I try to use default keybindings and keyboard layouts as much as possible, but as a vim user, I’ve always mapped Caps Lock to escape wherever possible. On certain mechanical keyboards (I use the Drop ALT) you can map multiple functions to the same key, so a tap presses one key while holding it treats it as another. I never thought about this much until recently, but realized this functionality is incredible for vim and tmux users:

I just published a novella that I wrote during the summer of my PhD thesis defense. I actually wrote the first scene a year ago because it wouldn’t get out of my head, then returned to it in May 2025. A novella is apparently just a short novel, so that’s what this is, I guess. I have no interest in wasting people’s time—especially my own—so I wrote Growth and Decay to be a quick read (~70 pages) while still saying everything I had to say.

0x0d-I: March 13th, 2181, 10:00pm

“Hi Ari, it’s Ari.”

Ari’s head snapped to face the speaker placed on the floor. It was a small bookshelf speaker, with a laptop resting on top. On the screen, a bar scanned across a waveform titled 12-greeting-final-2-final.mp3. The voice sounded like Ari’s.

Just upgraded my Framework Laptop 13 Mainboard from a Ryzen 7640U to a Ryzen AI HX 370. I run Arch Linux. Here’s my experience:

• Upgrade was easy, but the cables for my WiFi card wouldn’t snap into place. There’s a plastic thing that I have to put on top of the connector to hold them in place, but it’s a massive pain to connect. Took me over 20 minutes to align and lock the cables into place, but I got it working.

Like many edgy teenagers, I once embraced nihilism—the belief that nothing matters, that existence is fundamentally meaningless. I could write a book on how strongly I subscribed to this area of thought, but that’s not the point of this post; you’ll have to trust that the following comes from someone who climbed out of the pit:

Everything matters. And that’s even scarier.

I still don’t believe in broad concepts like “meaning” or “fulfillment”. I believe in biological reactions that make something feel meaningful or fulfilling. Those reactions are what matters, and I think nihilism’s pull is strongest on those who lack them. But we can hack our minds.

My latest paper is available on arxiv: Low Rank Factorizations are Indirect Encodings for Deep Neuroevolution.

The general idea is that we can search for stronger neural networks in a gradient-free fashion by restricting search to networks of low-rank. We show that it works well for language modeling and reinforcement learning tasks. It’s essentially a crossover between the following papers:

• LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models
• Deep Neuroevolution: Genetic Algorithms Are a Competitive Alternative for Training Deep Neural Networks for Reinforcement Learning.

I’ll be presenting it virtually for the Neuroevolution@Work workshop at GECCO 2025.

If all goes well, I’ll leave Brandeis University with a PhD degree in computer science this summer. Here are my parting thoughts for our remaining students, divided into technical and non-technical sections.

I write this out of self-interest; students after me will represent our university in years to come, and it’s in my best interest for them to be as effective as possible.

NON-TECHNICAL

• Students often lack crucial skills. Technical students may lack communication skills, or social butterflies may lack depth. Some lack both. This doesn’t really matter, in my opinion, if they are willing to learn. Just like neural networks, they may be all over the place initially, but students who reflect on your feedback will (eventually) be worth more than those who never update their parameters. Don’t give up on those who listen and try; they often just need the right kind of mentorship.

I used to have a mental block against casually reading things that weren’t designed to be casually read, like old papers, textbooks, documentation, etc. If I was going to read for enjoyment, I’d read blogs or popular science/fiction books. Not sure why.

Over time, I’ve met people who read things I’d never think to read. I’ve gotten a lot of value from copying them, so I’m sharing my thoughts here.

Starting from REINFORCE, the original deep reinforcement learning algorithm, we will trace the evolution of policy gradient methods to the Group Relative Policy Optimization algorithm used to train Deepseek r1.

This post ignores the LLM side of things, less-related developments in RL, and most of the equations used for these algorithms, but captures the essence and intuition of the RL-timeline without wasting your time. This is all self-study, so feel free to send me any corrections/suggestions.¹

I just finished The Story of Civilization, Vol. 1 (1976) by Will Durant. It’s a fantastic read; Durant is eloquent, witty, and surprisingly relevant today. Below are some of my personal highlights of his writing, mixed with some quotes-of-quotes I found interesting.

Sections: Introduction | Communism | Government | Women | Morals | Language | Appearance | Sumeria | Egypt | Babylon | Assyria | Judea | Persia | India | China | Japan | Conclusions

Introduction

“the provincialism of our traditional histories, which began with Greece and summed up Asia in a line, has become no merely academic error, but a possibly fatal failure of perspective and intelligence”