"Day by day, what you choose, what you think and what you do is who you become." -Heraclitus "Don't sit this one out. Do something. By chance of fate, you are alive at an absolutely critical moment in the history of our planet." -Carl Sagan "That one day, we'll look back at where we started, and be amazed by how far we've come." -Technoblade "In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me lay an invincible summer" -Camus "Your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing" -Dostoevsky "The biggest problem in the universe is that no one helps each other" -Anakin Skywalker "To tame the savageness of man, and make gentle the life of this world." Greeks "You can't stop change, any more than you can stop the suns from setting" -Shmi Skywalker "No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man" -Heraclitus "A tomb now suffices him for whom the world was not enough" -Alexander the Great "The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away" -Picasso "That which we are, we are. One equal temper of heroic hearts. Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will. To strive, to seek, to find. And not to yield." Ulysses, Tennyson "It's not where you start that defines you, but how far you were willing to go" Unknown "Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God." Aeschylus "A man of bad character punishes his own soul" Unknown "A tragedy is when good men fall too early" "There is no escaping death, but there is a brief moment. A beautiful Camelot when hope prevails. That moment is called life"

You Can Read a Better-Formatted Version of the Text Here: Recap of 2024 I mean, if you don’t want to… man, why don’t you like better-formatted text? I won’t steal your money. Don’t worry! Well, that aside. It’s December 25th! Two things: first off, Merry Christmas to everyone! I hope you are enjoying your holidays. I surely am, since I got a two-week break. It’s just sleep, sleep, sleep because after that, I won’t be able to… story for another day. The other thing is, the New Year is coming soon, so what I wanted to do in this post is to recap my year. In one word: eventful. To give you a perspective of how important this year was, if you visit my LinkedIn account and see the things I’ve accomplished, all of them are from 2024. So let’s get this thing rolling: January to May: My First Year in FRC Robotics This was my first year in FRC Robotics, and man, it was crazy. We had work meetings every day from 6-9 PM and from 10 AM-4 PM on Saturdays too. It wasn’t like we were just chilling there; we actually needed to get stuff done, test them out, and treat it like an actual job. You might have guessed it, I’m on the programming team, and we needed to have the code almost ready before the robot was even built. How, you ask? While we simulate the robot in a virtual world. We already have the CAD model of it (which is just a digital twin of the robot, used as a guide to build it in real life), and we just need that to write the code for the robot and see if it works as intended. Honestly, I learned a lot. I learned how to use GitHub in a more teamwork-oriented environment and better collaborative coding practices. There was just so much to learn, and I worked on the vision side. Next year (2025), we are planning to implement AI in vision, and you know how interested I’m in that. We also got selected for Worlds, which is really good! But it was also so stressful, waking up at 5 AM, going to school at 7 AM, coming back, then tennis after school, followed by robotics, and finally getting back home to freshen up… It’s 10:30 PM, and I haven’t even opened my homework. Then other not-so-fun things came by: finals, APs, and sleepless nights.

“Haha, Chinnu bro left Skool! Hehe, we can take the top spot on the leaderboard now,” — Rudaiba and Dan plotting “Ahh, excuse me? Is this the betrayal I get? Heh, so sad. But, you know, good luck with that. I doubt I’ll be around for long anyway, especially in December… Ahh, yeah, I need to stay safe here,” — Chinnu “Heh, whatever, you c***p,” — Rudaiba “Why am I here? Hello? What’s happening?” — Dan It has been so long since I last read a good book, and yes, it’s been over a month since I posted about books. I know, I’m sorry, but I just can’t manage it right now. I’ve already reached my limits with AP classes, and I have extracurriculars on top of that. Each blog post takes me 1 to 1.5 hours to write and another hour to find the best images. And that’s not even counting the time needed to read the book—which is just… ahh, NOOO. So yeah, my schedule is at its peak, and I can’t take on more. I was discussing this with my confidant about how we tend to neglect the things that make us happiest. For example, if you have a meeting at 5 PM but your best friend texts you to hang out, you might say no to your friend because you have a meeting. You decline your friend because they understand you and your situation better than someone you’re meeting online for the first time. Or let’s say you have plans with your friend at 8 PM, but someone from an internship asks if you can meet at the same time. You’d tell your friend you can’t make it but not the interviewer, because your friend understands and is flexible, while the interviewer doesn’t care as much. Similarly, I need to reduce my time writing blogs because I know you all understand the other commitments I have on my plate. As for what I’ve been up to, let’s focus on the highlights: I have a question for you: How much trust can you have in a person, and how much trust do you receive in return? Is it the kind of trust where you’d share any password imaginabe, Google, bank accounts, anything? Can it be so profound that they share every aspect of their life with you? So much that they seek your opinion and feel comfortable showing you any of their conversations?

"Man is a mystery. It needs to be unravelled, and if you spend your whole life unravelling it, don't say that you've wasted time. I am studying that mystery because I want to be a human being." --Fyodr Dostoevsky I want to quantify infinity. Huh? You might ask Well, we already do this in math. We can apply limits to infinity: "As x approaches infinity, this happens." The definition of a derivative is just the slope of two points, but they approach infinitely close to each other. We can't perceive infinity, but from the impossible comes the derivative. So why not apply this to everything? Why not quantify everything? Existence is a paradox, existence is infinite. We-- beings of reality-- are finite. Yet out of nowhere, comes life: paradoxical and explainable, all at the same time. A wonderful paradox. The process of quantifying infinity is called philosophy. And you don't need to be any "good at it" to be considered a philosopher, because you already are. You just need to live life with an open soul, ready to learn and adapt. “If you wish to glimpse inside a human soul and get to know a man, don't bother analyzing his ways of being silent, of talking, of weeping, of seeing how much he is moved by noble ideas; you will get better results if you just watch him laugh. If he laughs well, he's a good man.” --Dostoevsky Today, I laughed quite a bit. I laughed out of stress, and then out of relief. And then I laughed at the absurdity of it all. Life is good

Choose to see the world as beautiful, and your life will be much more fulfilling. All of us live the same lives, but we choose to perceive it in different ways. Today was one of the most exciting days of my life. I woke up refreshed, went to the gym, and then went to practice. Then, I played at my violin recital and it a lot of people came up to congratulate me. When I was a kid, I would look up at the older musicians with fancy suits in admiration. Now, I am one of the older musicians, and I think I inspired at least one other rising violinist. Then, after I got home, I did something really dumb. I've been talking with this girl at my school for about a week, and today I asked her to be my girlfriend (out of nowhere). Keep in mind that we've only been talking for a week and haven't even gone on a date. I thought I was about to get friendzoned, so I just put on a movie and accepted my fate. Who would've thought that she was feeling the exact same way? So now, I'm gonna take her on a proper date instead of jumping the gun 🤣 Moral of the story: You can approach life either from the perspective that it sucks, or you can stay cheerful no matter the situation. I was kicking myself for messing up so badly, but it turned out to be fine in the end. Life is definitely more fun if you accept it for what it is an just enjoy. Otherwise, it's just misery, and who wants that?