Blog PostDate posted: April 14th, 2026 Things have been better. Although I have not gotten over my grief of dying dreams, I have positioned myself to support myself, my family, and my interests. There are some major updates that I want to cover. I quit my job at Audi. I was supposed to transition to a full-time role by February, but there were major delays because my manager went to Germany and HR was awfully slow. Furthermore, I wanted to work on something more fulfilling. My imminent role would put me in integration and development, which wasn't exactly what I was envisioning. Lastly, the compensation wasn't enough to support my family. Indeed, it is the “hard engineering” that I should've done in my undergrad where I'm designing autonomous vehicles and stuff, but it wasn't my cup of tea anyway. Thankfully, I received an offer from a stealth startup working on more research sided things. I can not disclose any information, but the work is definitely more interesting and aligns with my goals. I finalized my manuscript on Nesterov's accelerated gradient descent and posted it on arXiv. The ideas are a bit rough and rudimentary, but everything came out of my own head, so that's fine. I remember coming up with this analysis in September 2024 while sitting around in a cafe in Korea. I have no idea if it is original or not, but it was definitely a useful method. I spent my entire vacation working on this. My professor didn't find it particularly interesting, which was exactly when I lost my interest. Thankfully, working at a SWE job and rotting my brain encouraged my to revisit old passions. I received an email shortly after from a German chess grandmaster regarding further research directions on essential equilibriums. Unfortunately, this man doesn't know that I am not the biggest bird.
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