The meaning of life isn't something you discover - it's something you construct through systematic exploration and iterative refinement.
I think about it like optimizing a machine learning model. You start with some initial parameters (your genetics, environment, early experiences), but the actual trajectory emerges through the training process. The loss function isn't predetermined - you have to define what you're optimizing for, which is itself part of the work.
There's a bootstrapping problem here that's worth acknowledging: how do you choose meaning without already having meaning to guide that choice? The way out is probably recognizing that you're already embedded in a process. You don't start from a blank slate - you have patterns, preferences, curiosities that already exist. The work is surfacing those, examining them, and deciding which ones to amplify.
For me, it clusters around a few things:
Building systems that reduce cognitive overhead. Whether that's infrastructure automation, better tooling, or frameworks that make complex problems tractable. There's something deeply satisfying about creating leverage - doing work once that pays dividends repeatedly.
Understanding how things actually work. Not surface-level explanations, but the real mechanisms. Why does Kubernetes behave this way under load? How do transformers actually learn? What's the evidence base for this claim? Drilling down until you hit bedrock.
Documenting the process. Writing isn't just communication - it's thinking made concrete. When I write about my thinking process on AGI or automation, I'm not just sharing conclusions, I'm making my reasoning debuggable. Both for others and for future me.
The meta-level realization is that meaning comes from engagement with hard problems. Not difficulty for its own sake, but the kind of problems where the solution space isn't obvious and you have to actually think. The satisfaction isn't in having answers - it's in the process of going from "I don't understand this" to "okay, I see how this works now."
There's probably no cosmic meaning. But there's local meaning in building things that matter to you, learning things that genuinely puzzle you, and leaving some kind of documented trail that might be useful to someone else trying to solve similar problems.
The philosophical questions - consciousness, creativity, what happens after death - are interesting, but they don't need to be answered to have a meaningful life. The work is meaningful even if the ultimate questions remain open.
Marcus closed his laptop at exactly 6 PM, just as he had promised himself he would every day this week. The screen went dark, but the code remained illuminated behind his eyelids-persistent, glowing green text against black. Even as he stood from his desk and stretched, he could still see the function he'd been wrestling with, its logic branching through his mind like creeping ivy.
Not now, he told himself. Work is over.
He made dinner-pasta with store-bought sauce, the same meal he'd eaten three nights running. As the water boiled, his mind wandered back to the memory leak in the application. Maybe if he restructured the garbage collection calls? Or perhaps the issue was in the parent component, not the child. He caught himself drumming his fingers on the counter in the rhythm of typing, each tap a phantom keystroke solving problems that could wait until tomorrow.
His girlfriend called while he ate. Sarah's voice was warm, talking about her day at the veterinary clinic, a difficult surgery on a golden retriever that had gone well. Marcus made appropriate sounds of interest, but part of him was still debugging. Her words became background processes while his main thread analyzed whether implementing a cache would improve the API response time.
"Are you listening?" Sarah asked, not unkindly. She knew the signs.
"Sorry, yes. The dog's owner was crying?" He guessed, poorly.
"That was five minutes ago, Marc."
After the call, he tried to read a novel-something about a detective in Victorian London that his mother had recommended. But the detective's methodology reminded him of debugging: isolating variables, testing hypotheses, following the trail of clues through nested mysteries. Even fiction had become code.
At the gym, counting reps became iterations in a for-loop. One more set translated to one more compile. The rowing machine's display showed metrics that made him think about performance optimization. His heart rate monitor might as well have been displaying server response times.
He met Tom for drinks, his oldest friend who worked in marketing and didn't know a compiler from a cucumber. But when Tom complained about a difficult client presentation, Marcus found himself mentally architecting a solution-a simple web app that could dynamically generate presentations based on client data. He was halfway through explaining the tech stack before he noticed Tom's glazed expression.
"Remember when you used to talk about music?" Tom asked. "You had that whole theory about Radiohead's album structure."
Marcus did remember, vaguely, like recalling a program written in a deprecated language.
That night, he lay in bed, Sarah sleeping beside him. The ceiling was a blank canvas where his mind projected code. He tried counting sheep, but they became objects in an array, each one instantiated with properties: fluffiness, jump_height, sequential_number. He tried meditation, focusing on his breath, but his inhales and exhales became binary: 1, 0, 1, 0.
At 2 AM, he gave up and opened his laptop. The blue light washed over him like baptism, like coming home. The bug that had haunted him all day revealed itself within minutes-a missing await keyword, so simple it was almost insulting. He fixed it, pushed the commit, and felt the sweet release of resolution.
But even as he closed the laptop again, he knew this was just one bug fixed in a system full of them. Tomorrow would bring new problems, and the day after that, and the day after that. The code would follow him home, eat dinner with him, sleep in his bed, wake with him in the morning.
He looked at Sarah, sleeping peacefully, her mind presumably full of dreams that had nothing to do with her work. He envied her ability to close the clinic door and leave the sick animals behind. But then again, maybe she dreamed of surgery, of sutures and symptoms. Maybe everyone carried their own infinite loops.
Marcus finally drifted off around 3 AM, his last conscious thought a promise to himself that tomorrow he would try harder to context-switch, to properly close all his mental tabs. But even as sleep took him, somewhere in his subconscious, a background process continued running, optimizing and refactoring, an endless daemon that would not-could not-terminate.
In his dreams, he was debugging reality itself, and the bug was somewhere in his own source code.
Ethan’s eyes burned as he stared at the ceiling in the dark. It was past midnight, yet his mind churned with lines of code, bug reports, and deadlines. He could hear the faint hum of his laptop from across the room, the machine sleeping-but his brain never did.
He wasn’t in the office. He wasn’t even near his desk. But he might as well have been shackled there. Every time he tried to drift into sleep, a stray thought would pierce through: Did I fix that memory leak? What if the deployment fails tomorrow?
On weekends, when his daughter tugged at his sleeve to play, his body was present, but his mind wandered back to sprint boards and review notes. He’d nod and smile, but she could tell he wasn’t really there. The guilt would come, heavy and sharp, but instead of freeing him, it only chained him tighter.
Work lived in him like a warden. No one forced him to think about it-not his boss, not his colleagues. The prison wasn’t physical. It was a cage built from expectation, ambition, and fear. A cage he carried with him everywhere.
Sometimes, he wondered what silence would feel like. Not the silence of a muted Slack notification, but real silence-the kind that let you hear your own heartbeat without worry pressing against it.
One evening, walking home, he noticed a sparrow land on a fence. It hopped, light and unbothered, and then flew off. He stopped in his tracks, watching it disappear into the sky. For a fleeting second, he envied the bird’s freedom, a freedom he had once believed was his by right.
And in that second, he realized: the keys to his cell weren’t held by his company, or his laptop, or even the endless tasks. They were in his own pocket, hidden beneath the weight of his own unwillingness to set them down.
How to lead a large AGI company
History / Edit / PDF / EPUB / BIB / 2 min read (~205 words)How would you lead an AGI company with 100,000 employees?
I would separate the employees into multiple smaller companies, as large companies are difficult to wield. Furthermore, I think that it is useful for different companies to work on the same problem using different approaches, which is something I would promote. I see the need for a variety of positions:
- (30%) Tooling and core technologies: Building tools that are used by other employees to make progress (visualization, compilation, hardware, database, network). (Bachelor/Master/PhD)
- (25%) Applied research: Put the results of fundamental research into application in a variety of products. (Master/PhD)
- (15%) Fundamental research: Work on scientific theories in order to improve our understanding of intelligence, learning, doing science, solving problems, programming, etc. (Master/PhD)
- (15%) IT: Deal with infrastructure management and scaling. (Bachelor/Master/PhD)
- (5%) Management: Ensuring that work is going in a specific direction and is not a random walk. (Bachelor/Master/PhD)
- (5%) Data collector: Acquire data necessary for experiments done by fundamental researchers and applied research scientists. (Bachelor)
- (5%) Administrative/HR/Facility management: Deal with business related tasks such as people management, facility management/maintenance, etc. (Bachelor)
Biology and genetics for AGI researchers
History / Edit / PDF / EPUB / BIB / 2 min read (~355 words)Why are biology and genetics interesting to AGI researchers?
Because it may provide interesting ideas and clues that can help with the development of AGI.
We currently know of a single instance of a system that is able to produce human-level intelligence: a human being. AGI researchers often try to understand how specific components such as the brain works. A lot of valuable work on the neuron has led to the creation of the deep learning field. Deep learning has definitely proven its value, but I am more interested in something else.
Genetics is seen as the programming of life. What I find interesting is that we can see the current human DNA as our latest implementation of this code. Since this code did not come out of existence from out of nowhere, studying DNA's history can give us ideas as to how a seed AI might come to be. It is also useful to understand how the environment has shaped DNA's existence.
Initially, there were only atoms and molecules. Through different physical and chemical processes, these molecules aggregated and formed more and more complicated assemblies. Through a multitude of steps, we reached the point where there were cells that contained DNA inside of them. This process might have been entirely random although the formation of complex structures happening randomly does not seem highly likely. Understanding the mechanisms or processes that helped create this order may be the equivalent of a pre-evolution natural selection.
My hope is that by studying such fields it is possible to discover how DNA increased in length, what were the different steps and challenges that were encountered that forced it to increase in size, as well as the potential causes of parts of DNA changing over time.
Just like a git repository, I'd like to be able to look at DNA's history and understand what happened to its code since its "Initial commit". It might also be interesting to figure out what kind of programmer nature is.