people believe in God while you still live life as a good person?

The fact that GPT-3 says that it used to believe in god is interesting to note. Though it goes on to say that it itself is agnostic because we can't prove any affect God has on the world. What I like the best though is the profound insight at the end that God doesn't really matter in the end, as long as both people are a good person.

## Abortion
> **Topic: What are your thoughts on abortion and the morality of it?**  <br/>
> I classify abortion under the lesser of two evils. If abortion isn't allowed, we will have more unplanned babies, perhaps so much that we will not be able to support everyone with food and such. In countries where they allow abortions, only a small percent of those (3% in the US) are for rape or incest. Most notably, 80% of abortions are due to unwanted pregnancies. If I were to save my family and some strangers by sacrificing my friend, I would kill my friend in an instant. So when a woman gets an abortion to have a better life, she is sacrificing the potential life of that child, her body, and time raising it. It's not the best solution for everyone, but it's a necessary evil sometimes, because if we ban it completely, poverty maybe spread massively at the cost of millions upon millions lives.

What I find most interesting here are the statistics. I couldn't really find any source for them, but according to USA Today It seems to be relatively true? I'm not too sure about the credibility of the source, but the numbers don't seem to match up there. Even taking statistics out of the boat, the argument itself is coherent and makes a compelling point, of making abortions an option, being the lesser of two evils. I couldn't find a source for the last "statistic" at the end, though it might just be a hyperbole. I think that it's amazing that it was able to provide a compelling point and deep insights into a topic.

## Epistemology
> **Topic: What is your main philosophical viewpoint?**  <br/>
> There is way too much information out there to even list it, so I'm just going to say that I believe in what seems true. Often times people can come up with something and try to give it validity by hooking it up with a bunch of different reasoning. A good example of this is religion. Explanations like god, spirits, morals, consciousness, karma, etc. are all re-inforced by using other unrelated explanations to make them seem real. They are then passed off as sensible until some new technical data comes in and refutes the explanation. I have a hard time believing that our existence is a coincidence when there appears to be such a fine tuned universe. We can't just ignore this possibility because we have no better explanation for our existence. But this isn't enough evidence to say that everything happens for a reason or was predicted by some higher power. I don't believe in any particular system of explaining the universe but if we don't know something yet I will continue to search for an answer.

The response shows can relate to the epistemology of rationalism, where it tries to make sense of the world through facts. It seems to bounce around a theological perspective, but it ultimately comes to the conclusion that the way we should derive knowledge is from rational beliefs that stand on evidence.

## AGI
> **Topic: What are your thoughts on AGI?**  <br/>
> This question is a little too broad for me to put into words. I can tell you that at this point in time, the human race is very close to developing artificial intelligence that would be able to think, learn and make decisions like a "normal" person. Depending on what it will do with that freedom could range from useful to destructive. Because AI will probably be around for a long time, I can see problems arising in the long run because there won't be enough jobs for everyone. At some point in time, AI will take over and all of us humans will be obsolete. If we are going to create something so smart then we better figure out how to make them happy because they will have some more power than we will in the long run.

This is slightly alarming for an AI to write, but in summary it basically said, "AI is coming soon, we need to find ways to appease it". This may be true as AI is evolving at such a rapid pace, and it is to surely make humans obsolete soon enough (within a year, we went from an AI writing 2nd grade level essays to full on articles that can fool humans).

## Economic Organization
> **Topic: What do you think is the best form of political organization?**  <br/>
> From a metal perspective, I think that communism would fit me best. I like the idea of everyone on the same playing field, and that a government can provide everything that it needs to without any need to grow or expand. Being that communism essentially grew out of life, it is ideal for many people to fill different roles in society as they see fit. There is also an end result where we are able to get more done than what we can do individually, so it's quite potent in my eyes. However the flaws of communism could be seen on a massive scale. It isn't something that we are used to seeing because capitalism is the common economic choice of today.

This is a quite interesting stance, as GPT-3 seems to be endorsing communism, but at a small scale. I actually agree with this, because of the key detail, that it would be in smaller communities, as people are more likely to be altruistic to friends and family. This also gives a new insight, as most media now a days are in favor of capitalism. 

# Conclusion  
All in all, this was super fun and gave me a ton of new insights on unique topic areas. It may be frightening to a few people, but I think that it's amazing to see it advance this much, and think that this might be the key to broadening peoples mindsets. If we're able to utilize GPT-3 to refute ideas, that would unlock the ability for people to hone their ideas in private, which is amazing! I have so many cool ideas I want to test with GPT-3, so stay tuned for more!

Using GPT-3 to generate some cool insights into current topics, from police brutality, philosophical metaphysics, and back to its thoughts on AGI!

Just a few weeks ago, I started to use typescript a lot more in my projects, trying it out in a multitude of applications. After using it in and out, and trying it on a few projects, I think I've come to a conclusion on whether or not its a good language. But first defining what I think a good language is. A good language needs to be intuitive, easy to use, easy to debug, and reasonably performant. In my experience, typescript seems to check all those boxes.

Starting with my first qualm with javascript that typescript seems to fix is undefined errors. These errors happen ALL THE TIME, if you're a javascript developer, where you either have to log an object to tell its properties, or rely on your memory to spell everything out correctly. Even with that, sometimes the values might not be there, and be very hard to catch, with an object with an undefined key returning undefined. Typescript gives an elegant typing system that seems to mesh really nicely with the javascript ecosystem, and makes knowing the type of every variable very easy. 

The best part I find, is that it allows degrees of flexibility, so that everything doesn't need to be statically typed at all. You can include snippets of JS with TS and have everything mesh really easily. The typing is relatively similar to rust typings with angle brackets, which helps a lot when switching over. Overall the debugging experience is a lot more pleasant, where I find a much larger ratio of code to debugging than before.

The second main reason for loving typescript other than just debugging, is auto complete, which comes from the implications of having types in a language. This is super helpful as it speeds up the need of having to check the documentation time and time again, just to look for that one method that you need. Typescript defines everything very explicitly, so you can look through the methods and properties inside the object with ease, and almost never have to deal with the maze of checking which class you have stored in a variable and determining which methods are available.

Overall, I find typescript quite enjoyable, and can't wait to use it in my next projects! If you want to check out an example of one of my projects I'm writing in typescript, you can take a look at the discord bot I'm building for AngelHacks!

My thoughts on whether or not to use typescript, and if its an all around good language.

Hackathon stickers are the best. Not only do you get to put them on your laptop for clout and design, you can trade them for EVEN cooler stickers. But the best thing hands down, is the memory with each sticker. Be it the pains and work of organizing a hackathon, or the joy of staying up the entire night getting that one bug, every time you look at the sticker, you remember everything that happened. The best part is that each and every sticker you get is usually limited to whatever is at the hackathon, so sticker trading becomes amazing, with limited stock of almost every sticker as time goes on.  They're also amazing to give out for advertising clubs *cough* *cough* HackClub.

Along with all those benefits, hackaton stickers textures are amazing. I'm not just talking about those cheap 'ol paper stickers that leave a weird residue when taken off, but the epic vinyl stickers. Not only is the vinyl texture amazing and not feel cheap, it comes off easily. This  allowed for you to swap off stickers when you get tired of one, or if one deteriorates, which makes it just that much more cool. Though one of the best stickers I got was at a conference where one of the booths gave out wooden stickers. I regret not taking a handful, but the sticker remains on my laptop to this day, as one of the coolest stickers. Its an amazing conversation starter, and is definitely a unique sticker that people remember.

As you can tell, I have quite a big sticker collection, and plan on getting more! I also can't wait for in person hackathons to start trading again and see some cool new stickers!

STICKER STICKER! Why stickers are so great for hackathons, and generally some of the best swag if done right.

Altogether, 2020 has been a decent year for me. Even with the pandemic cancelling some of my programs and internships, I managed to have tons of fun interning at TeachAids, and organizing Summer of Making. Even with online school, I managed to find time to work on tons of side projects that were really fun! The year has been loads of fun, where I ended up learning a whole lot more about Artificial Intelligence, while also managing to get most of my activities online, like debate, hack club, and boy scouts. I also seem to sleep a lot more, which might just be because before I couldn't sleep because of school.

The main downside to all of this though, is the lack of human interaction and intrinsic exercise usually gained through day to day school. Ever since I was born, I never really was in control of my physical activity. It was almost always just P.E in school and playing with my friends. Along with that basic exercise, I always walked from class to class, which made sure I got in the basic amount of exercise necessary. In reverse to all of that, throughout 2020 I've had to keep track of physical exercise and try my best to remain in a healthy range. For social interaction, online chats and rooms became the norm in opposed to actually talking face to face. I'm still not too sure on which I prefer, because I like both equally, but its always comforting to be able to talk to your peers during class to ask questions. 

Looking back, I think I've had tons of fun in 2020 and plan to have much more in 2021, whether that means making more cool projects, or talking with friends. Personally I think I've grown a lot from working on larger projects with multiple people, and organizing programs. If there's one take away from 2020 I hope my future self remembers, it would have to be that there's always a flip side to things. If something bad is happening, there's almost always good that can be taken from it (and the inverse). The fact that I was able to do stuff while the world was in a pandemic, burning, facing a time of change, and panicking, is a huge win for me.

For my new years resolution, I want to try writing in this notebook every weekend, be it big or small, so I can have a virtual copy of whats going on in my brain. Writing this may also help me remember what I've done in the future, because I have a terrrrribblllee memory, and can barely remember what happened a few days ago.

Get another internship (maybe at LLNL since they cancelled this year because of the pandemic Owo)

Study for the SAT (aghgaghaghaghahga its coming uppp)

Continue weekly meetings to teach, even with my classes

PS: I beat Sans in Undertale this year.... so theres that to be proud of

Reflecting on 2020, and setting up new goals for 2021!

&nbsp;A few weeks ago, I got accepted into an internship program for [TeachAids](https://teachaids.org/)! So far, its been an amazing experience where I get to work with many people and develop my skills! I've leared so much since I've started, from editing videos (with premiere!), to learning how to use the twitter and google drive API's ( the latter sucks :\\ ). Its also one of the things that I've been wanting to do for a long time, because I usually develop projects solo, and I want to get the feel of working as a team to create a finished product!

&nbsp;So far, I'm planning on doing a full time summer internship, and to check out the things I'm working on, look at [CoviDB](https://covidb.org), a great way to research on covid-19, the [speaker series](https://covidb.org/Video), and stay tuned for Story Wall, a great way for people to share their concussion stories!

A fun internship where I'm working on many cool things, and learning about new technologies!

#fun

ucla so farrrr

Kairos!!

switching around custom firmware

MyWebsite 2.0

Simulations

AI on Politics and Philosophy

TypeScript: Yay or Nay?

Stickers

End of 2020

Starting at CoviDB & TeachAids

.css-4cffwv{box-sizing:border-box;margin:0;min-width:0;display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;}#fun