AJ
@aj_kourabi
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@semianalysis_ previously @atomic_semi. village idiot @joininteract
Toronto, ON
Joined January 2021
I have been learning how to design a chip. Here is how I broke down the different parts of the chip design process with no previous experience:. 1. Requirement and Architecture design:. > performance targets of the chip (clock speed, FLOP/s, etc). > selecting a manufacturing node
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TIL scikit-learn, an open-source ML library, has only one Platinum sponsor and it is . Chanel?
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@jacobrintamaki Idk about you but I move around a lot on a phone call and stuck to a chair w zoom.
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personal update: I graduated, moved to San Francisco, and started working @atomic_semi — where I will be working this summer. say hi if you’re around!
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@westcoastwinter you haven’t been to the downtown cineplex on Jackson square after midnight and it shows.
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4 things every uni student should be using as much as possible: . 1. The university gym .2. University library (borrow those expensive textbooks) .3. Office hours .4. Makerspaces. Laser cut/3D print for free.
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this vibe is why I started a micro grants program at McMaster . We gave almost all applicants $500 and people did everything from custom planes to electronic synths from scratch . Student orgs have multiple millions, often used poorly. Huge opportunity to make a lasting impact.
every waterloo student should be given 10k on admission for side projects and community building, no questions asked. absolutely cracked team at @waterloofab @_yashkarthik @AbhayRatti
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I started a newsletter! For my first post, I talk about Google's TPUs and how they compare to Nvidia's chips. I cover their microarchitecture, Google's data center supremacy and why, despite TPUs being great chips, everyone rushes to Nvidia anyway. Link in bio!
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April 2nd is the day me and my family immigrated to Canada. I’d say being at socratica was a great was a great way to celebrating that ❤️🇨🇦
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There are ads for Ontario in SFO and I think it they’re trying to bring back all the Canadians
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almost all of them are Canadian btw.
This year’s winners, including @clayhaight and @BigCrete, @raffi_hotter and @_marleyx, @jonxuxu, @alishbaimran_, @maxkriegers, @ismailhozain, and @mathurahravi, illustrate the diversity and dynamism of young innovators poised to make significant impacts.
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consider applying to @joininteract - the deadline to apply is this Friday! . the community has made a big impact on my life - personally and professionally. joined 3y ago and it still is v important to me. happy to answer questions! DMs are open (esp if I do not know you!)
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Stumbled into the right zoom call and now I’m proud to finally be able to call myself a Canadian citizen! It’s been a wonderful 4 years and I’m looking forward to so many more ❤️🇨🇦
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@yoonseok_yang The idea that some uni clubs have rigorous admission procedures is crazy to me.
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we sang a song about O-1 visas to the tune of O Canada . I love it here.
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Interesting how many leaders in AI are Canadian / studied in Canada: . Geoff Hinton .Yann LeCunn (@MetaAI).Andrej Karpathy (@OpenAI).Ilya Sutskever (@OpenAI).Yoshua Bengio (@Mila_Quebec ).Aidan Gomez (@cohere).Chris Olah (@AnthropicAI).Richard Sutton (@GoogleDeepMind).
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@sportswithjohn Gates foundation and Wellcome foundation just put a combined $550M into a TB vaccine candidates
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@Jsevillamol It’s the most popular it’s been in a while, in some part due to the queen’s gambit but also the emergence of chess YouTubers and other content creators
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hey, images of my work made it to twitter! cool! . You should very strongly consider working at Atomic. Cracked team, supportive culture, and lots of fun work to do!.
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1 month working in a lab has taught me as much about scientific funding, the research process, incentive design, and institutional constraints as 1.5 years of metascience research did.
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@BrennaParker1 @USDOT @hankgreen I love this very much . Reminds me of when a nerdfighter did a piece about hank’s cancer for NPR and contained show suggestions for him . Shows up in fun ways!.
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this is a great example of shooting your shot. low probabilities do not mean impossible — in fact it often turns out the probability was never low at all : ).
@natfriedman if you could give a 15K grant i can make it happen this summer. my resume:.robotics @ tesla autopilot,google x, samsung, uber atg.
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@paulgb disagree. while there are no SATs you DO need extremely high grades to get into engineering or CS, and a strong extracurricular portfolio. waterloo IS great, but partly because it takes the top high school students and it’s not correct to portray it otherwise.
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watching Sam talk is really interesting. No “ums” at all, different pacing and pauses to emphasise specific parts over others, basic and clear language, eye contact, grounded body language — impressive speaking habits!.
Sam Altman says OpenAI will start to release more frequent iterations of their AI models as they get more capable
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@AlecStapp They still had to put limits on it so you could not use it to guide intercontinental ballistic missiles.
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@michael_nielsen Was wondering the same recently. @dwarkesh_sp asked @ilyasut about this and his answer helped clear some things up: .
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that’s my desk! apply and maybe you’ll sit in front of me :) . jokes aside, i can’t recommend working here enough . cracked engineers, interesting work, lovely culture.
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I had a hard time accepting that I am graduating or that much of my life right now is going to change very soon. I think everything got much better after the iron ring ceremony. Rituals and rites of passage are real — but I understand that in a much more visceral way now.
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the @stripepress catalog had a lovely Easter Egg on what they have coming down the line 👀👀 . super excited! . @dwarkesh_sp @_brianpotter @g_leech_ @_TamaraWinter
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on a 2h+ bus ride to Socratica while listening to the Karpathy LLM lecture 1… looking to be a great day.
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Excited to be exploring various themes surrounding technology, power, and society through this book alongside the wonderful people of @reboot_hq !!!
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New post: demand continues to outstrip supply for Nvidia chips, but H100s make up a small amount of TSMC's fabrication capacity. Increasing it is not that simple. Link below!
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bit late but going to the Grand Canyon was a lovely experience and I am way more of a rocks guy than I thought I was
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I have met a "suspiciously high proportion" of my favorite people @joininteract - people who continually inspire me, motivate me & push me to think critically about the world around us. Can not recommend it enough for <=24 technologists! DM's are open for any and all questions :).
Applications are now open for the 2022 Interact Fellowship!. Learn more and apply here by February 15th:
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Some personal news ✨.I have joined the team @Convergent_FROs to build Focused Research Organisations - unblocking research bottlenecks and accelerating scientific moonshots. Looking forward to an incredible summer!.
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@pitdesi this is a big reason, but I think the low air density matters a lot. Less air density means you need long takeoff roll, especially in the summer! . Density at the altitude of the airport is ~80% of sea level.
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breaking news from under my favourite willow tree on campus: i just wrote my final exam of my undergrad!
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@shreyjaineth and I have been thinking about reimagining R&D and innovation in Canada. In this proposal, we outline how Canada can be the new world leader in R&D. 👇.More in the 🧵.
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born in the 2000’s and growing up in a Syrian family, all I’ve heard are harrowing atrocities after another, and family members trying to find their way out one by one. Assad family has ruled for 60 years. this past week has provided hope many thought they’d never have or see.
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fabs can be disrupted by things like exhaust vents 400 feet away from a fab building and the phase of the moon so yeah it’s dark magic.
@natfriedman I think this kind of thing happens all the time at silicon fabs where they have to do something very bespoke like have one particular guy standing in a room in order for something to work.
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Johns Hopkins received more funding from the NIH in FY 2023 than the University of Waterloo's endowment (464M).
NIH funding by institution for FY 2023 . 1 Johns Hopkins U $518M.2 UCSF $451M.3 U Michigan $436M.4 Penn $434M.5 UCLA $424M.6 Stanford $407M.7 Mass General $406M.8 Wash U. $404M.9 Yale $390M.10 Pitt $382M.11 Columbia $362M.12 Duke $360M
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I am getting better at meeting and becoming friends with cool people from Twitter and I like that very much.
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SF is essentially a college town with no campus. Almost everything is less than a 15 minute bike ride away and the population is small enough such that you get to see a lot of faces repeatedly.
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This is a great example of Not Lying to Yourself, a very difficult thing to do. This blog post is a good read on a similar topic
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I enjoyed @dwarkesh_sp 's episode with @dylan522p and @asianometry!. I thought I would give my take on some of his questions, building off the conversation. Link below!
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The world doesn’t tell you that you can get your friends, start a quantum club at your university, and procure a bunch of lab space dedicated to the club…but you can!
Never forget that we live in a world in which giant spheres appear out of nowhere for no discernible reason, a random DM can lead to marriage and children, and you can tweet your way into public office. You need to be delusion-maxxing.
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I often get questions about what metascience is and how to learn more about it. I compiled a reading list for those interested: 👇.
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met a xerox engineer who worked on the GUI team that met with Jobs . he invented the drop down menu for font selection! . super fascinating and energising to talk to people who were at such unique institutions at interesting points in tech history. only in SF!.
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@AlecStapp Ontario’s energy is already relatively clean and this will only improve that 🫡🫡🫡🇨🇦🇨🇦🇨🇦
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This recent report by @fiiiiiist and @ArnabDatta321 is one of the best pieces on compute and infrastructure that I've read. Here are some parts that caught my eye, beyond the pretty graphs!
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unfortunately all it took to feeling superhuman with unbounded energy and enthusiasm for life was sleeping 8 hours a day, working out 4-5 times a week, and eating well.
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if you move to SF you will very quickly realise what people mean when they say startups are risky . you will hear many, many stories of startups which have failed and gotten nowhere . twitter gives a biased viewpoint that if taken seriously underrates the failure rate of startups.
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@MedCrisis made a very informative video about what might have happened to Eriksom at the Euros. He talks about athlete’s hearts and athlete screening - among many other things. Check it out if you can.
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it’s our parents first time on this planet, too ❤️.
3/ Forgive your parents, especially if you’re the child of immigrants. Embrace commitment and mutual obligations: being firmly rooted makes it _easier_ to take risks. And finally, take your work seriously, but yourself less so. Hard work often looks suspiciously like play.
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i think i understand exponential scaling and then I see things like this, which make me realise that I don’t
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(1/6) Emerging technologies and research can be incredibly useful, but may also have risks associated with them, so it is important to develop them with risk-reduction in mind. This is called Differential Technological Development (DTD), which I explore in my latest piece. 🧵.
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surely there has been a book written about this? . point me to the best book you know about the history of silicon valley
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Occasional reminder that Ontario is a clean electricity generating beast that often also exports to New York
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Straight up badass.
GREAT WOMAN OF MATHEMATICS: FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE, 1820-1910. Best known as a nurse who helped take the role of nurse from cultural caretaker to medical professional, Florence Nightingale was also a mathematical trailblazer. Her parents had objected to her becoming a nurse, 1/8
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@nabeelqu lots of coops, but what people don’t recognise enough is the very strong grind culture the coop program creates. People are kinda forced to more side projects because that’s the best way to set yourself apart.
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University is great because you can just show up to an expert’s office if you have a question/ curious about basically anything.
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TIL Google has been using RL to aid in the design of their TPUs for about 4 years now
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being earnest, curious, and interested takes you much farther than you think it does . i think this is perhaps because the people you might want to impress will often also be able to know if you are pretending to be something you are not.
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@hud_zah @AryanAfrouzi I can’t believe I’m saying yes but yes I do. The reason is Steve Jobs thought it was beautiful.
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tapping the sign again
so asml makes 25 machines a year at like $300M each, every good fab is completely dependent on them, and you're telling me no one in the startup world is crazy enough to try to compete? this is one of the main ai supply chain bottlenecks.
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Canadian engineers embrace this and the end of your engineering degree is literally a secret cult event.
There is a ton of indoctrination that typically goes into STEM degrees, which nobody seems willing to admit
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At university I started and ran a microgrant fund of exactly the same size and you’d be surprised at how effective it was.
Introducing Bagel Fund. $100-500 microgrants for ambitious young builders working on anything from their first Arduino kits to underwater UAVs. Apply:
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mfw engineers will make software that will simulate complex physics but has this UI:
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one of my worries about graduating was making friends . silly activities like this make me feel closer to those around me. seeing them every week helps build and cement closer relationships . the recipe is (on paper) simple but the impact is striking . thank you hosts.
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Tom, @KumarAGarg and @Parthion are an incredible team who move at the speed of a dream on high impact often visionary projects in science and technology and are a great empowering force to those around them. I’m glad I got to work with them and I’m excited about this!.
I am excited to announce the launch of Renaissance Philanthropy, with a phenomenal team including @KumarAGarg. Our goal is to help foundations and philanthropists promote a 21st century renaissance, fueled by advances in science, technology and innovation.
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Love to see such great Ontario representation! . Congrats @Sana_Rfzz and @Michael_Loftus3 :).
Emergent Ventures winners, 26th cohort:
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It provides an overview of the problems metascience aims to address, scientific funding, and what concrete projects look like. Ping me if I missed anything!
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