What am I doing here? I’ve recently been pondering this exact question. And while I don’t intend to answer the question in such a quick blog (as doing so would probably require a treatise), I did realize that the question makes no sense. Or rather, it makes way too much sense. And it does so in very different ways, and probably means a different thing to different people.

What am I doing here? Literally. Well, I am sitting down at my computer, writing a blog post (which I haven’t done in ages). At the same time, I’m pondering about the problems that I’m going to include on my training for OMI, on segment trees. I’m looking at the book beside me, Nueva historia mínima de México, and I’m also remembering the podcasts with Javier Garciadiego that I’ve been listening to. At a more abstract level, I’m getting ready to start classes tomorrow, and I’ve been trying to severely restrict my screen time on Netflix and YouTube (after listening to Anna Lembke¹ on Emma Chamberlain’s podcast). I should be working on some money and personal finance related things (like taxes).

What am I doing here? The emphasis here is on me. Why am I here, and not, say, any of my family members. For one it’s a matter of logistics, my brother is 16 (so not in college yet), and my parents are way past their college years, they have their life set up in Torreón. On the other hand, there might be a more fundamental reason why I’m here: because MIT has been my dream university for the last 7 years, because the things I’m learning are much more valuable to me than they are to anyone else, because it’s a fixed point in time in the Doctor Who universe. Or of course, there might be a much less fundamental reason: because I lucked out, because my profile reminded my college admissions officer of a friend of them, or simply because of no reason at all, determinism or complete randomness in the universe.

What am I doing here? What do I mean, here? Is it here at the Starbucks where I’m writing this? Well, I’m here because my friend just gifted me a Starbucks cup for Christmas and I’ve been pretty excited to use it recently. Is it here, at MIT? Is it here, in the US? In the universe? Each of these questions merit an entirely different discussion. I could rehash the Medium article about how Starbucks operates as a bank, or a review on the reasons why I like Starbucks over Vester (even though they’re right beside each other, and if I went for the coffee shop experience, it’d be a much more even 50-50 split). I could write about the advantages and community I’ve built at MIT that I don’t think would have been possible anywhere else, and why I like my university, despite it’s (pretty awful) downsides at times. Or I could write a much more historical view on how, even though the US has only been a country for 34 more years than Mexico, it’s opportunities and place in the world are nowhere near my own country’s, despite being neighbors and Mexico being (objectively) richer in resources (it is, after all, the Gulf of Mexico) and strategical location (you could feasibly transport things from the Atlantic to the Pacific during La Colonia, and Nueva España became one of the biggest maritime commercial locations of that time). Or I could write a much more philosophical approach as to why I think I’m here, and what my place is on this Earth, and on the universe as a whole, at this specific point in time. I could go into Nietzsche’s view on nihilism, contrast it (compare it?) to the Cyrenaics’ hedonism.

My point is, I think, that I realized that the question I was asking is very ill-defined. There are so many variables, so many different perspectives, so many definitions. But at the same time, I realized that it’s quite beautiful, in a way. There are so many different interpretations, and my main idea was to help me get some clarity on myself. I don’t need to choose one and stick to it, it’s not an academic essay. And that’s something I find quite beautiful about writing things that are only meant for me. As long as I’m aware of this context, I don’t need to remind myself every time. There is a lot of room to be lenient about what you choose to write about, at the end of the day, it’s your writing. Who cares about well-defined conventions, especially in the 21st century.

–

UPD 24-02-27: I’ve briefly talked about this question with some of my friends, and all seem to follow-up with one of “what do you mean, here?” or “like, literally?”. Almost nobody has pondered the I part of the question, which I thought was interesting enough to add to the blogpost.

Day and Night

I’ve always loved this view of Kepla. I can come to the balcony and stare all day long. It reminds me of my mother.

“Hey Jacob, come here,” she used to say.

“I’m coming mom,” I must have been maybe around sixteen years old back then.

“You must understand that running the company will be stressful when the time comes.”

“Yes mom, you’ve told me about it. I’ve seen you get stressed out, I know what I’m getting into.”

It’s been a few months since she left. Surprisingly, what I said was never a lie. I was always prepared for what was expected of me. It was my turn to run Ubiquitin. It wasn’t until my freshman year in college that I understood what the Ubiquitin protein did, it served as a tag that helped cells dispose of proteins it didn’t need. In essence, that was what my company did. We tagged problems, and then we set plans in motion to remove those problems.

The view in front of me is one of the best views of Kepla. Of Upper Kepla, in particular. Sunlight shining and reflecting in the skyscrapers walls, somehow making all of the flying advertisements look better. It does bore one’s eyes a bit to always see the sparkly white lobby floors, with the occasional black columns in every building, with a lot of green from plants and trees sprinkled in between. White, black, and green, the signature colors of minimalism. Of solar minimalism if you will.

As soon as I finished the work I had, I take the train to lower Kepla to meet up with some of my best friends. You couldn’t really see that part of the city from upper Kepla. It wasn’t even that far away, only a half an hour ride in the high speed underground, but no one really took the line for pleasure.

“The work was tough this week,” I overhear some of the construction workers on the train.

“Yeah, these machines they keep adding. It’s impossible to keep up,” the other one replies.

“I know right? I heard the company’s trying to replace all of us with living machines.”

“You really think they might?”

“Oh for sure. If the money’s there, they won’t even give us a second thought.”

Read More

The Falcon Network

Prologue

It was the middle of the Second Great War. Nations had been at peace with each other for quite some time now. They had developed space travel a few centuries ago, and just as they were about to send the first manned ships outside their solar system, disaster struck. The guerrillas took over Nabla’s government, fully supported by most of the population. They threatened to attack Beta if they didn’t back down from their exploration missions. It was not clear for the rest of the world what was their intent, or what they stood to gain from this hostility. Then, Nabla launched an unwarranted nuclear strike on the capital of Beta, violating countless centuries of nuclear nonproliferation treaties, and prompting Beta to strike right back. Of course Nabla foresaw this, they had the element of surprise— the element of shock— in their corner, and by that point they had targeted most research facilities in the rest of the world. Politicians, scholars, civilians, no one was spared from this attack. And everyone wondered, “why?” It would take a couple millennia for the survivors to get back to a kind of normal world, but they would never even get close to recovering space travel. History was much too traumatic for anyone to dare to try…

---

The general consensus was that Professor Tom Johnson was a genius. A couple of months back, out of nowhere, he published a paper where solved the Hodge conjecture and managed to use it to close a fundamental gap between quantum theory and general relativity. This took the academic world by storm, as every theoretical and applied physicist and mathematician was astonished by the result.

“You’d need years of formal training to even begin to understand what exactly a cohomology is,” said an MIT professor in an interview for Quanta, “and a whole PhD to even begin to try the methods Johnson used.” Tom, at only twenty two years old, had no formal training in mathematics, physics, or any natural science.

One of Tom’s high school physics professors was quoted saying, “if you had told me Tom would solve this unsolved problem in mathematics and then apply it to physics, I would have laughed at you. He almost failed my class!” The reporter was trying to figure out how Tom managed to solve two problems that had managed to stump some of the greatest minds for the last century.

“The ideas just came to my mind one day,” this was what Johnson had said. “I was talking with a friend and he explained to me about topology. Later that night, I started reading the basics, and it all just seemed so natural and logical. Finally, when I got to the Hodge conjecture, the answer was there, staring at me. I simply wrote down what I saw.” The reporter later added that they were not able to contact this friend for comment.

Read More

Wednesday

There’s an unexplainable beauty in the unreliability of memories. Take myself, two days ago; I had a very weird yet interesting day, and we had to leave early (at 8am) the next day for Rockport. Yet if you could enter my room, you could see a tired Jose at midnight trying to desperately put everything he could remember into writing, lest he forgot what he had lived that day. I guess if I wouldn’t have had anything to do for the next couple of days I could’ve gotten away by simply trusting my memories. But I made mental maps of two very new places in the last two days, Rockport and Amherst, MA, to the point that I don’t think I can remember everything that happened on Tuesday.

Fortunately, I wrote it down. Here’s what I wrote: (a note on convention, I’ll write present edits to my past self’s writing in [])

---

Monday

As I was heading back from dinner, I was wondering how I should start this blogpost. A couple things crossed my mind: should I write it in the present tense, as if it were a story and I was guiding my readers (that is, you), or should I write in past tense, to give it an actual feeling of reflection? I believe you can guess which one I settled with. [As you can now tell, I found a much better beginning.]

A Day in The Life, Spring Break Edition

I woke up as my roommate was getting ready to go and grab breakfast. A friend left for Mexico City today, and we had agreed yesterday night that we would get breakfast with him before he left. That meant waking up at 10am, which at 10am today, I really didn’t want to do. My roommate left at 10:01, while I ended up getting to Maseeh for breakfast at around 10:30. My friend still hadn’t left and we managed to talk for a few minutes. For reasons still unknown to me, he left for the airport shortly after, at around 10:45am. His flight was at 2pm. Well, that’s not entirely true, I do know the reasons. He explicitly listed them out. What I don’t get is how he continues to believe that, as he was ready to board the plane by 11:40am, per his BeReal.

After our friend left, my roommate and I finalized some of the details for Tuesday’s trip to Rockport and Wednesday’s trip to Amherst. [Which, I’m glad to inform you, were amazing.] After breakfast I did laundry, mostly because I hadn’t washed my bedsheets in a while and I wanted to sleep comfortably for the rest of the week. For the first time in a while I did laundry even though I still had some clothes left, which felt pretty nice.

Read More

Running

“Just one more tree,” I say to myself. “Only to the tree. It’s a couple more meters,”

“You’re so close, come on.” I like to talk with myself whenever I run. It helps me concentrate. It helps me stay motivated.

Finally, I get to the tree. “You’re amazing. You got here already. You can do one more. Just one more tree.” The cycle repeats. One tree at a time, I finally manage to finish my five kilometer run. I reach my apartment, exhausted. Another morning, another successful run. I would hope that by this point I could finish a five kilometer run without having to think about trees. But counting trees is what helped me begin in the first place. It made such a daunting task feel so simple.

I took a shower, and started dressing up for the day. I glance at my bed, part of me just wants to drop down and sleep just a couple more hours. “Just one more tree,” I tell myself in the mirror. It has been years since the last time I couldn’t finish one more tree, I wasn’t about to start now. And so, I shake my head, I finish putting on my suit, and I grab my helmet as I get ready to take my bike to work. People are always amazed to see a guy in a suit riding a bike. But I hate traffic, and this way it is so much more efficient.

---

“Just one more tree,” I say to myself.

“What was that Peter?”

I keep running. I heard Emma, but I decided to just keep running. I figure she would see I was concentrated, and she’d simply ignore what I had said.

“Oh nothing, just talking to myself.” Who was I kidding, of course I couldn’t ignore Emma. “It helps me concentrate.”

“Okay… sure…. Also, what did you think about the new boss?”

“Oh, Jimmy? I don’t really know, it seems like he knows what he’s doing, he went to Harvard and all.”

Read More

Back in February 2021, I decided to create my “Idea Note.” I’m not entirely sure what were the circumstances that led me to do such a thing, although if I had to bet, I was bored so I started watching Netflix, and I got tired that every time I got bored I would watch Netflix, so I decided to start an idea note that I could look at whenever I felt bored and do some of the things I had suggested to myself in the past, rather than watch Netflix. Granted, this is a completely made up story, but it is pretty consistent with the way I know I act, and it sounds plausible enough to me to believe it, so let’s go with it.

Regardless of what its initial purpose could’ve been, I now strive to use it like that. Whenever I’m bored, I look at my idea note and work on one of the things I suggested. Or well, at least that’s what I try to do: but given that my last modification to my idea note is from May 2022, I don’t think I’m actually using it that well.

Let’s take a look at some of the things I have written in my idea note:

---

Continue with my graph theory shit

If you’re in my blog, I’m guessing you probably already know who I am. Regardless, if you don’t know, I really like algorithms, and I would really love to know more math. Graph theory is that sort of intersection between the two, were you have a lot of graph algorithms (think searching, maps, recommendations, social media; all graphs) and also a lot of graph theory (embeddings, Ramsey, random walks; all math). I know a bit about the algorithms side, but I know almost no theory. And thus the Idea, I want to learn graph theory. I’ve got a textbook on Introduction To Graph Theory and lecture notes with psets by Benjamin Sudakov, I just have never opened either for reasons unknown to me.

Learn how to play the piano/any instrument for that matter.

Okay, I’ve actually made progress on this one. I’ve been learning how to play the violin with Tomas, although it’s mostly at random/sporadic times, without any set or defined schedule. Maybe I should try and do that more consistently, maybe if he’s got time we could set a specific hour a week in which I could learn how to play the violin. One of my “bucket list items” is to be able to play Violin Concert in D Major, I. by Tchaikovsky, not to an orchestra level, and maybe not at the timing, but to at least be able to get something that sounds good.

Read More

Day and Night

We arrived in Monaco a couple of days ago. There was a lot of work to be done in the data analytics industry, and one of my company’s contracts included a full data management system for Space Formula 1. We didn’t actually have to travel to the Monaco Planetary System, we could do all of our work from our office in Kepla, but there was something special about Monaco, a sense of beauty and of aesthetic that I have always enjoyed. As such, every year we come here to watch the Monaco Grand Prix. The SF1 had gone to great lengths in order to emulate the Principality as closely as possible, and at least according to the pictures, they had done a great job. The lakes were made to perfection, the blue skies, the yachts in the pier. It smelled of the sea– and of champagne, a lot of it. It was a rich man’s place.

“Ah, what a move that was!” André says. “Yes! Verneven switcharooed Leciel right past the anti-gravity, that was such a great move,” I reply. “Oh fucking Verneven was not clean on that exit—” that was Nate, speaking in his faintly Italian accent. “—Leciel had to swerve out of the way just to avoid crashing into him, he did not leave enough racing space,” Nate continued to rant, although I stopped paying attention to what he was saying. I continued to watch outside our balcony as the rest of the cars zoomed through. It was a magnificent outer space recreation of the original Monaco Grand Prix, you could feel the attention to detail that the organizers had put into this. The antigravity section began just after that famous chicane, after the drivers had lowered their cars speeds just enough to be able to control their car. We were on top of the chicane, watching as their cars went up and over us. Every single lap, you could see twenty cars going full speed through the air, trying to overtake each other with marvelous technique. The race ended about an hour later, Verneven winning to no one’s surprise, while Leciel’s car broke down in the middle of the race, again to no one’s surprise. Breaking down was a very dangerous thing, especially in the antigravity sections. If your gravity warping device failed, you would fall to the ground at 0.1G— G is the unit of gravity back on Earth, and SF1 had very strict guidelines, races could not have anti gravity sections on planets with more than 0.15G. The limit used to be 0.1G, but after careful analysis with our company, SF1 bumped the limit to 0.15G, allowing Singapore and Cresta to be able to add antigravity sections to their own tracks (which greatly improved sales for them, more than tenfold by our analysis). We got some very good contracts with some of Singapore’s and Cresta’s major advertisers, that was a very good year for us.

The weekend came to an end, and we headed back to Kepla on Sunday.

Read More

What do I want to write about? I mean, when I want to write about philosophy, I take course 24 classes. I’m taking a course 21W, and HASS-A class with the purpose of creating, to be able to say that I am seeing something that wasn’t there before. To be able to get some of the ideas I have stored in my mind and to be able to look at how they evolve, to be able to track how they grow, to be able to see them, and nurture them, and to create more. In part, I guess that this is the reason i code, because I like to create, I like to see my work, and I like to feel my work. I love it when I have an idea on my mind and I’m able to translate it into code, or in this case, into a world with characters that feel happy and loved and sad and are human, or non-human, now that I’m writing sci-fi.

Now, what do I want to create?

• A journey; I want my characters to learn and evolve throughout the story, although remember I only have seven pages.
  • Perhaps I could write something in the middle of a journey; I really enjoyed the way Burning Chrome does this, you get the idea that Bobby is an excellent programmer, and you get a lot of details without ever getting a POV.
  • Maybe about a universe traveller who meets someone new, no plot necessary, just talking?

I’m liking this lone traveller idea. We may get introduced to them very early on in their story, perhaps how they stole their ship and then retired from the action, for a more tranquil and peaceful lifestyle. Perhaps we can get introduced to this character in the middle of nowhere, simply drifting through space.

Could it be that this lonely traveller is the speller of doom? The foreteller of misfortune, the legend throughout the galaxy that when this traveller comes, they bring misfortune to all that they touch. War, famine, drought; why does it follow them? But to be told this story all via his own POV? I think that’d be pretty hard, you wouldn’t know exactly what’s happening. Whose POV could this take? I don’t have the space to write multiple character’s perspectives, I need to focus in and zoom in on one. I think that this is going to be very important point that I need to focus on; if I had infinite space to write, or if it were a novel, I could focus on a much more complex web of ideas, interplay and conflict. But it’s not, so I need to think of a way that I can express a great idea into a few pages.

Read More