Fall was good! More fun and more productive than all previous semesters and probably a life high overall. I didn't prioritize right, but I got a lot done. I also got closer to a lot of great people.

Some miscellaneous highlights:

I roomed with one of my closest friends, went to a bunch of concerts, visited the Harvard AI safety folks a lot, starting working out with my gym bro friend, worked on a research project that was unusually fun, hosted a birthday party where friends from different walks of life all came together, went to ABC, went to two more MAIA/AISST retreats (co-led the first), got to the top of the dunster house bell tower at Harvard, and took a lot of walks. Towards the end of the semester, my AI urgency levels hit a whole new high, especially with the o1 release. I'm going to go to the Bay in January to work on white box monitoring with Redwood.

Course reviews:

18.404 — Theory of Computation

• SO FUN! Pretty useless I'm sure, but so fucking fun. Felt like doing logic puzzles as a class. ToC problems involved making a lot of creative, abstract connections, which was really interesting for reflecting on my thinking patterns.

• Got a 56 on the midterm and a 98 on the final.

• This is the sort of class that AIs are really bad at; I think it's very reliant on the most abstract parts of general reasoning.

6.7480 — Graduate Information Theory

• This really didn't focus on the material I was hoping it would. Channel coding gets hopelessly boring after a month or two.

• But it was interesting nonetheless, especially during the first half of the course.

8.02 — Electricity and Magnetism

• Really fun material. Wish the class was more conceptual and less algebra bashing but alas.

• Made me really jealous of the alternate reality where I get to become a physicist.

14.73 — Challenge of World Poverty

• Material was pretty interesting, and the professor was awesome, but the classes themselves weren't great because we were just making presentations.

• Each week I spent 1.5 hours in lecture and about 2 hours outside of lecture, so this wasn't a big part of my life anyway.