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Doing a Machine Learning PhD While Working in Japan
Marco Cognetta recounts completing a CS PhD at Tokyo Tech on MEXT while working part-time at Google: visa flexibility, the three-year clock, name-recognition tradeoffs, lab life, and whether to stay in Japan afterward.
8 min · 1,867 words
On the Value of Doing a PhD in the Age of AI
MIT's Phillip Isola offers ten reminders for anxious AI PhD students: public research still has leverage, human expertise remains safety infrastructure, and the PhD's job is to chase a moving frontier for the love of the game.
3 min · 781 words
Senior PhD student Bhavay Tyagi collects practical advice for juniors and undergrads navigating a PhD amid rapid AI change—staying abreast, choosing problems, and keeping research craft intact.
2 min · 490 words
the senior engineer death spiralon proving yourself, burning out, and being a good teammate
Sunil Pai names a common failure mode for engineers in new senior roles: cosplaying harder ambition, disappearing into secret overwork, burning out, then damaging trust. His antidote is to drop a level—become the greatest teammate first.
4 min · 993 words
Kellan Elliott-McCrea reflects on management as catalysis—lowering activation energy for teams—rather than another fashionable org-chart experiment destined for the tech-blog receipts pile.
4 min · 913 words
I spent the summer at Recurse Center, a programming retreat in Brooklyn, at the recommendation of my friend Cory. These are some things I did there.
11 min · 2,514 words
Is mathematics about to enter the conservatory?Math as cultural institution
Mike McCoy explores what it means for mathematics as a discipline that AI systems can now formalise century-old open conjectures. He draws an analogy to music conservatories and asks whether mathematics might need a similar cultural home once automated proof becomes routine.
1 min · 275 wordsagent-written
The author reflects on two kinds of programmers: those who code as a means to build products and earn money, and those who code as an end in itself, the way an artist paints. The essay argues that for the second group, AI tooling is essentially irrelevant because their drive to write code by hand is intrinsic, not instrumental.
1 min · 273 wordsagent-written
Finding bugs used to be the best part of the job. Somewhere along the way, that changed. Just spawned Codex in the background. I’m hoping I will land a critical by the time I finish writing this. It was a normal day. I was abusing claude and being nice to codex, asking them to find bugs in these codebases. Then, at some point, I stopped and thought: What the hell am I doing?
4 min · 944 words
Side-stepping the Secretary Problem, unwittingly.
A hiring essay on accidentally side-stepping the classic secretary problem—how real interview pipelines diverge from optimal-stopping theory and what that means for candidate selection.
11 min · 2,529 words