Curtis Hu Blog

WARNING: some it-who-must-not-be-named will be discussed. 

As much as I hate to deny it, the it-who-must-not-be-named is influential. I would be living with my eyes closed if I said otherwise. To point the obvious, the nature of many jobs will change including research:

- Many jobs now becomes a validation engineer, including parts of research

- Research farms of agents will be undoubtedly be used to explore more ideas than imaginable.

While a lot of these loops can be done quite quickly, the limiting factor is reality and physical reality. It can simulate thousands of times in seconds but those sims don't always match physical reality. Especially in areas where we are still formulating its behavior. For example, in plasma physics. Sure, it can create a hypothesis or a design and test them in simulation many many times but that won't mean it would necessarily work in real life.

I'm pretty sure by the end of my PhD, it-who-must-not-be-named will have yet become many folds smarter as it has during my undergrad. I'm sure PhDs are using it like crazy. So will the skills developed in a PhD even be useful in the world afterwards? Will I be able contribute to the world at large? Will I contribute to the body of knowledge at large? Will the knowledge or skills be useful?

Definitely not here to define what a genius is much less call myself a genius. But I can attest to some of the great problems in my life.

Restlessness

I can attest to a mind that runs as fast as F1 sports cars. In my opinion, it is involuntary solitude, innate worrying, and drifting imagination that enables room for quiet calculation. Not genius, that is a cheesy way to explain something you don't understand. Mind becomes a blender. Mind becomes a rollercoaster. Mind becomes a lightning rod that never turns off.

Cannot sleep. Cannot function as a human being if they consume you. If you don't write things out. Like a million Watts of electricity is coursing through your spine at every given moment. When I was young, I certainly did not know how to deal with this.

Detoning

You can tone this down by methods everyone else does. Music, entertainment, books and such.

Most people experience this too, but they channel them into community and gentle hobbies, which is much more healthier. Community. Strike genuine connections -- even though they won't fully mean everything or reach the core of your heart (that's a lonely place not a lot of people will understand). 

This doesn't work for some people who's minds run on fire. It becomes an alienating process. Negative feedback. Genius isolates. You feel so deeply and so complicatedly that language fails. No conversation can even touch the depths of what you feel and think. There is a certain kind of isolation that comes with that -- where no one truly knows what goes on inside your mind or what you are truly feeling. They look upon you with much speculation. I could tell ya, but ya probably wouldn't ever truly understand -- not your average psychological template human being, believe me I've desperately tried.  

So here enters the negative feedback loop. It causes you to have experiences that no one has. This can isolate you on some level. Which in turn gives you the solitude that enables room for more mental fire.

Additionally, it doesn't work to have gentle hobbies or entertainment: Numb yourself. Then you are in decay. You are dying in a figurative sense.

Naively, I could just settle down in the countryside but deep down I know that I wouldn't actually be able to rest. 

At this point, everything you have ever thought of, I think I have thought of before already.

Paradox

The moment you stop or slow down, chaos replaces the tranquillity and the peace. Mind wanders again and pretty soon you are back on a rollercoaster. 

One of the great paradoxes of living. Going full force in a chaotic and focused way is the only thing that actually gives you peace. Going at a peaceful pace is the only thing that gives you chaos. 

Conclusion

One's internal wiring is a masonry for their actions. 

I am a rocketship. I need to move fast or the potential energy inside unleashes in unhealthy ways. That very escape-velocity is not sustainable as well.

So I'll settle for the base camp - climb - camp - climb - camp until the indefinite.

Certain things compound. Certain things have leverage. Others don't.

• Reputation can compound. Rolling burritos don't
• Networks can whisper your trust after you've left the room.
• Automation keeps working when you sleep
• Writing and video content can keep reaching audience after the pen stops
• Skills grow on top of each other.
• Systems engineering creates ecosystems that operate after you've stopped.

You can work really really hard and still not make it far in life. To me its quite common sense.

Simple idea. Short post.

Success demands deep focus, long blocks of solitude, obsessive energy, saying “no” constantly, delayed gratification

Social/romantic life wants frequent presence, emotional availability, spontaneity, saying “yes” more, immediate reward

These forever pull in the opposite direction. It's not possible to be on one side without sacrificing the other side. We need both sides in our lives, otherwise we miss out on a fundamentally wonderful aspect of living.

For me, what works is understanding this love-work spectrum and finding something that works for you. Try not to dwell too far on one side for too long.

I find two opposing forces tugging in opposite directions.

• A desire to live a simple life away from politics. A desire to jump into the deep end and expand and dominate.
• A desire to rebel by exclusion. A desire to rebel by breaking rules of the game at large.
• A desire to hide away from visibility. A desire to be visible at large whilst whispers of respect, of broken expectations, of originality
• A desire to be at peace. A desire to be at war.

Both psychological profiles exist in perhaps all young men at varying degrees. Absolute respect for following whatever underlying neurological wiring serves the most satisfaction.

Attention

It's not healthy to live with a pair of eyes over the shoulder but that is a sacrifice you'll need to give up to do something of magnitude. The alternative is to live a very boring life. Am I really living then?

From my perspective, use attention as a tool to do your goal of magnitude. Protect the space such that peace is possible. Protect a Walden for yourself.

Internal Chaos

Peace breeds internal chaos within that is tranquilized through an external war. War bleeds which is tranquilized through peace.

War is of course not sustainable. Oscillate between peace and war effectively. Relax and hustle. 

Until his name becomes a towering edifice of its own
Where its fog whispers through matcha cups and coffee
Establishes a gravitational field of its own.
Without the illusive, muddying reliance of prestigious titles or hollow trophies

And so the chain of events start to make sense,
The curse of the one room apartment you called the philosopher's desolation land
Morphs into the delusional, egotistical belief that you are a cosmic fluke
But it's quite a gamble because those are the same words of a disgraced madman.

Deep down he feels he wasn't supposed to make it this far
That it all happened for a cosmic reason.

Read more

My ruminations to be a physicist or an inventor or a software engineer or somethin'. I've had a many-of moonlit qualms discussing this with the sassy parrot that lives in my head. To the point that I never really know anymore.

Historically, it's been hard for me to suppress my own thoughts. At surface level, it's a quite a problem - gives rise to so much uncertainty at the wrong times. Those voices don't come in handy when you're say, talking to a girl. Contrarily, in the long run, I do think those visions, decisions and revisions ultimately lead a mapped path forward. Just don't overdo it; overpreparation is born of sickening levels of doubt and uneasiness. 

Like all people, I've just chosen the path that I thought I would enjoy the most. Rest easy. Not have any regrets. .

Behind the palm tree silhouettes pressed against a cotton candy sky, a crow caws with no voice in the distance responding. Maybe there's the whispering drone of the 680 freeway or a stray cat wandering by those dilapidated apartments.  My consciousness has become a vignette, creeping up from the sides. Sometimes you'd sit on the curb just waiting for a car to drive by.

Things have changed. The streetmall we used to go bowling sometimes after school has become abandoned, except for a lonely liquor store and some hobo cars. The schools I went to got rebuilt with a steel fence surrounding it - maybe from all the school shooting complaints and mishaps over the years. When I was young, my neighbor and I would roamed the streets knocking on our friend's doors, looking for places to eat Sour Patch Kids or Takis without our parents knowing. Would building dirt ramps for tailwhips. Would spending hours modifying our bikes. The children now go straight to tutoring or music lessons after school. All my peers are working their jobs, speeding ahead in the distance.

My neighbor Carol, an older lady, sits by her window every day waiting for something eventful to occur - like the rebellious teenage daughter next door. Actually most of my neighbors do that. That or watch television.

I gotta get out of this town. Gotta get out of Duluth, gotta get out of Decateur, gotta get out of Fremont. I gotta get out of here. I gotta, the way people need water.

I think I've hit an all time low in my college years. Just bombarded with a mixture of lucid visions of dystopian futures, crippling worry, and my own constant disappointments. I've probably bombed some tests along the way. In hindsight, I was homesick and missing an element of human connection.

What I've realized is that I just can't bring myself to care that much about money. I just want enough to put food on the table and just spend the rest of the time doing things I enjoy and find meaningful with people I want to do it with. 

My priorities are starting to change due to artificial intelligence. I've been choosing to fixate more on my relationships. I feel that I've been hyperfixating on productivity a little too much; powered by some mixture of inner rage, worry, the feeling of being trapped in a hole, and the only way forward is up and lastly obsession. I'm not sure if I want to feed into that hardcore productivity, although I know that obsessive side of me reappears again and again. Don't get me wrong. I want my work to have a meaningful impact, just not sure if I want to make the extreme sacrifices that I've done previously. I want there to be love and laughter as well. I want to go camping with my family and play sports. I want to make inside jokes, draw mustaches on magazine models, and get a pilots license. I want to build some memorable experiences. Worst case is I become the kind of people who sacrifices time with friends and family for their work.

I've been letting people down a lot. I let myself down a lot too. I'm realize I have this tendency to do exactly the opposite of what everyone else is doing and wants me to do; there's this sort of rebel inside of me since high school. So sorry ma for letting you down. Sorry for everyone who've invested heavily in my education and believed in me, but I'm just gonna do what I want to do (and suffer the anticipated consequences of course).

So...

Sorry guys, I gotta see about a girl.