komron’s stuff

it’s been a little scary to follow AI’s rise in ability to solve math problems. Navier Stokes especially was pretty shocking, and recently we got some more bangers like quasi-RH that i wont pretend to understand but that by all expert accounts is Fields Medal worthy. but if we look beyond the upending of an entire academic field, i think it’s worth understanding the tools with which these and many others AI miracles have come about. with math specifically, many of the solutions use Lean, a programming language that lets you write a proof and have a machine verify it's correct. fun fact: at Brown, i was the head TA for the class that taught Lean :) we’ve also seen huge feats in large-scale software. this would include Bun’s rewrite from Zig to Rust (the famous 1M line PR), or the recently viral “porting PS5 to PC” project. in both cases, the agent has a ground truth to check against, like an existing test suite or the original behavior. the common thread is that: each of these tasks allows an agent to self-verify its work with a guarantee. i’m quite late to this realization, but many thousands of dollars of token usage later, some of my most successful work has happened because of finding the right loop for the right task. need to optimize performance? autoresearch! sandbox the workload, give the agent a benchmark to improve, and leave your desk. need to land code safely? build a strong CI pipeline and have the agents go ham. even if verifiability is a fuzzy concept, you can give the agent a goal and a way to self-evaluate. it's amazingly hands free. and i think this is a great callback, because when i was learning Lean, the proof/solution itself was not always the hard part - it was mostly just being precise enough that a machine can check your work. that's the new regime with agents too: true productivity leverage isn't necessarily the prompt, but the check itself.

this summer i felt loss anger passion peace serenity joy and a sense of absolute pure happiness that’s overwhelming in the moment and indescribable afterwards. it’s been a year in mamdanistan and i couldn’t have asked for a fuller life experience :)

been thinking a lot about horses lately https://andyljones.com/posts/horses.html

so many ugrad admissions decisions went out today and now as an alum i realize that if someone sent me back in time and let me choose any place… i’d do it all over again at brown. this channel is a testament to a beautiful 4 years spent with my best friends. i wouldn’t give it up for anything. sorry for the sap but enjoy a picture of a very lanky 18 year old me for the first time on campus :)

“There is, after all, always something wonderful and touchingly beautiful about a young man, for the first time released from the bonds of schooling, making his first ventures toward the infinite horizons of the mind. At this point he has not yet seen any of his illusions dissipated, or doubted either his own capacity for endless dedication or the boundlessness of the world of thought.” — The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse

meta vp: “we now have MZ actively testing , so please let’s be careful to maintain our quality bar” zucc is testing my code👀

so much of work is ugly and so much of your ability to work is just your ability to eat shit and move on. there’s a small sample of jobs reserved for the purists. the academics (full professors), the semi-retired CEOs (of successful companies), the film directors (with a final cut!). and even they have had to eat shit at some point in their lives: grinding through grant approvals or a successful exit is no noble work. more than that: some positions’ whole point hinges on your ability to produce copious amounts of pretty low level menial work: junior investment bankers and consultants famously “move around icons in powerpoint” and have 100-hour workweeks. even in fields where we believe in a higher level of intellectual capacity as a requirement, the work is reduced down to an ugly floor: highly trained judges deal with self-representing criminals that shout in the courtroom, engineers move dots on a screen at 3am to deliver a design in time for a deadline, quantum physicists use scotch tape to get a good layer of graphene after yet another etching failure. is this just friction towards a goal or humiliation? to restate my hypothesis succinctly: my guess is most careers are not limited by intelligence, taste, or even ambition but by how much sustained shit a person can take without quitting or becoming bitter and letting it poison their sense of self. maybe this is why “success stories” feel dishonest. we like to tell tales about passion and brilliance because they’re pleasing, but the more accurate story is probably procedural and most value in the world is created not by eureka moments, but by people who can operate at (and even enjoy) the ugly floor long enough to, maybe, sometimes, touch the ceiling.

soooo my homelabbing obsession has only grown, and now with my big boy salary, a couple amazon purchases and a trip to staten island we officially have it! my very own 80kg server rack running a custom built nixos server. it also happens to double as a space heater :) as far as hobbies go, building a homelab comes quite close to mending a garden but without actually touching grass, which is great for me. there will be more server hardware to come for sure.

A lot of people ask me for advice on securing a job post-graduation and doing well in college. To avoid repeating myself, and because I think it’s useful, I want to share this unsolicited with all of you :) I stand on the shoulders of giants and quote Andrej Karpathy — a Stanford PhD grad and co-founder of OpenAI:

Undergrads tend to have tunnel vision about their classes. They want to get good grades, etc. The crucial fact to realize is that noone will care about your grades, unless they are bad. For example, I always used to say that the smartest student will get 85% in all of his courses. This way, you end up with somewhere around 4.0 score, but you did not over-study, and you did not under-study. Your time is a precious, limited resource. Get to a point where you don't screw up on a test and then switch your attention to much more important endeavors. What are they? Getting actual, real-world experience, working on real code base, projects or problems outside of silly course exercises is extremely imporant. Professors/People who know you and can write you a good reference letter saying that you have initiative, passion and drive are extremely important. Are you thinking of applying to jobs? Get a summer internship. Are you thinking of pursuing graduate school? Get research experience! …

That’s it. I wish I read Andrej’s post in its entirety in college — it is full of good advice. I wish I worried less about getting a B+ or an A-. Especially in the age of AI, grades and courses are fungible and what matters more is your reputation and skill as someone who does things. Do the thing.

i am now officially part of the superintelligence labs org at meta :) if you’re unaware, i invite you to read zuckerberg’s memo on the team and its goals. from 600-person layoffs announced yesterday, to re-orgs, to 70-hour work weeks — all i can say is that this feels like the most volatile and chaotic period in industry and in my life, so i’m holding on and just doing my best to do my best. with that said, i can’t believe the absolute cutting edge at which i get to work. specifically, my team focuses on ai inference & serving, where we scale trained recommendation systems and LLM models to billions of requests per second. my two in-flight projects are: - a brand-new deployment process for private ai in trusted execution environments across whatsapp & reality labs (whitepaper, blog). we’re migrating all production models to my code next week and i’m scared to say the least - enablement of new cloud capacity. this is still new and not fully public but basically helping make this moment happen lol. as one of the most senior engineers on my team recently said: “we’ll all look back at this in a year and think — what the fuck were we doing?”

i realized i don't talk much about what i actually do at brown. this is an attempt to fix that. if you have any questions, do text me at @kjaripov -- i'm happy to talk (time permitting). here goes nothing !! i study computer science at brown. i'm also applying to the concurrent masters program. if i get in, that means i will graduate with both a bachelors and masters degrees. for anyone wondering what a full upper-level cs workload looks like trying to do get this done, this semester i'm doing: computer science-related (these are required for my degree) - logic for systems: a course on modeling software systems using software on top of first order logic. check out a greedy coloring algorithm a friend and I modeled as a midsemester project. - prescriptive analytics: a graduate-level course in large-scale optimization problems. applications include truck routing for big delivery companies and more. as a first project in the course, we wrote a boolean satisfiability (SAT) solver, a report for which i also published here. - applied cryptography: using advanced cryptography concepts to create secure systems: e.g. messengers, authentications systems and more. our latest project is to implement a secure e-voting platform using zero-knowledge proofs. masters-program related (these are required classes outside of cs) - ancient egyptian hieroglyphics II: this is the second semester of a year-long sequence of learning ancient egyptian hieroglyphics. just two weeks ago, i traveled to the museum of fine arts in boston and presented this false door as a tour-guide, reading the inscriptions with grammatical analysis :) - face of earth: affectionately known at brown as "rocks for jocks", this is a relatively easy class which i don't really attend but have to do assignments + midterms for to fit within the 36-credit requirement for the concurrent masters. other - research: working with the programming languages lab at northeastern to help train large language models (think chatgpt) for generating code. - teaching assistant: roughly 10 hours a week as a TA for our introductory systems programming course (find me here hehe). next semester, i will be the head TA for formal proof and verification -- a class I loved and have written a cool final project for. this schedule means that, roughly, i am either eating food, hanging out with friends, working, or all of those combined -- all my waking hours, weekends included. there is so much stress and anxiety, always. but it is incredibly rewarding. i am obsessed with everything i do. burnout is real and it is a price i pay for knowing my limits, of which there are many. i am human and failure is an option.

time is the substance i am made of. time is a river which sweeps me along, but i am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but i am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but i am the fire. the world, unfortunately, is real; i, unfortunately, am Borges. -- Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings

for many years this was my home in tashkent. i lived here and went to lider bolalar maktabi from 2008 to 2015. i sat on top of the iron rainbow and snacked on kirieshki croutons that we bought for two hundred soum. the broken pool from the 1950s was our favorite spot to play football and shark-in-the-“water”. our apartment entryway smelled like cat piss and our fourth floor neighbor was an alcoholic. i was the happiest child in the world. as i would fall asleep, i’d look out and see apartments. the little windows etched into soviet concrete buildings would slowly shut off their lights until it was all dark. i never thought i’d miss the blocs, but i do. the ocean of matiz-nexia-lacetti-zhiguli on my way to school. the semolina porridge every morning. the math teacher throwing a wet mop for answering a question wrong. my memories are the roots that ground me and the stories i carry forward. a longing not just for a place or a time, but for the feeling of being utterly, irrevocably home.

yet another absolutely amazing semester opening with the dream hackathon team. we won the best hardware hack 🌼 check out our project at https://devpost.com/software/spacestock :) though Ishika couldn’t make it this time and was greatly missed, she was also slaying at MIT’s quantum hackathon with a first place win in her track. P.S. excuse my appearance - i got 3 hours of sleep in that pic

p.s.: if you enjoy the content on my channel and have telegram premium, feel free to boost it. this would give me the ability to post stories -- maybe this could be another cool medium to document my life at brown.

it’s so easy to fixate on numbers, course codes, hours spent on work — on countable things that bring our life a sense of meaning. we want the highest numbers, the best numbers. society reveres numbers and we revere them too. surrounded by the ceaseless rat race of college, my life whispers a different kind of progress – one of inner peace and contentment. i can't wait to wrap up this semester and spend the winter with my mom, dad, my brothers. i miss them lots. good luck to u all too!

recent bops

Soon, the last sliver of electricity and connection will be exhausted. If I die, remember that I, we, were individuals, humans,

we had names, dreams, and achievements

, and our only fault was that we were classified as inferior.

- Belal Aldabbour, Palestinian Neurologist (via X)

spooooky szn 👻🎃 they had a good halloween dubstep mix so i was bopping. so pretty!