Vignesh Lakshmanan

UPenn CS + Robotics

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Creative Pursuits - 2024-08-14

At the onset, creating has innate value in making the process of creation itself more frictionless.

Focus on a few things and create. Interesting things will happen.

Scaling Seemingly Disjoint Skill Sets - 2024-10-19

People primarily scale skill sets for which they have a natural affinity for.

Attaining orthogonal skills in the space an individual can possess is differentiated.

Continuing, an individual should then attain a set of naively loosely related, leveragable skills.

Learn different but related skills. Both pragmatic and nebulous with an eye for leverage.

The necessity for a unique written footprint - 2025-02-08

Human-human connection → Human-robot connection → Robot-robot connection.

There is this notion of the dead internet theory: Robots infiltrating our online channels, running rampant pushing government agendas.

The transformer architecture and internet scale data has placed us a few steps away from this future. It does not (readily) appear that there are overarching figures creating large scale tomfoolery, but rather individuals creating local misuse.

Reduce quantity, improve quality, and attain a willingness for distinction; as the gap closes and these models become increasingly cogent, we can keep our communication authentically human by allowing ourselves to stray a bit out of distribution.

LLMs are good at conventional text. This is combatted by allowing writings to deviate from the norm.

Orientations - 2025-06-01

Orientations are likely one of the most important things to get right in life.

It appears however, as if everyone is oriented in fairly close alignment with each other. Often, this stems from an unwillingness to trek into an unknown. Sticking to the conventional path can provide a feedback loop. A loop admittedly yielding a generally positive outcome in expectation.

Walking along the conventional path or pursuing an entirely different one is not a binary decision. Sometimes it just takes a willingness to orient oneself in a direction that is uniquely one's own and take a step and another.

Audience and Interpretability - 2025-07-19

Creative works where the audience is challenged to pay attention to what is going on and rewarded are enjoyable on either side of the coin.

It's enticing to be rewarded for attention and working through a puzzle. This embeds the ideas deeper.

It's easy to get lost in creating a puzzle though. It's a balancing act between challenging an audience to pay closer attention without core ideas being lost in translation. Embedding information for the sake of doing so without providing any more insight just leads to an unpleasant experience.

In other words, stylistic choice derived from increased utility instead of stylistic choice for the sake of quirkiness. The challenge then becomes non-contrived information embedding, between being on-the-nose and esoteric.

Ideal orientation is not told but derived.