Dear XYZ,

The central point that this essay makes has always been true, but is worth stressing now that we can delegate a lot of cognitive work to LLMs and AI agents — I think it’s important for us to remember that some things that we do have to be done by ourselves, without that condition they become pointless.

Take for example, meditation. The whole point of meditating is so that you can accrue the personal benefits of the practice, such as calming your mind or thinking more clearly. Meditation, unlike a task like washing the dishes, is meaningless if it is delegated. If you delegate your meditation, you don’t get its benefits; if you delegate dishwashing to a dishwashing machine, you still get clean dishes. (The physical analog to this is something like exercise, but that’s not the focus today.) In fact I think anything where the direct or indirect effect is self-improvement falls into this category.

It’s obvious when we use such exaggerated examples, but I think the main issue is that things aren’t always very clear cut. Especially because the systems and institutions that we’ve set up tend to focus on the task completion rather than the self improvement aspect. Students have to finish homework and workers have to finish jobs. Previously, completing the task is fully aligned with the improving yourself, but that is splitting now that we can delegate task to something else.

It’s like the montage sequence of a kungfu movie. The master tells the student to do something that looks extremely mundane like sweeping the floor or pull water from a well, which the student becomes super bored with. Cut to the next scene, the student realizes that he has grown in strength and now has the muscle memory for certain foundational moves. I think as a whole, we do a terrible job emphasizing the improvement aspects because we’re too obsessed with the immediate outcome, rather than the longer-term process of cultivating a person.

It might be tedious to work through a challenging math problem or to think hard over an essay question. But that friction, and going through that struggle is the point in itself. We become better as a result. So I think we need to be careful when we use such powerful automation tools. If we aren’t, then we may atrophy as a result because we delegate all of our exercise away.

More broadly speaking, the same is true on a societal and institutional level. We need to remember that the larger point is enriching lives and making things better for everyone, not just blindly getting things done. But that’s a bit of a stretch for our immediate topic today.

Addendum, 2 hours later

After finishing the first portion earlier, I find myself stirring and feeling that there’s something incomplete.

I made it seem as if things that we should do on our own is mostly distinguished by whether or not it causes self-improvement. However, I feel like there’re missing edges here, plus it has a very instrumental framing, as if everything has to be done with a purpose or intention in mind.

I’ve found two other ways of looking at this. I think any act that requires understanding becomes meaningless if we were to delegate it. Because, similarly, if doing something helps us gain understanding, which is an internal effect, then the alternative is a lack of understanding. However, “understanding” broadly does not necessarily have to be for self-improvement, although some may argue that any form of added understanding is equivalent to it.

The third approach to seeing this is somewhat meta, some things that we do are meaningful simply because we assign meaning to them. There are things that we just want to do, either for its own sake, or for no apparent reason other than our plain volition. Since the act is completely willed by the doer, it becomes meaningless without them.

I’m sure there are other ways to cut this and others will have different perspectives, but I’ve enumerated a few ways where the whole point is lost if we don’t do certain things on our own.

xoxo,
K

Dear XYZ,

If you’re the kind of person who believes that every idea that will ever live already exists and originality does not or no longer exists, then you can stop reading the essay here.

Otherwise, if you, like me, believe that people and culture at large are continually creating new ideas that are distinct from prior ones, then a pertinent question in the age of AI becomes the relationship between AI (specifically LLMs) and originality.

My main explanatory model today will be the idea of dimensional spaces. Anyone with a basic understanding of geometry, the difference between 2D and 3D, or better yet, the concept of embeddings (if you have learnt machine learning), should be able to grasp the gist of my argument.

I think novel ideas fall into two categories, which we can differentiate using spatial dimensions. I don’t have good names for these yet, so I will be relying on the model to refer to them.

The first type of new idea is about filling in existing known space. If you have an idea represented by the 2D coordinate (1,2), then you know that there can be a coordinate (54,376), because that is already captured by the axial logic of the 2D coordinate system. We can call this intradimensional originality. In other words, we’re extrapolating and interpolating between known ideas to get to new spaces. Let’s use the example of a horse and a man. In reality, a combination between those doesn’t exist, but our minds can conjure an interpolation: a centaur. Extrapolation could be maximizing the quality of some attribute. For instance making the best chair (the chair-est chair, as Platonists might say), or perhaps making a car go faster.

The second type of new idea creates a new dimensional axis. Its existence expands the possibilities of thought. It’s akin to going from a circle in 2D space to a sphere or cylinder in 3D space. 3D forms cannot be fully represented in the prior 2D space. Our 2D coordinate (1,2) becomes (1,2,x) and an entirely new axis becomes available for us to explore. A 2D plane becomes a 3D space. We can call this neodimensional originality. Examples of this may include discovering that light behaves both as a particle and a wave or a carpenter having screws as opposed to a saw and glue — it expands the way we see and the possibilities we have at our disposal.

We can understand the most recent AI achievements using these notions of originality, the most salient of which being the AI-fueled disruptions in Mathematics. AI will continue finding proofs and solutions like Navier-Stokes. However, I don’t see it inventing Lean, new mathematical questions, or novel perspectives to these problems. It extrapolates and interpolates, it does not create new dimensions. And perhaps we can argue that this is fundamental to the training regime of LLMs, they are trained on existing corpuses. This is also a point of contention in the Navier-Stokes debacle, where OpenAI cannot confirm that their training data did not include transcripts with Buckmaster and Alpoge.

I’m sure that there are ways in which this distinction can be disproven and as with anything, things are likely gray at the edges. I think it is possible if we give LLMs increasingly vague and open-ended instructions that begin to model human-like ontology. However, I would argue that this would be a terrible idea in the first place.

Beyond the question of originality, we should also interrogate, like Terence Tao has, the underlying value system, beliefs, and culture of our practices and communities of practice. Why we continue making and inventing things and how that relates to what we understand to be “original” are possibly even more important meta-questions we should consider.

xoxo,
K

Dear XYZ,

Silicon Valley was a comedy series that was popular in the 2010s. It chronicled the journey of the fictional startup Pied Piper, with its CEO Richard Hendricks as the main protagonist.

2010s feels like very recent past, but technology companies and their overall tone and cultural impact have dramatically shifted in less than a decade. This was a time when:

• Google still had “Don’t be evil” as its motto
• tech CEOs generally supported progressive causes (or at least weren’t overtly right-wing or authoritarian)
• tech employees had considerable say over what they companies should (and shouldn’t) be building
• the world’s first trillionaire was a remote concept
• tech startups were founded by wide-eyed optimists who were trying to “make the world a better place”

Silicon Valley was made at a time when technologists, even the leaders at the biggest tech companies, could make fun of themselves. It’s somewhat difficult to imagine that happening today. Especially with the AI arms race, technology has evolved to take a more critical seat in serious conversations like global great power rivalry, national security, and human existential risk.

Lately, I’ve been reminded of a quote from Christopher Nolan’s 2008 film, The Dark Knight:

You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain…

Harvey Dent

For those familiar with Batman lore, you will know that Harvey Dent later becomes the tragic villain Two-face. I’ve been wondering how technology companies somehow also seem to have gone through a similar process. Big tech of the 2020s has a more sinister tone as compared to being relatively light-hearted just a handful of years ago.

Of course, there are other societal changes that have happened alongside that precipitated the change. I wonder how historians would look back and make sense of this time that we’re living through, not just the early 2000s but the extremely rapid technological advances we’ve observed since the invention of modern computers and networking.

Perhaps it’s another version of the adage, “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely”. As technology companies grow their economic strength and increasingly reach into every aspect of our lives, we become subject to decisions made by technologists. And our world become increasingly shaped by the values and beliefs of the leaders of these large companies. And at least for now, there doesn’t seem to be any countervailing power — most major governments only play lip service to regulating tech companies today.

More to say about this in the future.

xoxo,
K

Dear XYZ,

At some point, science overtook religion as the predominant way in which people explain their experience. However, these two explanatory approaches operate differently. One big difference is how each handles arguably the biggest question that any of us would encounter — “why am I here?”

To better understand this divide, we can use Aristotle’s notion of the four causes, which he used to understand why something is. The four causes are material, formal, efficient, and final. We’re only interested in the latter two, so I’ll be focusing on them. According to Aristotle, an efficient cause explains how something came to be, which can also be understood as a mechanical explanation. On the other hand, a final cause explains the purpose of something, in philosophical terms, one might call it teleological explanation.

Let’s use a chair as an example. The efficient cause of a chair is the carpenter and the processes that were taken to go from raw materials to a chair. The final cause of a chair (i.e. its purpose) is to be sat on.

When it comes to existential questions like, “why am I here?” Religion often answers both questions, whereas science answers only the first question. For instance, Christianity (roughly) posits that God created people — the efficient cause — and that our purpose is to seek salvation through Christ — the final cause. Science, answers the same question with a series of occurrences that got us where we are — Big Bang, evolution. In some ways, we can think of it as a schism between the past and the future. Both offer stories about how we got here, but only religions give us a direction of where we go from here. One could possibly argue that science tells us what we are mammals with innate desires to survive, reproduce, and gain social status. However, knowing that hardly gives us an aspirational North Star, or any semblance of what it means to do those well.

So what? Why is this important? I often revisit a part of David Foster Wallace’s speech This is Water:

…in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. David Foster Wallace

Many people will now consider themselves as atheists or perhaps more loosely, not subscribe to any organized religion. However, that does not mean that they don’t believe in anything, it just means that whatever they believe in may not have a simple label. Unless we are deliberate, most of us will simply take on the path of least resistance and adopt the values of mass culture. For instance, we frame ourselves as consumers, and our purpose is to buy goods and services to make us feel better about ourselves. Or perhaps we might frame ourselves as utility-maximizing rationalists, as the economists like to imagine.

The causal schism brought about by the strength of science in explaining efficient causes but its weakness in final causes means that for many of us are educated scientifically, our default disposition is one void of meaning. This is related to Nietzsche’s lamentation that “God is dead […] And we have killed him.” Modernity is often one lacking in meaning and purpose.

So it falls to each one of us to understand, interpret, and formulate what meaning means to ourselves. What values do we hold dear? And what do we consider sacred? These are things that modern life tends to ignore, but I think are extremely important for us to live a good life — one filled with meaning and fulfillment.

Good luck on your journey.

xoxo,
K

Dear XYZ,

Various people have talked about why it is unnecessary to use courteous language when instructing LLMs. Since an LLM has no feelings, there’s no need to say things like “please” or “thank you”.

Some might argue that using language in specific ways could boost the efficacy of such models, but this is not my concern. Beyond matters of efficacy, which is more concerned about the here and now, I’m more interested in how LLMs change us, how we use language, and our society as a result.

Given that an increasing share of our communication may be to non-human language machines, and the medium of exchange is the same (i.e. whatever language of choice). This medium will start to co-evolve with the use of this technology. This is akin to how SMS caused the proliferation of abbreviations like “lol” or “omg” due to the character constraints of that early cellphone messaging service. Today, these abbreviations are effectively universally understood to most English, and perhaps even non-English speakers.

If I have to make a choice between burning a few more tokens or causing our language interactions to become increasingly imperative or impolite, I’ll choose the former.

I should also caveat that given my day job working in AI infrastructure, the cost of those additional tokens pale in comparison to the full context in most LLM conversations. It’s no big deal for the most part.

xoxo,
K

Dear XYZ,

Y just crossed his one month a couple of days ago. There were a couple of things I wanted to jot down because I didn’t come across them during my pre-parent readings (which admittedly I didn’t do a whole lot of).

1. Dry hands

I’m washing things (bottles, clothing, etc) much more frequently as I did before. I observed that my hands are now much drier and my cuticles are cracking more often. Moisturize!

2. Baby smiles

I’m not sure if this is a particularity of Y, but I noticed that Y first smiled in his sleep. More recently, he’s smiling when he’s awake. This is pretty interesting and somewhat surprising to me. It’s not that he isn’t able to smile necessarily but that doing it while conscious is somehow different. It’s super cute when he smiles, but when he does it awake there’s definitely some bonus joy (because secretly I think maybe it’s something I did).

3. Active sleep

When Y sleeps, the early part of his sleep could happen with his eyes half or fully open. It would dart around, kind of like REM sleep but his eyelids would be wide open. Babies have active sleep typically until about 3-5 months.

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Needless to say there are times when Y cries when we are completely clueless why. I guess as young parents you kinda just cycle through the things until you find something that soothes them — bouncing, changing diapers, feeding, burping, etc.

Going back to work officially tomorrow, hoping that the transition will be ok for everyone. This shouldn’t be the big one since my mom will still be around.

I’m still waking up with C during sleep hours when Y wakes up for feeds, which is about 2-3 times a night. Hopefully that can continue without me feeling too tired for work the next morning.

Things are going pretty well overall for now, and I’m thankful.

xoxo,
K

Dear XYZ,

I’ve always been interested in what it means to be free. If I were to continue writing this blog for long enough, I won’t be surprised if I revisit this topic occasionally.

I would sometimes hear people saying that they choose not to have kids because that would mean giving up their freedom. A similar logic can be applied to marriage or being in a long-term romantic relationship; some people (probably less so compared to having children) would say that they prefer the freedom of being single.

For the most part, this makes intuitive sense. When you have relationships, they take up your time and energy. But I think that there’re other ways to see this. I’m particularly interested in how freedom can be conceptualized in a different manner to invert this intuition. If we were to imagine our experience of life as if it were architecture, relationships would be like doors to a separate space. Different life spaces allow you to have different sets of experiences and possibly express different versions of yourself. Without having these relationships, one will not be able to access these spaces and therefore not be free to roam and wander in such spaces. Seen from this perspective, having relationships gives you the freedom and ability to experience things that you wouldn’t have otherwise.

This is similar to Isaiah Berlin’s coinage of positive freedom, which can be understood as the freedom to do something (as opposed to negative freedom, which is the freedom from external restriction). In this sense, the ability to act in a particular way is a form of freedom, because it would otherwise be unavailable to the person.

Perhaps it could be thought as a trade between temporal freedom and spatial (or relational) freedom. We may get less time to do things for our personal self, but gain the opportunity to build relationships and community, as well as bear witness to the life of another individual.

I am somewhat bothered, as I’m writing this, that we often associate the lone ranger out in the frontier as synonymous with freedom. There’s something to be said about the lonely freedom of striking it out on your own, but I think what’s often left unsaid is the courage and freedom to connect, to befriend, to love and be loved. In my case specifically, to have the space to explore what it means to be a dad.

xoxo,
K

Dear XYZ,

Y was born on 8 August 2026. That makes me a dad, which is something pretty incredible to wrap my head around. In some ways, having a kid is one of the most typical things about life — otherwise I wouldn’t be writing this and you wouldn’t be reading it — but yet every individual birth feels like such a miracle in itself. How is it that a sperm and an egg can come together to create a brand new human being with combined traits from mom and dad?

Y’s birth was relatively successful. There was a short moment where there was a possibility that we may have to do an emergency C-section but fortunately we didn’t have to resort to that. C did an amazing job, she’s a trooper as usual. What’s kind of funny is that we found that Y probably had his hand on his face when mommy was trying to push him out, so the pushing took a bit longer than we thought it would, though again, relatively short.

I brought my mom to visit Y at the hospital on the second day. I managed to muster my courage and broached the religion topic which I wrote about previously. While she would’ve preferred a different outcome, she was accepting of our decision. Mom said that she hopes that I don’t have to go through some kind of catastrophic experience to rediscover faith. She mentioned that the testimonies that she hears for rebound Catholics often involve them going through some kind of traumatic event. I think there’s some survival bias here, that many of these returning Catholics have experienced such painful life-changing incidents found solace in faith. The people who led otherwise ordinary lives likely stayed the course. This could explain why those testimonies aren’t heard, or even if they are, they are likely much less salient than the painful ones. This experience has also led me to think about the relationship between life and writing (or perhaps more broadly, art). I’m not sure if I would have the same conversation with my mom had I not put it into writing. In that sense, I have already gained from writing by living more truthfully. Perhaps writing can act as a sort of rehearsal by staging the situation with words first.

Y is absolutely adorable. He makes really epic funny faces and poses. It’s super fun to observe him grow.

As of this writing, Y is on his thirteenth day. In the first two weeks, I think the main concern is getting the baby to regain their birth weight. For those who don’t know (I only found out during pre-natal courses), babies will usually lose some weight after birth and regain it by the second week or so. One of my personal challenges during this phase, as someone who loves to plan, is that Y’s hunger doesn’t really follow a fixed schedule. So things change on a daily basis. Having medical consultative help has been a great source of confidence and reassurance, and so has the occasional questions to Claude for consolidating normative benchmarks and guidelines. Prescriptive science, when applied to medicine and biology, is normative in nature. This means that parents are often trying to fit a shape that is defined by normative distribution. I have some thoughts about this, I think it’s probably the best approach that we know of, but it immediately forces parents to be in a comparative state of mind and to worry about “standards” right after the baby is born — I’m not sure if that’s a good starting mental space for new parents. I might discuss this more in a separate post. Fortunately, we just came back from the medical appointment and Y is now heavier than his birth weight. So in that regard, we’re probably done with this first “quest”.

So far most things have been within the range of expectations — disrupted sleep, less structured time, changing diapers, getting pooped, peed, and puked on. Things have been a lot easier with mom holding the fort in the kitchen, cooking delicious meals for us everyday. It has been immensely helpful to not have to worry about it and know that C’s diet is properly taken care of. I can’t imagine doing this without at least some parental leave. I don’t understand how some working parents are able to survive with little to none of it. Caring for a baby is something that requires time and takes some getting used to. I find myself feeling somewhat tired and thus frustrated at times even when I’m on paternity leave. I can’t imagine people who have to juggle everything all at once in the first few weeks of their baby’s life. I feel like it would be a lot harder to enjoy this time if there are so many other things that require your attention. I’m really lucky to have this time to be with my family.

The last thing I wanted to mention today is that there is a lot of well-meaning advice and pointers that come your way as a parent. I don’t think I know how to properly deal with those yet; I mostly find them somewhat annoying. What I find especially annoying are people telling me all the work that needs to be done and pointing out all of the tasks. I find that kind of… boring and off-putting? Maybe it’s just me being weird haha, but I don’t think it’s super helpful to give such information nowadays in such an information-dense world? I think if the roles are reversed, what I would say instead is to assure the parent(s) that they’ll do a great job and tell them the cool things to look forward to, for instance, the funny little noises that they make and their cute facial expressions.

All in all, glad that things are going well in general. Definitely more to come!

xoxo,
K

Dear XYZ,

As we count down to Y’s birth, I sometimes wonder, how should I respond if he ever asks me, “Why did mommy and you bring me into this world?”

I feel like I should have some kind of an answer to that, perhaps this could also serve as a reminder to myself about the kind of dad I want to be, especially when things get challenging.

Dear Y, you may wonder why you were brought onto this planet amidst upheaval. We have a looming climate crisis, the global world order established after Second World War is unraveling, AI is changing how work is conducted. There is a lot of uncertainty and risk. I think it’s important to remember what the point of all of this is. And I think, the point is to have a good life, one that you define and cultivate. I think all these ongoing changes do not preclude making a good life, one filled with meaning and purpose. I hope that you will grow to be a good person, the kind that leaves the world better than you found it. I hope that you take joy in all things big and small. I hope that you’ll chart a path you can call your own and make decisions based on beliefs and positions that you refine over time. I hope that you’ll open yourself to what the world has to offer, especially its awesome natural beauty — the depth of the ocean, the breath of the sky, the warmth of the sun. I hope that you’ll love the people that you meet, make many friends of different stripes, experience heartbreak, and believe in the goodness of people. I hope that you’ll make your own mistakes, learn from them, and do better the next time. I hope you’ll enjoy the life that you’re given, not by mom and I, but by the infinite string of contingent miracles that manifested your consciousness into your body in this time and place.

My job as a dad is to help guide Y to be and become himself. I’ll try to be sensitive to his inclinations and interests, and help him channel his energies to his ends. I’ll be honest when I need to be, but also be kind and open because he is born in a different episteme, and there’s so much that I’ll learn from him and the way he looks at things. I look forward to sharing time with him.

I’ll probably not be doing a second one of this if I have another child. Or perhaps it’ll be a good chance to revisit and revise this then.

Mommy and I are excited that you’re coming Y!

xoxo,
K

Dear XYZ,

The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

Recently, one of my favorite YouTubers, the Green brothers, made videos about Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus. Thought it’ll be nice for me to revisit it.

I first got to know about the story through a philosophy course in college by one of the most important teachers in my life. That was also the time when I was looking for another philosophical (or perhaps some would say spiritual) footing as I was progressively becoming detached from the Catholic faith that I was brought up in.

I am inclined to say that a huge part of my worldview today is shaped by Existentialist philosophy, especially that of Camus. I think that we are thrust into this existence not by our choice. And it’s odd and beautiful how we try to find meaning in what seems like an ultimately meaningless universe. Except that it is meaningful because we create that meaning by being. We are the color in what is otherwise a grayscale void. And that’s a part of why this is so absurd, we didn’t have any choice in being; it almost seems like humans are built to seek meaning, but there’s no meaning to be found, at least in the metaphysical sense where most people tend to look.

I think struggling to find or make that meaning is central to the human experience. Trying to figure out who we are and what we want to do in our limited time here prompts much of how we feel. But I think that’s the whole point. The way that Camus’ melodramatic frenemy Sartre would put it is that “man is condemned to be free.” The agency that we have over our lives is a blessing and a curse — we are responsible for how we live our lives. For many of us, we’re so lucky to be given the breath of life and to experience what it has to offer. We’re fortunate to live, learn, and iterate.

The act of putting one foot forward, falling, picking oneself up, taking another step, and repeating that again and again until our time here ceases — I find that a beautiful thing to do.

xoxo,
K