About
Why “Critically Thomas”?
The title was a late night musing. I was thinking about all the different things I enjoy reading, studying, doing — and no one thing stuck. Since I’m starting my Master’s in Applied Mathematics, coming up with a coy title seemed necessary. I bounced between “Hamiltonian of Thomas” and “d/dt(TSP)”, but those were a bit excessive and niche. Critically Thomas stuck as a simple play on words.
A short explanation of criticality: there’s a hypothesis in the field specifically called the “critical brain hypothesis”, which claims that the brain operates near the boundary between slow, predictable behavior and fast, chaotic behavior, allowing for the more efficient transmission of messages1.
While I don’t know if this hypothesis is true, I know that criticality is an interesting lens with which we can look at many phenomena, and particularly, one with which I can look at myself.
Plus, I think it’s just fun and wise to be critical of things from time to time.
Why Write “Critically Thomas”?
I figured this could act as my digital postcard and feed. I’ve never been a super-fan of social media, but I do value keeping in touch with everyone.
Way back in high school, I wrote journal articles for The Lantern, the school’s newly-established newspaper. There was something cathartic about sharing my feelings openly, but in an organized way.
Recently, I’ve enjoyed journaling, but those thoughts all stay to myself. Now, I’ve decided that some of these thoughts, along with my adventures while travelling and learning, do deserve to see the light of day. Even if eclectic, I feel it’s time to debut a little more of my inner world publicly.
Wait Who is This Critical Thomas?
I am Thomas.
A bit more seriously, I’m a Master’s Student studying in the Erasmus InterMaths program, which is for interdisciplinary (applied) mathematics. I intend on studying Fluid Dynamics in the future. We’ll see where that takes me, but I don’t have concrete plans for what happens after graduation.
Before, I was an advanced software engineer at FDB; before that, I studied Computer Science and Applied Mathematics at Indiana University (Go Hoosiers). I’ve done some undergraduate research, and I’ve also worked at restaurants intermittently in high school and college. All of these have been formative.
While my occupations may be engaging to a hiring team, I don’t think they fully captures the breadth of my inner world. I’ll spare you a CV-like list of activities. If you’d like to see some of that, you can follow me on LinkedIn. But this is supposed to be for more fun, and I hope you can get to know me through my writing just as well.
I have more interests than I can count, among which are electronic music production, reading (or listening to) literary classics and modern literature alike, playing with AI, writing, and digital art. I’m new to the world of travel, but I’m getting my feet wet now. Catch me in Italy right now. In general, I find topics like dynamical systems, chemistry, philosophy, machine learning, sociology, psychology, quantum computing, and physics engaging, and I like reading or watching videos about them. But I’m no pro, but I put the ‘pro’ in progress.
I’ve done a variety of creative projects before, including making electronic music (although now I don’t have as much time to publish it), training machine learning models, competing in hackathons, and physically, painting, sewing, and drawing. Writing is a new hobby to add to my ever-expanding list 😉
How I Will Write “Critically Thomas”
AI Notice
One thing I want to make abundantly clear: my first priority of this blog is that the writing is my own, and AI doesn’t write for me. I am using AI to assist with the creation of widgets, projects, and features, but it doesn’t write the words you read. That much is important to me. I can feel my brain sloughing out of my head like pot roast off the bone whenever I read AI-generated text, every time. If I’m using AI-written text, it will be very clear, and I will treat it like a citation, so it is clear that it is not my own words.
That being said, AI has been a huge interest of mine, and I strongly feel that as a tool, it greatly augments our capacities. I do regularly use AI to explore ideas, and so often, I may reach conclusions that I wouldn’t have on my own. I see this as similar to consulting the internet though—many ideas that we have are a product of what we consume online, be it from TikTok, YouTube, or just Google Search. I think one sentence sums it up nicely; “we are what we eat”.
I also believe that AI is a powerful tool for iterating quickly, as I’ve learned from my last job. I will often use it to generate code, and I intend to write some articles about how I use it to create this code, and what my methodology is. I believe there’s many unexplored concepts, such as using AI as an interactive learning utility, writing partner, and 3rd-party opinion, that deserve intellectual discussion. If we don’t explore the techniques, then vibe-slop wins.
Guiding principles
Other than that, I have a few guiding principles:
- This is an honest blog. I will avoid misrepresenting my own understanding of things, but I will also avoid sugar-coating things.
- This is a guilt-free blog. I’m not going to write about subjects that would make me stay up at night wondering, “should I really have posted that?”
- This is a human blog. I’m not a channel for ChatGPT or Claude when writing these. The ideas are my own (insofar as they’re not consciously generated with AI; that’s it’s own paradox now), and AI only assists me when writing.
- This is a critical blog, but not a hateful one. Any criticism I have, it will be constructive.
- This is an evolving blog. Since I am hosting the web app on my own AWS account, I have full control over its features and user experience. I may be adding new features and/or rolling them back here and there. In the future, we’ll hopefully have more community features like comments and sharing, but for now, it’s just a static blog.
- This is a semi-professional blog. I’m not going to write about anything that would get me fired… sorry. While politics are an inevitable conversation topic, I will avoid disclosing my opinions.
- Most importantly, this is a fun blog. I’m here to have a good time writing, and hopefully, you all are here to have a good time reading. Or you’re a bot harvesting my text and turning it into training data, which means I can basically say I helped write ChatGPT 7 or whatever. But at the end of the day, this blog is designed inspire, intrigue, and some-other-i-word-for-spark-imagination in us.
Don’t forget, this is all just a static, digital representation of me as a complete human being. For the time being, this text can’t talk back to you like I would. That being said, if you ever have questions or comments about any articles, please do reach out to me. I’d assume that if you’re reading this, many of you already have my phone number, email, or other social media anyways.