M.Eng. - Electrical & Computer Engineering 👨🏻🎓 Interests: • Computer Science & Engg. 👨🏻💻 • Quantum & Particle Physics ⚛️ S.T.E.M.-focused 🌱📚🤔💡
Canada
Joined May 2021
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Akul retweeted
There is an absolutely WILD story in this @GergelyOrosz podcast episode
1. An unnamed CTO of a cash-flow-negative company was debating doing layoffs. AI
2. He says "I don't want to hurt morale like that, I won't do it"
3. A few months later, he says to @GergelyOrosz that he's cash flow positive. WTF. How?
4. The company had been licensing a component from a licensing company that was critical for their business.
5. One day, a dev thinks "what if we got an agent to build our own?"
6. The agent does so well that they produce a BETTER, FASTER version of the component they were licensing.
7. They debate open-sourcing it, and they ask the licensing company about it
8. The licensing company panics, and says "we will pay you NOT to open-source this"
9. They also say "we'll also pay you extra so we can re-license it"
10. So a big outlay became a recurring windfall, thanks to the ingenuity of a dev asking the right question.
Individual contributors have never been more powerful. Think bigger.
youtu.be/mQu0zN4IvSI?si=P_v9…
Akul retweeted
Never, ever let them tell you it can't be done.
Palmer Luckey says analysts claiming it's too expensive to manufacture in the US are lying to protect megacorps
"I think I have a more realistic view than almost anybody. One of the problems with all these analysts that are telling you that it's going to cost $37,000 to build an American iPhone or $100,000 to buy an American computer."
"They're trying to prop up a status quo that the megacorporations want to keep going. They want to outsource everything. They want to hire cheaper non-American labor."
"They are willing to say and do anything to convince you that it can't be fixed, that it can't come back, that America is this helpless, neutered, post-relevant empire, and it is just not the case."
"How do I know that? Because I have to make stuff in America every day because I work in the defense industry. The stuff that Anduril makes every day is not actually that different from a computer. My drones are basically computers. They have memory, a GPU, a CPU, sensors, batteries, a rugged integration."
"The only difference between an Anduril attack drone and a laptop is a keyboard and a screen. That is not that hard to figure out, especially for a guy like me who started Oculus and comes from the consumer electronics space."
"We're not going to let people lie about what America can and can't do anymore. We're just going to do it."
Akul retweeted
PsiQuantum was founded on a simple premise: useful quantum computing requires a million-qubit, fault-tolerant system.
We chose photonics for its scaling advantages and spent nearly a decade building an ultra-low-loss silicon photonics platform to make that path possible.
That platform is foundational to our path to useful quantum computers. Now, beginning with Optical Circuit Switching, it can help power the next generation of AI infrastructure.
Akul retweeted
AI is pushing computing infrastructure to its limits. Our photonics can help.
Today, PsiQuantum is unveiling its industry-leading Optical Circuit Switch initiative with an 8×8 OCS demo built on the company’s low-loss silicon photonics platform—the same platform we’ve spent nearly a decade developing for quantum computing.
Akul retweeted
My second interview with @SauravShroff_, Founder & CEO of @StarpathSpace.
0:10 SpaceX has no competition
4:52 Owning a launch monopoly
7:02 AI data satellites
16:33 Starting a launch company
18:54 How AI sats change launch dynamics
21:25 Reducing the cost of space solar
30:35 Scaling space solar capacity
39:48 Building AI data sats
47:00 Moon base
48:44 Maximum Starship production ramp
54:06 Mars base
Akul retweeted
Glimpses from the Employee Only Grand Event for the IPO Launch Celebrations at RCP, Navi Mumbai! 🚀
I think I joined Just-In-Time 😉🔥
Still, week 2… Employee engagement max pro!
Akul retweeted
I’ve heard there are hacker houses starting to pop up around Cambridge/Boston. I’d like to come check out some of them. DM me if you’re in one!
Akul retweeted
> a tour from one transistor to a small CPU (Scott CPU, to be precise)
One of the best!
Actually this was really good - a tour from one transistor to a small CPU (Scott CPU, to be precise).
The YouTube playlist:
youtube.com/watch?v=HaBMAD-D…
I also haven't yet come across the "But How Do It Know" by Scott, which this is based on, and which looks great:
amazon.com/But-How-Know-Prin…
Turns out this is a whole deeper rabbit hole of people who've also built + simulated it in code, e.g.:
djharper.dev/post/2019/05/21…
Now I must resist the temptation to simulate Scott CPU in C, add tensor cores to it, move it to an FPGA and get it to inference a Llama.
Akul retweeted
Very few ACID databases can actually run multi-region.
Most are too sensitive to the network roundtrip time (with interactive transactions holding row locks across the RTT then running into contention and Amdahl’s Law).
We did some measurements…
youtu.be/yKgfk8lTQuE?si=vCqI…
Akul retweeted
I was fortunate to have discussed some aspects of this with him about a year ago, but I had no idea he was going to cook this hard...
When I was going through the blog while it was still in preview, I had several aha moments! It took me 2 hours to read and comprehend it all.
This is sooo good. Give it a read!
After a year of quiet work, I'm ready to announce Egres.
Egres is a Postgres-compatible database designed to tackle heavy workloads and run thousands of tenants on the same server. It works with psql and drivers unchanged. The post covers the what, the why and the how:
manishrjain.com/egres/
For Egres, I wrote a new storage engine called zdb: a tree of LSM trees, which I call an LSM forest. It runs on local disk or object storage, has roaring bitmaps integration for indexing, and can do instant zero-copy branches of a database or a table.
Everything runs on zfiber, a coroutine system I wrote for Egres. It meters CPU ticks, disk IOPS and memory used per query, per tenant, so thousands of tenants can share the same server without the noisy neighbor problem.
This release is single node and the query features are very basic. Raft replication is already baked in. Future releases will allow multi-node clusters. Try it out! Would love to hear what you think.
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YC Paper Club is coming to Cambridge, MA!
YCPC brings together people from academia and industry to discuss the latest research. Our inaugural Cambridge event on November 18 will explore the state of the art in robot learning and control.
If you’re a student or faculty at a local university, or a researcher in industry interested in staying up to date with the latest literature, request a spot: events.ycombinator.com/yc-pa…
Akul retweeted
YC Paper Club is coming to Cambridge, MA!
YCPC brings together people from academia and industry to discuss the latest research. Our inaugural Cambridge event on November 18 will explore the state of the art in robot learning and control.
If you’re a student or faculty at a local university, or a researcher in industry interested in staying up to date with the latest literature, request a spot: events.ycombinator.com/yc-pa…
Akul retweeted
Cambridge has always been the best place in the world to be an academic researcher. These days, a lot of cutting edge research also happens in industry, and Cambridge is the home to many amazing research startups, spanning AI research, robotics, biotech, defense, and industrials.
We'd love for these two worlds to meet eachother, so we're bringing YC Paper Club to Cambridge!
if you're a researcher in industry or academia, request a spot below.
YC Paper Club is coming to Cambridge, MA!
YCPC brings together people from academia and industry to discuss the latest research. Our inaugural Cambridge event on November 18 will explore the state of the art in robot learning and control.
If you’re a student or faculty at a local university, or a researcher in industry interested in staying up to date with the latest literature, request a spot: events.ycombinator.com/yc-pa…
Akul retweeted
This doesn't replace engineering work. It's reshaping the work so fundamentally that the job starts to look like building for the moment or finding defendable layers against others. It requires more agency, flexibility and intuition, and strategical thinking.
Akul retweeted
Software is not disappearing, we are producing more software than ever. What is changing is the premise. The modern foundations of software engineering has been built around encapsulation. Today, it's getting hard and sometimes impossible to defend the layering.
Akul retweeted
Here’s a look at the hard problems these five universities are tackling:
@Caltech: Expanding our partnership with Caltech to test whether large language models can accelerate innovative research in mathematics and physical sciences – pushing the boundaries of what AI can do in rigorous scientific domains
@OhioStateMed: Developing AI workflows to assist radiologists screening X-rays, building AI tools for earlier heart failure detection, and building clinician-guided AI tools for Alzheimer’s diagnosis.
@LSU: Implementing AI to improve non-contact infant tracheostomy monitoring, neurosurgical outcomes, VR training for medical professionals, and more.
@IndianaUniv: Applying open-weight models to improve maternal-newborn care and learning, with a focus on tools that work with limited connectivity and accommodate diverse cognitive needs.
@UTHealthHouston: Using Muse Glimmer, one of our smallest open-weight models, to support projects that improve treatment for brain cancer and agentic benchmarking in healthcare settings.