Context Dump
An Autobiography + My Average Day
I've often wished that brief autobiographies and 'what my average day looks like' sections would become as common to put on personal websites as 'about me' sections. Whenever I see someone living an awesome-looking life (especially one that’s unique and a little bit wonky), knowing how they got there and what their daily life looks like helps me break down the hero-worshipping and take something more practical away.
At a more personal level, conversations that touch on these have been some of the most meaningful ones I’ve ever had in terms of pushing forward a long-term friendship. They help me build higher-fidelity mental models of the other party’s beliefs, motives, and future actions (as long as they’re being genuine), and that’s invaluable for a deep and rich friendship.
In the process of lamenting the lack of these on personal websites with a friend, I realized how hypocritical it was that I hadn’t even put them on my own websites. This is my attempt at that.
Autobiography
Notes
This is very heavily focused on mid-2023 and 2024. I did very little worth writing about before the summer of 2023, and I’ll do my best to gradually update this in the future as I hopefully do more worth writing about and can compress the past year and a half.
Looking over this, many parts seem needlessly angsty and pity-inducing. I’ve been genuinely happy most of my life (8th grade is a notable exception) and much of this is tinted by my regret now about how much time I’ve wasted by not being 5% more agentic and self-aware years ago.
One thing that doesn’t come across here quite as strongly as I’d hoped is that a lot of my personal growth has been in realizing “this is something that I can just do” for a whole host of things after watching other people do them first.
Pre-August 2023
5th grade math teacher convinced me to give coding a try.
Learned Python and built some mini-games and small projects.
Got bored of programming because I never tried to expand my abilities or do cool projects—mainly because I didn’t realize that was something people did. I worked on lots of small (<80 lines) projects and games and never realized that I should try my hand at something more ambitious. Eventually, I thought, “if this is all there is to programming, it’s fun and I’d love to do more of it in the future, but there are way more fun things out there for me to do right now (reading SFF, learning about history, learning about mythology) and I’ll come back to programming in high school and college.”
I can’t help thinking how different my life would be if I had discovered the notion of hacking (as in the idea of “hacking on a project”) through Hack Club or even just found my way to the GitHub of a developer who’d built cool projects.
Got really into history and Greco-Roman mythology.
Covid hit
First half: Watching a lot of Crash Course World History and Crash Course Biology. I rewatched Crash Course World History during pandemic classes so many times that I constructed a timeline of history eerily similar to what Jacob discusses here, except with major events from Crash Course instead of presidents (although the fact that I didn’t use a spaced repetition system meant that the timeline died pretty quickly after I got to the second half and let my history muscles atrophy).
Second half: Discovered CS50 and fell in love with programming again. I was in a weird place mentally during this time, and needing to complete the course with perfect grades on every assignment to prove to myself that I was a good programmer was probably the only thing that kept me from getting stuck in a massive, self-reinforcing rut (as evidenced by the fact that I fell into exactly that the moment I submitted my final project—see below).
8th and 9th grade (I call them the dark ages):
8th grade: Suffered from akrasia and didn’t do much other than obsessively tying my self-worth to good grades, non-stop texting, consuming trashy content (TV, YouTube videos, etc), and hating myself a little more every day. Programming, history, and mythology were all early casualties, and even my steady relationship with reading as a leisure activity became very rocky. A few major life events pushed my lurking dissatisfaction with my life into an intense self-loathing. I reacted to this by alternatively lashing out at and closing myself off from nearly everyone that was closest to me, and caused lasting damage to some of my deepest relationships.
9th grade: Pulling myself out of the mess that was 8th grade. I cut out the trashy content and non-stop texting, but by this point, I’d fallen out of love with all of my previous interests and it didn’t even occur to me to spend my extra time on those interests or to find new ones. My life revolved around being efficient at getting my schoolwork done and reading.
July-December 2023
A friend introduced me to competitive programming. I learned C++ and got addicted → completely pulled me out of the dark ages.
I shifted from being addicted to competitive programming to standard enjoyment within weeks, but those few weeks were the first time since finishing CS50 that I finished every day feeling fulfilled for a sizable span of time. This let me pull myself out of my rut and fall in love with things again.
Realized I was really bad at effective writing and communicating my thoughts → started a blog.
Thought that views and claps on Medium were a good signal for good writing, so I very quickly figured out what worked for others and optimized for that. I spent several months writing stupid and clickbaity articles as a wannabe self-help guru + fantasy nerd.
A friend encouraged me to join TeenHacks LI.
Moved during the summer, and adored my new home for a magical few weeks.
I went to school and had culture shock more intense than I could have imagined.
Even after making new friends, everything felt slightly off, and at times I felt suffocated.1 On a particularly bad day, I looked for summer experiences where I could find some of “my people”2 and by chance found an online community with some really “sparkly” people in it.
For the first time in a while (and definitely to a greater extent than any time previously), I was in an environment that genuinely valued and socially rewarded sparkliness. The aspiration to be as cool as the people in that community changed my identity completely.
January-May 2024
Decided to stop churning out low-quality, view-optimized blog posts every week and focus on long-form, higher-quality ones that were meaningful to me and fun to write about. This has been tremendously fulfilling. Blogging was mildly enjoyable before, but it’s become genuinely fun afterwards. If I didn’t like programming more (and if language models weren’t better writers than I am), I would probably be blogging nearly full-time outside of school.
Discovered spaced repetition systems through a chance conversation.
Discovered Andy Matuschak and Michael Nielsen.
Discovered the tools for thought/human-computer interaction space.
Discovered Bret Victor.
Decided I wanted to build great tools for thought.
Thought that would mean reading a lot about people working in this space and building off of them. Basically wasted a month reading blog posts and convincing myself that I was setting myself up for real work.
Realized that wanting to build tools for thought is a good frame of thinking, but it’s best to do it in an intrinsically meaningful context.
Example: In my opinion, Jupyter Notebook is genuinely wonderful tool for thought, and it would have never been made by someone searching around explicitly trying to make tools for thought.
Realized that all the people who were having success in the tools for thought domain were applying knowledge from other skills (UI design, mechanical engineering, etc).
Found Linus Lee and got really excited about ML and better search. Shortly after, I started using Arc and that reinforced how amazing good browsers can be.
Decided I wanted to build a prototype of a better search engine that ranked for each individual user using a method somewhat inspired by RLHF. (In hindsight a very dumb idea with many flaws)
Decided I needed to get really good at ML for that.
Summer 2024
AI
Took fast.ai part 1
It was really good, but I felt that it went too in-depth into a lot of topics I wasn’t interested in and didn’t go deep enough into ones that fascinated me.
Took Andrej Karpathy’s Zero to Hero
Realized that I now had a lot of fundamental knowledge and some tacit knowledge but couldn’t build much without handholding.
Took Arena to address that.
I don’t exactly know what I’m going to do next. I briefly got excited about mechanistic interpretability but quickly got bored, although I’m open to changing my mind. I’ve recently become fascinated with RL, and whatever I do in the short-term will probably be around continuing to explore my enemies-to-lovers arc with it (I think we’ve just gotten past enemies to hostile acquaintances). Before that, I’ll be revisiting and drilling down everything I’ve learned over the past few months. To make myself feel productive, I’m building out a deep learning roadmap for other high schoolers while I do that.
August 2024: In a pretty bad rut, productivity-wise. I took a 2-day break, and that quickly stretched into a month where I only had the quality-adjusted equivalent of 15 days of work (by the norms in the next section). Most months, it’s ideally something closer to 25.
Average Day
General Notes
During each “work block”, I generally try to work in chunks separated by 5-10 minute breaks of staring into space/annoying my sister/throwing a ball at the wall. Ideally, these breaks are supposed to be no-screen breaks and strictly less than 10 minutes, but I only manage to stick to both rules ~40% of the time. The chunks are as long as I can maintain attention, which I’ve found is pretty reliably ~50 minutes for my deepest work (ML, competitive programming, the hardest writing) and ~70 for everything else (though I usually end up taking longer breaks because I luckily enjoy the deepest work most). I have a hard cap at 105 minutes because at that point I’m usually just kidding myself and my eyes are glazing over the screen.3
Average Summer Day/School Weekends
I spent several weeks’ worth of time very unproductively during the summer of 2024, so this isn’t completely accurate, but I think it’s representative of ~70% of summer days and ~85% of school weekends.
I wake up somewhere between 6:00 and 7:00. If it isn’t really cold, I try to get out the door within a half hour to go biking. Otherwise, I’ll do some form of cardio indoors.
Note: I’ve made it a rule that on school weekends/summer days I can only listen to my favorite podcasts while exercising or completing chores. That’s been really good for motivation, and I find that I often prolong the exercise to finish podcast episodes.
I finish this around 8:00. I always try to get to work as soon as possible away, but between spending time with my sister, showering, breakfast, and reading I actually sit down at my desk at about 10:30.
This is one of the biggest things I want to change about my average day. I’ve noticed that I’m most productive before 12, but fitting around my family’s schedule makes it hard for me to start much earlier.
10:30-11:00: Anki (and reading interesting blog posts I’ve saved)
11:00-2:30: I try to spend at least 170 minutes here on my highest priority and most cognitively demanding work done here. That’s generally competitive programming or something ML-adjacent.
2:30-4:00: Lunch + chores + more annoying my sister.
4:00-~8:00: I generally spend some time on another high-priority + concentration-demanding task. It’s generally either competitive programming or something ML-adjacent (whichever one I didn’t do in the morning) or blogging.
Once I feel satisfied or I don’t have the cognitive capacity anymore, I batch through a lot of shallow work. This is usually homework (ideally not, because I try to get all homework over the weekend done on Friday night), hackathon organization, guitar, working on my Hack Club, or lighter blogging work.8:00-10:30:
Ideally: Dinner + annoying my sister + journal + reading + going to bed
Really: Dinner + annoying my sister + checking email + realizing it’s already 10:30 so I now have to choose between sleeping well and journaling and reading.
Overall, I generally spend ~6.3 hours of real time “working”.
There is a lot of variance, and I’ve been gradually trying to push this number up over time.
I can keep track of all of this because I use Toggl religiously. Ideally, you’d want to be tracking value-adjusted units of work done rather than units of time spent.
This is my best description for an average day, but most real days end up looking quite a bit different.
I wish I was kidding about how much time I spend on an average day annoying my sister. If you feel bad for her, she spends more time bugging me.
Average Weekday During School
I wake up at ~5:30.
~5:45-7:15: Generally either competitive programming, something ML-adjacent, or blogging (CP 60% of the time, ML-adjacent 20% of the time, Blogging 10% of the time, something totally random 10% of the time)
3:30-4:30: get home, shower, eat a snack, annoy sister, and read.
4:30-5:00: Anki
5:00-6:00: Strictly some kind of high-concentration work (tough school homework or ML-adjacent)
6:00-8:30: As much school homework as I can get my hands on and then whatever else I feel like doing (high-concentration work or shallower work).
8:30-10:00: Dinner + annoying my sister + journaling + reading
This is actually fairly representative of my average school day. I generally can work for longer chunks, keep breaks a little shorter, and generally be more self-disciplined on school days.
Overall, I get ~4 hours of “work” done.
If you happen to know me and go to my school, this is nothing against the people or the culture at our school. I just grew up with different people, in a different culture, in a very different environment for virtually my entire life and it took me a long time to become semi-comfortable with this one.
Talking like this makes me feel conceited, but I just mean the people with whom I feel most comfortable being authentically myself.
Writing is a weird and notable exception. I can edit for basically as long as I need because it’s usually both enjoyable and non-demanding.