Essays

What do books, art, music, video games, and mathematics have in common? I remember the last time I went to the cinema and was genuinely impressed by a movie’s visual effects: Avatar (2009). Since then, my impression is that we’ve been living through diminishing returns: more polish, higher resolution, better lighting, but fewer moments that feel like a new era. The same seems true in video games: Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018) felt like a leap, and many people are hoping GTA VI will be the next one. But few expect another order-of-magnitude jump anytime soon. ...

Following the trend of neobanks, I think it is only a matter of time before “neo hospitals” start spreading. The way things are run right now feels so wrong: slow, inefficient and expensive. Especially, for the ones that can’t afford quality private healthcare. There’s evident demand for better (or different) healthcare services. For instance, almost 40% of Americans trust chatbots for medical advice [2], and ChatGPT’s report [1] even mention the category “Healthcare”. And recently, GPT5 outperformed licensed human expersts by 25-30% on the US medical licensing exam [3]. And this is without mentioning the future problem of doctor shortages due to aging populations. ...

Piracy is as old as trade itself. When Spain and Portugal began sending treasure fleets carrying gold, silver, and goods across the Atlantic in the 16th century, it didn’t take long for pirates to appear. You might recognize some of the most famous names: Francis Drake, Henry Morgan, Blackbeard, John Hawkins, and others. Some pirates resembled more like companies than the anarchic individuals you might imagine. English piracy often took a special form: privateering, where privately owned ships were authorized by the Crown (via letters of marque) to raid enemy shipping during wartime. ...

We all know the slogan “knowledge is power”. In this essay, I want to argue for the opposite: too much knowledge can hinder creativity Not because learning is bad, but because what you already know quietly narrows what you consider plausible. In the age of AI, where solutions are increasingly cheap, this matters: the bottleneck shifts from “finding an answer” to “finding an original direction”. So… should we stay ignorant? Creativity needs ingredients: skills, taste, vocabulary, technique, references. But there’s a trade-off between exploration (searching broadly) and exploitation (reusing what already works) [2]. Expertise pulls you toward exploitation and AI makes exploitation nearly frictionless. ...

Initially, I wanted this post to focus solely on metrics in machine learning. However, the concept of metrics is far more universal, and it doesn’t make sense to treat it as an isolated problem. This is more of a philosophical post, the ultimate goal is to make you think and reflect. We live surrounded by metrics: grades from teachers, performance reviews from employers, publication counts in academia, FLOPs in computing, ELO in chess, salary, IQ for intelligence, movie ratings on IMDB, book ratings on Goodreads, stars/reviews on Amazon, election results in democracies, F1 score in machine learning, GDP for countries, EBITDA in finance, likes/followers on Instagram, time spent on TikTok for content recommendation algorithms, etc. ...