VARUN JOSHI'S BLOGS

Have you ever felt like the problems you’re solving are completely new? Like nobody before you has wrestled with the same logical puzzles, the same iterative thinking, the same “if this, then that” decision trees? I used to think programming was modern. Revolutionary. Ours. Then I learned about Donald Knuth’s discovery in 1972, and everything shifted. The Moment Everything Changed Knuth, legendary computer scientist and author of The Art of Computer Programming, was examining ancient clay tablets at Yale. These weren’t artifacts from some early computer age. They were from 1800 BCE. Eighteen hundred years before Christ. And they contained algorithms. Not just calculations. Not just answers. But procedures, step-by-step instructions with conditional logic. If-then statements. Loops. The same fundamental structures we use today when we code. The Babylonians had figured it out. Nearly 4,000 years ago, they were writing what we’d now call executable code. From “Why does this matter?” to “W...

  Have you ever felt like you’re learning  everything  but mastering  nothing ? You buy courses. You read books. You consume podcasts. But when someone asks what you’re  really  good at, you freeze. For years, I thought being a “generalist” meant collecting skills like Pokémon cards. Marketing? Check. Coding? Learning. Design? Working on it. I was proud of my versatility — until I realized I couldn’t go deep on  anything . I was a mile wide and an inch deep, drowning in surface-level knowledge that evaporated the moment I stopped using it. Then I discovered Naval Ravikant’s perspective on learning, and it completely flipped my approach. Naval doesn’t say “don’t be a generalist.” He says most people are doing it backwards. The Problem With How We Learn Most of us treat knowledge like a buffet. We pile our plates high with random skills, hoping something sticks. Business strategies. Productivity hacks. Social media growth tactics. But here’s what Naval n...

  I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit recently. Every day, I see people turning to ChatGPT before they even pull out their notebook. Asking it to assist them in brainstorming, to correct their work, to make decisions that they could quite easily make on their own. And I think somewhere down the line, I started to wonder if we’re doing any better at anything, or if we’re simply doing better at asking the AI to do it for us. The thing is : a crutch is something that catches you when you cannot stand by yourself. It’s a temporary thing until you heal. But imagine if you were to use it all the time! The muscle that you’re supposed to be strengthening just. doesn’t. I think that’s about where a lot of people are at with regards to AI. The Illusion of Progress I do know a guy who used the AI tool to write an entire research paper last semester. The paper was great. Really great, in fact. Scored an A. And the part of the story that kept him awake all night was the fact that he didn’...

  In the domain of theoretical physics, few concepts kindle the imagination as does the tachyon-a hypothetical particle that travels faster than light itself. Though Einstein’s theory of special relativity forbids ordinary matter to reach light speed, it leaves a mathematical loophole for particles possessing imaginary mass and that, by their very nature, travel faster than light. Physicists have been struggling with the concept of tachyons for over six decades, oscillating between fascination and skepticism. Recent breakthroughs in 2024 have once again revived interest by proposing new reconciliations with relativity theory, and at the same time revealing some fundamental mathematical inconsistencies in existing frameworks. This blog explores the fascinating world of tachyons, from their theoretical foundations to cutting-edge research and the profound implications they hold for our understanding of space, time, and causality. Press enter or click to view image in full size Tachyo...