Out of Hiding

Woo finally, site launch! ¹ Pleased to meet y’all fancy people :)

After more than a year spent learning in the Silicon Valley, masquerading as some non-crazy dude, I’m ready to take my lessons out into the world. This site, opening today, is my portal. Welcome! Your encounter with this page was preordained by the choice of Stein’s Gate. HAHAHAHAHAHA!

Er, why was that necessary? What are you, an agent of CERN? Fine, here’s my story:

5 years ago, I entered grad school with no clue of what I was trying to do or why. 3.5 years, several great friendships and life lessons later, I dropped out, still having hardly a clue. So I did the modern equivalent of picking up some books, and dedicated myself to studies like never before. Free of any structured requirements, inspired in equal parts by sheer curiosity and by the very real challenges faced at work, I put my heart in the work. Turns out the web is chock-full of quality free resources! It didn’t cost a dime to learn about:

• Information theory
• Statistical mechanics
• Finance and economics
• Calculus of variations
• Stochastic calculus
• Rust programming
• Advanced data structures
• Deep learning
• Reinforcement learning
• Deep reinforcement learning

But of course, it’s not enough to just read. As a former theoretician, it’s been an interesting struggle to learn my way around a living, whirring computer at work and beyond. Even the toolchain needed to generate this site was a level up. And, though I skip over it here, I’ve also been busy picking up a bunch of non-technical skills.

As a result… uh I still don’t know what the goal is :/ OK there is something. Indeed, the first stages of disruption are well under way! I’m all-in on this movement: human driving on public roads is both wasteful and dangerous. For a minority, it’s not even an option. So I’d like to play a small role here. Besides, I kinda left Canada while my driver’s license was still in the mail…

What’s next? Well, I’d like to share what I’ve learned in collaboration with you awesome people. You’ll have to look to official channels for the Waymo stuff, but my roommate Shriphani and I have some fun things planned of our own ², so please stay tuned!

1. Helped in part by today’s 40℃ heat wave. ↩

2. Collectively, we are DeepFear :D You can already check out our first collaboration. ↩