Best Summer Yet
Best Summer Yet
Just hit Akali 3 to win a lobby. I’m the goat. Anyways, this was a pretty fun summer. I liked it quite a bit. Mainly because of where I worked but also some other stuff. - 8/20/2025
This summer, I spent my time at a job. At first glance, that sounds rather sad. I’m spending the last summer before college working rather than…whatever else people do. Sometimes, I like working though. In this case, I think applying for the internship I did was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. That’s a rather strong statement. But, I also think I can back it up.
How it started
The application header
During high school, I think I was really concerned with doing something this summer. What I mean by that is that I wanted to gain some skills and experience – partially because I wanted to bolster my resume prior to freshman year and partially because I felt I had not accomplished anything significant yet.
I first heard of the place I worked (ARL) after seeing the program product, student reports, on my school’s college counselor’s desk. ARL stands for Applied Research Laboratories, and since ARL is a government organization, I won’t go into too much detail.
Basically, while talking to my college counselor about college applications, the ARL student reports caught my eye. I asked my college counselor about it, and he explained the program to me. Then, I thought a bit, realized it was far too early to apply since it was only September, stored it in my head, and told myself that I would apply in a couple of months.
I don’t recall the exact time frame, but at same point in time around Spring, I opened the application, decided it was too long and too difficult, and put it off until the week before (at least my procrastination did not leave it until the day before!).
I remember very clearly that I finished writing the application during lunch in a teacher’s classroom. After finishing, I put off turning it in until a couple days before. Then, I turned it in, and that was that. Quite the interesting story.
What the fun thing was
Literally just a matplotlib heatmap, nothing of importance here
Ok, now for the actually interesting part. I don’t know how much I can actually share – I’m pretty sure I can share all of it – but at the same time, I will veer on the side of caution. At a high level, I worked on speeding up signal acquisition using GPUs. Signal acquisition is one of the first steps for GPS location solving, and for those that don’t know, GPUs can make certain operations really, really fast.
The fun part was the math. It’s that simple. There’s so much math that underlies GPS and signal processing as a whole that I legitimately believe I could fill up multiple notebooks with just what I learned in a single week at ARL.
I can definitely share this: my favorite math part was manipulating FFTs in equations. I’d heard of FFTs before working at ARL but only in a very abstract something, something, frequency kind of way. At ARL though, I learned in much greater detail what they are and actually saw all the math I’d learned in high school put into real-world use (which was just insane to me).
Frankly, I’d always believed in a sort of math is cool but only really as a foundational structure. What I mean by that is that mathematicians and researchers set up grand advances in human innovation, but the actual impact on people’s lives is brought about not by math but by scale more than anything. The clearest example that I would use to justify this idea is in AI. AI is only possible due to linear algebra and calculus. However, technologies like ChatGPT or AlphaFold are only here because of the massive scale of data along with the massive amount of money that huge tech companies can invest. I’m very not knowledgeable in history and AI, but I’m fairly confident that the math for modern AI was present 20 years ago if not even further back.
At ARL though, I saw math quite clearly being used to discover things and identify how things would change in a not-industry-scale but also not pure research kind of way (using the word things to stay vague).
What I helped (with a lot, lot of help) create
Surprisingly accurate, a much better explanation than anything I could come up with
Let me make clear, I was hard carried by my supervisors and the guy I worked with. While I think I contributed a lot and wrote a good majority of the code, without the people who helped me, I don’t think I could’ve even created a basic signal acquisition program. All of the math was taught to me by them, most of the programming knowledge was imparted by them as well, and what to look into for optimizations was essentially fed to me by them too. All in all, I am infinitely thankful for their help.
The end product that I ended up creating (from scratch which I think is the coolest part!) was a program that was able to do continuous signal acquisition for GPS. Extremely vague, but that’s so I don’t accidentally do something not good. It was a 20x speed up though (mostly due to the GPU) which is extremely cool.
To conclude, I will conclude, by saying that in conclusion…
GPUs!
Fantastic experience. My summer was made more fun by meeting with some friends that I hadn’t seen in a long time, but to be honest, it was hard carried by this experience.
Anyways, Akali fell off hard. So, I can’t play Akali in TFT anymore. Sad.
I think I can confidently say that this was my best summer. Hopefully, they keep getting better!
College
UT Austin turtles
I took so long to finish this post (mostly cause I was reading One Piece Colored version) that college has already started. It has been rather fun! I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised by how fun college has been. It has been very fun.
I feel so productive in college. It’s strange but staying in a dorm and only having my laptop instead of my desktop setup at home makes me want to do work rather than waste time watching YouTube. It’s very fun!
I don’t like the tone shift in this post where it sounds happy now. So, I will end in such a principled manner as to conclude by saying that time passes all of us by. It is up to us to ensure that our time is spent in happiness or in legacy. So, choose which one you desire for both is an impossibility afforded to the very few lucky ones.
Also, the layout image that says ARL is dead wrong!
Couldn’t remember the position, but what should White play?
I've been playing a lot of chess games against people down a queen to make it more fun. It's kind of disrespectful, but at the same time, it's really boring to play against someone not at my skill level when we have equal material. Like, imagine fighting a toddler. That's just boring.
This position is supposed to be from a game I played with a friend I went to the mall with. That person is now in another state far from where I am but is what it is. Either way, my advice if you're starting down a Queen is to hedgehog, then attack, then hope to somehow gain back some material for the endgame. You can usually scam endgames. Iirc, in this game, my attack led to checkmate, but I remembered this position wrong, so is what it is.