Bhaskar

The newly minted Nobel Prize winner Anne Carson shared a book recommendation and some timeless writing advice at the 2024 National Book Awards.

“okay, so what? it’s just math.” no, you don't get it. here’s what OpenAI’s math breakthroughs could eventually help make possible in the real world: Vlasov–Maxwell → stronger foundations for fusion research, whose ultimate prize is virtually limitless clean energy to power civilization Calderón’s Problem → portable body scanners using electrical signals, making medical imaging cheaper and easier to access Maximum-Cardinality Matching → faster searches for compatible kidney swaps across large donor pools, helping hospitals coordinate lifesaving transplants Inverse Elasticity Problem → scans that map tissue stiffness, helping doctors locate suspicious growths inside the body Mumford–Shah Conjecture → better tools for spotting tissue changes in brain scans, helping doctors identify signs of disease Bose–Einstein Condensation → stronger foundations for quantum sensors that could help vehicles navigate without GPS Simple Stochastic Games → better safety checks for self-driving cars and robots before dangerous mistakes reach the real world Matrix Multiplication → cheaper AI and bigger scientific simulations using the same computers Edit Distance → faster DNA comparisons, helping researchers study genetic changes linked to disease The k-Server Problem → robots that waste less movement and energy, making warehouses more efficient and goods cheaper to move a reminder that math is the foundation of science. so accelerating mathematical discovery could compress centuries of scientific progress into years. insane timeline to be alive for!

All roads lead back to 9 PM bed time, 5 AM wake up, 4 hours of deep, focused work creative work first thing, leaving your notifications off, work out mid day to break it up, admin & calls in the afternoon, hang with friends and loved ones in the evening, repeat forever.

Marry someone who is proud of your ambition but unimpressed by your status.

Everyone who writes more floridly than me is an affected windbag. Anyone who writes more tautly is a thin-lipped automaton. Only I know the exactly correct balance between stylistic exuberance and measured prose

There’s an old Chinese saying: “Read a book a hundred times, and its meaning will naturally become clear.” Practicing martial arts works the same way. You keep repeating the basics and fundamental forms until, once you truly master one thing, you can apply it to a hundred others.

Slow down and remember this: Most things make no difference. Being busy is a form of laziness—lazy thinking and indiscriminate action. Being overwhelmed is often as unproductive as doing nothing, and is far more unpleasant. Being selective—doing less—is the path of the productive. Focus on the important few and ignore the rest.

If you’ve ever felt addicted to twitter, this may interest you: Lately I've been feeling gross because I've been wasting so much time on Twitter for little apparent payoff. My judgment on what deserves to be posted also feels a bit less calibrated. People who care about me have noted that my brain is "reward hacked to hell" on engagement. I’ve noticed that my behavioral regulation, while outwardly fine (for the most part), feels internally degraded. I’m not so big on therapy, but my favorite coping mechanism for times like these is to read neuro papers about potential root causes of my dysfunction and try to brainstorm unconventional solutions. This led me to one of the most interesting and relevant papers I’ve read this year - a June 2026 Nature Communications study that modeled ~700k tweets from ~3k Twitter users. Out of 7 candidate models, Twitter posting was best explained by a hybrid of like-sensitive reinforcement learning and reward-insensitive habits. When likes on a tweet exceeded someone’s expectations, that person tended to post again sooner. Frequent posters exhibited greater inferred habit weight and a more persistent posting cadence, which is much more interesting a result than simply a higher rate of general reward learning. The strongest inference we can make here is that feedback actually trains the policy, while repetition gradually self-propels it. As a result, a user’s frequent posting behavior can persist even when the latest reward no longer justifies it. While this is obviously not evidence of brain damage (or even addiction), it is irritatingly congruent with my personal experience on Twitter. The demographic differences were fascinating as well - younger users and women were relatively more driven by reinforcement learning while older users and men were more habit-driven (statistically delicate but still intriguing). I fall into the exact demo whose posting behavior appeared more responsive to social feedback. All this being said, the study found NO relationship between these parameters and a user’s wellbeing - and it analyzed historical posting behavior rather than current notification checking or scrolling. These are important caveats but not exculpatory. Part of the trap in my particular case is that - pretty often, actually - Twitter has paid off for me. It has produced professional opportunities, investor interest, genuine friendships, romantic relationships, and unusually interesting conversations that have had real world impact outside my own life. This makes it MORE difficult to pull back not less - a slot machine is harder to quit when it very often pays out grandly. My notification checking policy is trained on real jackpots. Somewhere along the way, the proxy Goodharted the objective - engagement initially did track things I value (e.g. connection, intellectual feedback, distribution, career progress, etc). Now, however, I sometimes unintentionally optimize for engagement at the expense of those latent goals I care about more. Repetition may have also become sufficiently self-sustaining that selecting my next action no longer requires enjoying the action I select. Feeling gross while continuing to scroll or post may demonstrate a partial decoupling of wanting and liking. My ADHD probably enlarges the attack surface via novelty and frictionless task switching - so there’s that as well. None of this necessarily implies permanent dopamine damage, though. My synthesis is that neurologically, I am not broken. A learned policy has simply become misaligned with my explicit objectives, but my disgust may be evidence that I can still perceive the divergence. In short, there is hope. SOURCES: “A computational model of reward learning and habits on social media” nature.com/articles/s41467-0…