- What are underexplored case studies of disruption in different fields (e.g. societal, cultural, technological, linguistic)? What are the effects of disruption on markets, on interpersonal relationships, or on technology?
- How does disruption happen? What are the drivers or triggers for disruption? How is disruption shaped by individuals, or is the direction and orientation of disruption inevitable?
- How have new mediums of communication, such as TikTok or podcasts, disrupted political communication? How might we understand these impacts in light of historical disruptions such as the introduction of radio and television?
- How do industries integrate new technologies, such as AI? How do those technologies reshape tasks for different jobs? What factors about a market or industry shape adoption, and how might we understand such disruption through historical precedents like the rise and decline of switchboard telecom operators?
- How do the disparate and delayed impacts of climate change disrupt local economies and traditional practices? How is climate change today shifting the balance of power and trade between nations, as some benefit from its effects while others are negatively impacted?
1.Tell us about some rabbitholes you revisit often
Urban Design The way a city is designed can vary greatly from the way it’s used. Dead space between buildings is used for plazas that perhaps no one uses. Neighborhoods that on paper have all the elements for a good public space - proximity to business centers, space, lighting - end up being unused. Case study in how we battled for congestion pricing in the U.S., examples of removing the bus fee in Boston, how Tokyo utilizes every inch of land, the housing theory of everything and how housing shortages affect other macro-economic outcomes like climate change, obesity, falling fertility rates, The Death of Great American Cities, Cities for People, A Pattern Language, The Walkable City
I’m fascinated by the mismatch between how cities are designed on paper and how they’re actually used. Some neighborhoods have every ingredient for a “good” public space — lighting, benches, businesses nearby — but remain eerily empty. Why? What makes a space feel inviting, safe, or worthy of lingering? I’ve gone down rabbitholes on the psychology of plazas, “desire paths,” and urban dead zones. I love comparing places like Bryant Park (which thrives) vs nearby “leftover” spaces that no one touches, even though they’re technically accessible. gehl labs cities for people notes
https://asteriskmag.com/issues/07/the-wrong-kind-of-city
Linguistics/etymology
- I’m generally interested in how urban infrastructure shapes and is shaped by human behavior. Inspired by a study abroad moment in Copenhagen, I often return to how Copenhagen resisted car-centricism to become a biking city - how political uproar from citizens in the 70s sparked mini policy decisions like protected lanes and winter-heated paths.
- Cooking from first-principles rather than following a recipe is what differentiates a chef from a cook. I’m obsessed with food media like Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, where they teach you techniques (like how salt breaks down proteins in chicken) over recipes (aka how much seasoning to actually use).
- Words reflect thoughts, and a language in its sum mirror a culture’s development. Any word is an inherent rabbit-hole - e.g., the origin of tea - whether “tea,” “cha,” or “chai” — reflects which trade route the good tea spread from China: “te” words traveled by sea, “cha” by land, and “chai” evolved through Central Asia. Or, how in Mandarin, emotional states are expressed through physical metaphors, like “angry” (生气, shēngqì) translates to “generating air.” They in turn reflect values from classic Chinese philosophy like Daosim, and manifest in medical practices like acupuncture.
It’s a good foil for analyzing micromobility in NYC, whose current infra barely supports safe bike usage. Cities are for people and how do the things we develop incentivize this? For example, policy changes in NYC materially affect one’s everyday - congestion pricing has improved one’s daily commute through Lower East side. The gendered experience of urban design is surprisingly under-researched, such as how certain patterns in their routine leave them susceptible to unsafe situations at night. Or how Copenhagen became so bikable, through environmental incentives, reclaiming car lanes for cyclists, and reversed The design of an city.
I’m generally interested in how urban infrastructure shapes and is shaped by human behavior. Inspired by a study abroad moment in Copenhagen, I often return to how Copenhagen resisted car-centricism to become a biking city - from political uproar from citizens in the 70s sparking mini policy decisions like proteced lanes, winter-heated paths, and bike-first investigations. It’s a good foil for analyzing micromobility in NYC, whose current infra barely supports safe bike usage.
Etymology rabbithole - Words are reflections of a human thought, and a language in sum can hold a mirror to a culture’s values, biases, and geo-political development. Any word is an inherent rabbit-hole - for example, the origin of tea - whether “tea,” “cha,” or “chai” — reflects which trade route the good tea spread from China: “te” words traveled by sea, “cha” by land, and “chai” evolved through Central Asia. Or, how in Mandarin, emotional states are expressed through physical metaphors, like “angry” (生气, shēngqì) translates to “generating air.” They reflect classic Chinese philosophy like Daosim and Confucianism, and manifests in why Traditional Chinese Medicine incorporates acupuncture and the like.
Our how in Mandarin, how many of our terms describing emotional state of being are rooted in physical symptoms (e.g. saying happy is the same as opening your heart!) There’s the ongoing debate on how words capture a human’s cognitive ability to express themselves.
Bell Labs is a underexplored center of innovation, despite how many Nobel Prizes it’s netted. This is a
- cities are for ppl // urban collective memory
- the youtube rabbithole of food journalism
- gambling in asian-amercian communities, esp the elderly
- sisphyus 55
- how to cook from first principles (aka like a chef, sanns recipe)
- note-taking as a practice (tools for thought, digital gardens, obsidian)
disruption to:
- factories/supply chain management
- drug discovery timeilnes
- im curious by the mta -
- im curious by how chinese values are imbued within the language
- network science of friendships / connections
- authenticity
- im curious why systems break down
- im curious by the act of translation
- linguistic patterns
2. On person-problem-fit. Where do you think your ideal intersection of person-problem-fit lies?
What problems do you care about? What problems are you uniquely positioned to tackle? Is there anything you’ve done already or want to do that you’d like to share?
I’m drawn to messy systems where small failures ripple outward and affect people. I’m fascinated by infrastructure in all forms: from how congestion pricing shapes supply chain dynamics in NYC, to the delicate plumbing that supports cloud technology. It’s something core to my 9-5 - building supercomputers for a hyperscaler - and likewise fascinates me in everyday observations. Delighted by the unexpected patterns across systems, I find myself mapping ideas across domains, drawing from the humanities to inform the sciences.
What drives everything I do is this question: how does technology shape behavior and culture? Every system we build - from factories to cities - embeds human values and biases, and reflects them back into society. My work asks whether what we’re building still serves what humans actually need.
Writing is a tool to dissect a complex system and find the leverage points where small interventions can create positive change. It’s also a powerful form of open-sourcing your thinking. Through my writing practice - from organizing writing clubs to publishing magazine pieces - I’m working towards a body of case studies that examine the gap between the values we think we’re building into our systems and what communities actually experience.
Call me a generalist, a pattern-seeker, or just someone who notices the cracks — I’m drawn to messy systems where small failures ripple outward and affect real people. Having grown up with a heart in the humanities within a tech-focused environment, I I think of myself as a high-leverage generalist — someone who moves fluidly across the humanities to probe the sciences, looking for leverage points in complex systems where a small intervention can unlock deeper understanding or catalyze action, I want to take a humanistic pespective to identify where technology systems drift from human needs.
superpower — a way to take messy, abstract ideas and guide others through them. It’s how I make sense of systems that feel inscrutable: from urban zoning to
I’m fascinated by infrastructure in all its forms: from how congestion pricing shapes supply chain dynamics in NYC, to the delicate plumbing that supports cloud technology. It’s something core to my field of work - building supercomputers for a hyperscaler - and likewise fascinates me in everyday observations. I often find myself mapping ideas across domains to study platform incentives through a civic lens.
What drives me is the question: how does technology shape behavior and culture? What values are embedded in the way we build factories, train models, or design cities? I call this socio-technology alignment — asking whether the systems we build still serve what humans actually need.
Outside of work, I cultivate spaces for cross-pollination: speculative writing clubs, photo walks, collaborative inquiry. This abstract inquiry is grounded in concrete community efforts. I run a speculative writing club and host photo walks that help people surface patterns in their environments. These are experiments in co-ambient presence and cross-pollinating ideas can help us build better shared models of the world.
Call me a generalist, a pattern-seeker, or just someone who notices the cracks — I’m drawn to complex systems where small failures ripple outward and affect real people. My ideal person-problem fit lies at the intersection of infrastructure, systems design, and culture — where technical and social layers meet, often misaligned. I think of myself as a high-leverage communicator: someone who translates ambiguity into clarity, especially when systems are opaque.
I’m fascinated by infrastructure in all its forms — from how congestion pricing changes logistics in NYC to how software supports supercomputing at hyperscale. My work builds on this curiosity: I help operate GPU infrastructure for AI at Microsoft, but I’m just as interested in how civic platforms or urban policy shape incentives.
Writing is my superpower. It’s how I make sense of the invisible — the values embedded in tools, cities, or models. I call this pursuit socio-technical alignment: asking whether the systems we build still serve what humans actually need.
Outside of work, I prototype community-based inquiry through photo walks, speculative writing salons, and cross-disciplinary gatherings. These are more than hobbies — they’re testbeds for surfacing patterns, building shared language, and reimagining how we live with technology.
I’m animated by questions of how technology shapes culture: case studies in how innovation changes behavior, queries on how we can design a better system to encourage human flourishing. My investigations are grounded by investing into my community and cultivating a cross-pollination of ideas. Whether it’s through regular writing clubs or photo walks, there’s a magic that comes through when you’re invited to reflect and create with others.
I enjoy problems tha I am animated by aesthetics and visual beauty. I enjoy running up and down the ladder of abstraction. I care about
- i care about intentional spaces to cultivate thought (aka more socratic seminars !!) and encourage co-creative activites. aka, writing clubs/photo galleries etc
- as someone who is multidisciplinary i believe in cross-pollination.
- big picture patterns and tactical flows
- i naturally connect the dots across fields - spottig the weak signals that are overlooked by specialists
- animated by aesthetic and performance
- anti things: i dislike overly serious people / posturing
how supercomputing disrupts communities countries and control
-
the foundations of ai power structure are being destabilized
-
rural communities are hosting massive datacenters
Reference: https://manual.withcompound.com/chapters/finding-person-problem-fit
3, What do you plan on exploring at Rabbitholeathon?
For all the innovations in computing as of late, I’m still working to build a clear mental model of the physical nature of AI infrastructure. Supercomputers have an exceedingly simple definition: a computer that can handle high level of performance. But their impacts and implications are grand - historically powering weather simulation and complex physics equations, they’re the engine powering large-scale AI training. There’s some key dimensions I wish to explore that deserve a compelling narrative: the localized effects of datacenters on the communities they disrupt, with NOVA as a case study; how to sustain a convoluted supply chain amidst a delicate geo-political situation; how power and control of these behemoth computers flowed from government to universities to the hyperscalers.
I’d like to take a socio-historical lens to supercomputing, in a fashion inspired by The Idea Factory and The Power Broker. There are case studies and questions galore - who are the main villains and heroes of the industry, how can we align incentives for public good when these systems are owned by private companies, and oh my god, are we gonna run out of power?
Looking forward, I want to investigate - what is the datacenter 2.0? Will it shift from rural to urban for hyper-localized centers? When attention shifts from training to inference, how will this disrupt these existing infrastructure investments?
I want to explore supercomputing News of AI compute has gripped the news cycle - but I’m deeply curious on a socio-historical lens on the history of supercomputing, pre-dating its use case for lage-scale training.
An example case study is examining the new data center, and how it can be built from first-principles given market, geo-political, and environmental pressures. The New Datacenter
- supercomputing as a disruptive force
- geopolitical system and how the supply chain is affected by the parts of a supercomputer (gpu, nvlink, ib switch)
- datacenters and how it disrupts/dispels the local communities where they are built
- history of supercomputing and how power flowed from gov’t to universities to cloud compute
- who are the major players? the villains? the supporting cast?
- How do cloud providers essentially extract value from local communities (cheap land, tax breaks, energy subsidies) while providing minimal local economic benefit? What happens when a datacenter shuts down
- how open source / deep seek “disrupted” traditional american llms and the fall out from that
- https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia-manufacture-american-made-ai-supercomputers-us/
- what’s next for supercomputing in a post-agi society - what will they be used for - quantum?
- inference is becoming commoditized. What happens when running AI becomes as cheap as running a calculator
- choice of data center: build where land, operational costs, adn taxes are low, access to power, power grid
- https://andthewest.stanford.edu/2025/thirsty-for-power-and-water-ai-crunching-data-centers-sprout-across-the-west/
- use phoenix as a case study
- https://eelp.law.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Harvard-ELI-Extracting-Profits-from-the-Public.pdf
- expensive payments from tech is affecitng all ont he power grid
- same rate structures that have socialized the cost of reliable power force public to pay for infra
- https://www.blackengineer.com/sample-section/ai-news/can-localized-data-centers-energize-decaying-urban-centers/
- localized data farms? within cities?
- localized impacts on surrounding communities remain largely overlooked
-
(i) environmental issues such as noise pollution (Monserrate, 2022), air pollution (Han et al., 2024), and water usage (Li et al., 2024), (ii) social impacts such as lack of amenities, increased blackouts, and lack of aesthetic appeals for datacenter buildings, and (iii) economic strains such as increased electricity costs (Martin and Peskoe, 2025), and impact on life of household appliances (Nicoletti et al., 2024) (detailed in Section 3).
-
- urban disruptions
- how congestion pricing has influenced traffic patterns in the city
- how biking disrupted copenhagen
-
- How disruption happens: Copenhagen’s bike transformation shows how policy + infrastructure can create cultural shifts
-
- how to design a biking system for nyc
- how to design a city for non-economic incentives
- e.g. facilitate chance encounters
- facilitate community spaces
- how to design cities to hep marginalized communities like
-
- Underexplored case studies: The gendered experience of urban design is surprisingly under-researched
- disabled people
-
- how uber/ridesharing disrupts traffic
- how yelp/uber eats disrupts food system
- how yelp/beli disrupts which stores are formed
-
- Does hyper-local urban design actually reduce serendipitous encounters by creating micro-bubbles?
-
- How do improvements intended to help communities end up displacing them? Can you design urban improvements that are “gentrification-proof”?
- e.g. community centers
- how is our modern vernacular being disrupted by the 1) tik tok-ification of everything (how quickly socialmedia transmits memes) 2) the idea of “prompting”
- linguistics is ill-apt for how llms think
- how the type of system facilitates disruption
- infrastructure writ large - cities, computing, etc. what happens when systems fail? how do the interconnectedness of a system and cascade effects reveal the pressure points before the bridge falls down? how do potential failures actually indicate places where the fundamental paradigm of understanding the system is faulty, and we need to shift our direction altogether?
- who sees disruption and who doesnt?
- e.g. blockchain chicken farm, how rural china is so far from the promise of bitcoin
- rural america and its detachment from coastal acceleration
- e.g. how supercomputing occupies rural lands and displaces the locals but purely benefits the ai researchers being traded about like nba players
This rabbitholeathon will be a themed rabbitholeathon centered around Disruption. We encourage you to take a look at our blog post for the inspiration behind the theme and some ideas to get you started
This is not set in stone, we are just curious what you’d potentially like to spend a weekend exploring!
Share some things you’ve made!
Show us some things about yourself or things you’ve worked on/are proud of and why it’s meaningful to you (personal website, projects, writing, art, music, journal entries, early drafts of something you’re working on, etc.).