Sristi Sharma

SWE @ JPMC|
Maths&&Tech |

well, as they say, यत् भावो – तत् भवति।

[India in Pixels by Ashris 🔱 @indiainpixels]

Attachment is the root of sorrow but scarcity is the root of all attachment. Cultivate abundance and detachment stops being a pain you have to force yourself through.

[Justin Schroeder @jpschroeder]

Fable isn't the first.

In 1999 the department of defense blocked exports of the PowerMac G4 for crossing the 1 gigaflop threshold.

Steve Jobs turned it into an ad.

[vivek @itsreallyvivek]

the anthropic co-founder jack clark advice that stuck with me:

read the primary material. not the summary. not what the ai said about it. the actual thing.

form your own opinion first. then ask the model. never the other way around.

keep practices in your life where it’s just you against the world ~ a sport, an instrument, reading, building something with your hands. spaces where the algorithm can’t mediate what you learn about yourself.

and don’t defer to AI even when it’s usually right. especially then, actually. that’s precisely when the habit forms.

the people who won’t get eaten by this moment are the ones who stayed hard to replace. not because they avoided the tools but because they kept the parts of thinking that make the tools worth using.

[Sristi Sharma @2its_iris2]

“If you can solve a problem quickly, you are not learning. You are performing.”

Umm… wow

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

Two math olympiad champions wrote a training manual in 1993 on two old Macintosh computers, and every American kid who has won a major math competition in the last decade learned to think from it.

Their names are Sandor Lehoczky and Richard Rusczyk. The book is called The Art of Problem Solving. Most people in math know it as AoPS.

Since 2015, every single member of the US International Math Olympiad team has been an AoPS student. Not most of them. Every one.

That statistic sounds impossible until you understand what the book actually does.

Lehoczky and Rusczyk were not professors. They were competitors. Lehoczky earned the sole perfect AIME score in 1990 and led the national first place team. Rusczyk was a USA Mathematical Olympiad winner and a perfect AIME scorer in 1989. They had both survived the same brutal selection process the book was designed to train students for.

And the first thing they decided was that almost every existing math textbook was teaching the wrong thing.

School math gives you formulas. You memorize them. You apply them. You pass the test. Then you sit down in front of a real competition problem and the formula does not apply, and you have nothing underneath it.

That is the gap. The gap is not knowledge. It is thinking.

The entire premise of AoPS is that problem-solving is a transferable skill, not a bag of memorized tricks. A student who genuinely understands why a technique works can adapt it, combine it with something else, and deploy it in a context they have never seen before. A student who only memorized the technique freezes the moment the problem looks different.

The book teaches the difference between a formula and a method.

A formula tells you what to compute. A method tells you how to see. The students who win olympiads are not the ones who know more formulas. They are the ones who have trained themselves to look at an unfamiliar problem and recognize its structure. To see that this problem is secretly asking the same question as a problem they solved three weeks ago, just dressed differently.

Rusczyk calls this "learning to read the problem." Not reading the words. Reading what the problem is actually asking underneath the words.

The second thing they built into the book is tolerance for being stuck.

Most students treat confusion as a signal to stop. The book treats confusion as the starting point. Every chapter pushes students past the point where the obvious approach runs out. That moment of running out is not failure. That is where the actual thinking begins.

Lehoczky once described it this way. If you can solve a problem quickly, you are not learning. You are performing. Learning only happens when you are past the edge of what you already know.

The book was written on old Macintosh computers in 1993. Rusczyk launched the AoPS website in 2003. Today the community has over one million users. Thousands of students enroll in AoPS online courses every year. Most winners of every major American math competition are AoPS alumni.

A platform built by two kids who were good at math competitions has become the infrastructure that produces the next generation of mathematicians, engineers, and scientists who are good at thinking.

The formulas you memorized in school will eventually be obsolete.

The thinking you trained will not.

What is one problem in your life right now that you have been avoiding because you do not yet know the right formula to solve it?

[Sristi Sharma @2its_iris2]

Guys pls pls pls help me find that tweet by some engineer dude who recommended a book of JAX exercises and would recommend those who could prove they did the exercises themselves?

I just need to verify the book

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb @nntaleb]

@Jaffer22915438 The Roman army rule: action removes fear.

[Cedar You @our_decay]

Hypercompetitive guy who always loses

[Sristi Sharma @2its_iris2]

An unexamined life is not worth living

It’s fascinating how the ancients of vastly different cultures experienced life and agreed upon same wisdom

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

There's a physicist at Stanford named Safi Bahcall who modeled this exact principle and the math is wild.

He calls it "phase transitions in human networks." When you're stationary, your probability of a lucky event is limited to your existing surface area: the people you already know, the places you already go, the ideas you've already been exposed to. Your opportunity window is fixed.

When you move, your collision rate with new nodes in a network increases nonlinearly. Double your movement (new conversations, new cities, new projects) and your probability of a serendipitous encounter doesn't double. It roughly quadruples. Because each new node connects you to their entire network, not just to them.

Richard Wiseman ran a 10-year study at the University of Hertfordshire tracking self-described "lucky" and "unlucky" people. The single biggest differentiator wasn't IQ, education, or family money. Lucky people scored significantly higher on one trait: openness to experience. They talked to strangers more, varied their routines more, and said yes to invitations at nearly twice the rate.

The "unlucky" group followed the same routes, ate at the same restaurants, and talked to the same 5 people. Their networks were closed loops. No new inputs, no new collisions.

Luck isn't random. Luck is surface area. And surface area is a function of movement.

The lobster emoji is doing more work than most people realize. Lobsters grow by shedding their shell when it gets too tight. The growth requires a period of total vulnerability. No protection, no armor, soft body exposed to the ocean.

That's the cost of movement nobody posts about. You have to be uncomfortable first. The new shell only hardens after you've already moved.

[darpan @darpunn]

Thorium reactor

[Ankur Handa @ankurhandos]

I love the latin phrase "solvitur ambulando" which translates to "it is solved by walking". I make sure to walk to 1-1.5 hours every day it sparks some of the best ideas in my head.

[Birender Dhanoa @bsdhanoa]

“The celebration of jugaad is, at its core, a
celebration of underinvestment. And the
people who pay the price are always the
workers.”
Venki Padmanabham former CEO Royal Enfield.

[Parimal @Fintech03]

The most iconic line from this book is: We have to remember that what we observe is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning.

[Atlas Press @realAtlasPress]

J.R.R. Tolkien, one of his best lines

[Sristi Sharma @2its_iris2]

@AyushmanGarg4 Sorry I cannot help you with that request. I am just an AI model built for average talks

Upgrade to pro to access better out of context understanding

[Sristi Sharma @2its_iris2]

@AyushmanGarg4 That’s literally the most non ai image 😭😭✌🏿

[Sristi Sharma @2its_iris2]

@sreekeshiyer Kaise bhaye you are one of the chillest people 🙌

[Easlo @heyeaslo]

The book that inspired my app.

[Sristi Sharma @2its_iris2]

@chesscom_in @FIDE_chess She is sooo good to watch. The future looks exciting!!

[Sristi Sharma @2its_iris2]

@sreekeshiyer Yooo you are in blr??