Singularity

280 days. That's how long it's been since I last wrote a blog. Here's a fun fact: years ago, Twitter decided that a thought should be 280 characters long. That's the internet's official unit of thinking. I think mine just needed a day per character. Today also happens to be August 25th, Linux's 35th birthday. On this day in 1991, a college student named Linus Torvalds announced his little project to the world with possibly the most famous understatement in tech history, "just a hobby, won't be big and professional." That hobby now powers much of the internet, billions of Android phones, and every one of the world's most powerful supercomputers. Thirty-five years later, that's still the best way anyone has ever started anything. Quietly, with zero promises attached. Felt like the right day to start writing again.

So, where do I even begin after 280 days?

With these past four months. Alone, mostly. This summer was the first one in my life I spent mostly by myself, and I'd be lying if I said I handled it gracefully from day one. My internship started remote, which meant I was in Madison. And summer Madison is a completely different city from spring or fall Madison. Everyone I knew had gone home to their families. I had a four-bedroom apartment entirely to myself. During the semester I would've traded a kidney for that kind of peace. In June, I despised it. I've always been someone who recharged around people, yet you only truly learn that when the people you care about leave.

Nobody warns you about the small stuff. A random Sunday with nothing scheduled. Eating a meal by yourself. Watching a movie alone. That's when the philosophical debates started, me versus me, usually late at night. Why am I doing all this? What am I actually seeking? I didn't exactly land on clean answers. But I stopped being afraid of the questions, which might be its own kind of answer (P.S. The World Cup helped too. Nothing cures loneliness like screaming at a screen with strangers.)

The other thing that got me through it? Muay Thai. A couple of my friends had started, but the real reason goes further back. From age five to about thirteen, I trained in Tang Soo Do, a Korean martial art, all the way to a black belt. Its core principles were focus, discipline and respect, and somewhere between deadlines this summer I realized I wanted that architecture back in my life. It's also the only hour of my day where the gazillion open tabs in my head close. Hard to think about deadlines when someone is trying to beat you up methodically. Focusing on technique, on what my hands and legs are doing, makes me feel balanced in a way I can't fully explain.

Then, around mid-July, everything changed. I flew down for my internship in Florida, and remote became real. Real in every sense. Every day arrived shaped differently from the last. One day it's a new feature to build, the next it's a presentation, the day after that it's stakeholders and deadlines. And the fact that the work I do affects real people. That changes how you sit down at your desk in the morning. That's why the experience felt unlike anything I'd done before, and why it's the kind of work I'd like to continue doing for a long time.

All of this happened while the world outside was moving even faster. There's a new AI headline every single day now, and I've started to believe the most important skill isn't any framework or programming language. It's simply keeping up. Then, literally the day after my birthday, I woke up to the news that more than 1,100 people who work at massive corporations like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta signed a letter asking the government to prepare ways to slow AI down. Just to be clear, the people evidently building the thing asked the government to help build the brakes. That's how close we apparently are to the singularity.

Which brings me to the title. A technological singularity is the point where machine intelligence begins advancing beyond our ability to control it. In math, it's the point where a function blows up and normal rules cease to exist. And "singular" is also just a fancier word for alone. This summer somehow felt like all three at once. The world sprinted toward its singularity while I sat quietly inside mine. Weirdly, both taught me the same lesson. When the normal rules stop applying, you find out what you're actually made of.

Nine months ago, in Velocity, I said the one thing AI can't replicate is:

Almost a year and one AI internship later? Past me holds up. I'm very much keeping his answer.

So no, I won't promise weekly blogs this time. No schedule. Just a hobby. Won't be big and professional.