flâneur

Julia Wu

2 followers · 10 following · 430 views

on the atlas — 71

highlights — 50

  • (Gershenfeld is also credited in Minority Report and Big Hero 6, and in the spring he teaches “How To Make Something That Makes (almost) Anything”, where you make the machines that you use in normal How To Make.)
    How To Make (almost) Anything | MIT Admissions
  • Here we are also leveraging protein language models insights on which parts of the target are the most conserved for a more effective drug. With these candidate binders, we can then move into the laboratory to test and quantify how effective these binders are in vitro before testing them in infected plants to validate their therapeutic activity. Leveraging AI tools is a key part of our proposal in the form of target discovery and binder design, but there certainly is an important human component beyond validation. The hard-earned intuition of our consortium’s experts — built on unpublished neg…
    Making MGAIC with Jordan Hoff and Paul Torrillo – MIT Generative AI Impact Consortium
  • You will meet lots of people. Ones that you adore, and others that you abhor. I am often met by strangers with gentle humility; the trick is to carefully peel back their politeness until you get to the heart of what they care about. Over time, you will realize that we are all connected by our tirelessly beating hearts. Keep an open mind, as you might have serendipity to thank for some of the greatest people you will ever get to know. "Dawn" by Emily Dickinson sums it up: Not knowing when the Dawn will come, I open every Door; Or has it Feathers, like a Bird, Or Billows, like a Shore?
    undergrad at mit: my experience
  • Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter
    The Science Behind Christine Blasey Ford's Testimony
  • When Michelle Wu became mayor of Boston just under a year ago, she was seen as a transformative figure — not only for what she represented as the first woman and first person of color to be elected as the city’s mayor but also for the progressive policies she hoped to pursue, like a civic Green New Deal, waiving fees for some public transportation and reinstating a form of rent control. When Wu took office, these lofty goals were complicated by circumstances both predictable and unforeseen, mundane and extraordinary.
    Mayor Michelle Wu Wants to Change Boston. But Can Boston Change? - The New York Times
  • And so, there’s nothing that quite beats female friendships like these. For me, girlhood is powered by endless conversations — legs scrunched up to the chest in a car, lying on a couch, tanning in the sun. Paradoxically, girlhood thrives from silence, the simple comfort of warm bodies next to yours. There’s a peace in sitting beside someone, resting your heads on another’s shoulders, sleeping side by side. Almost instinctively, we know to smear sunscreen on each other’s backs, to dance crazily in our best dresses, offer water bottles and tissues and pints of ice cream at the end of the night. …
    On roommates - clo.stelle
  • Today has been one of the first Sundays I’ve truly had all to myself. It is beautiful in Boston today, with a cool Atlantic breeze that reminds me of the Bay. This morning, I went on a short run along the esplanade, changed into slippers and bussed to Hayden library. At noon, I sauntered onto Newbury Street, listened to live jazz playing along the street. I bought myself a flower-embroidered mini dress, then changed into it immediately. I sipped on a cup of fresh lemonade. A stranger complimented my dress; it made my day.
    On solitude - clo.stelle
  • We call the collection of these patterns the J-space—named after the technique we used to find them, involving a mathematical concept called the Jacobian.
    A global workspace in language models \ Anthropic
  • Taylor's theorem is taught in introductory-level calculus courses and is one of the central elementary tools in mathematical analysis. It gives simple arithmetic formulas to accurately compute values of many transcendental functions such as the exponential function and trigonometric functions. It is the starting point of the study of analytic functions, and is fundamental in various areas of mathematics, as well as in numerical analysis and mathematical physics. Taylor's theorem also generalizes to multivariate and vector valued functions. It provided the mathematical basis for some landmark e…
    Taylor's theorem
  • The Intellectual Vitality Initiative, which officially launched in January 2024, aims to foster more productive debate on campus because “diverse perspectives are the backbone of who we are.” The Q Guide now asks students how comfortable they feel sharing controversial or opposing views in each course they take. The University suspended and took under review an academic program accused of being one-sided. Student handbook policies introduced at the end of 2024 cracked down on student attendance in class. Just last week, Harvard faculty overwhelmingly voted in favor of capping the number of A’s…
    I Led The Crimson. The News Transformed Harvard. | Opinion | The Harvard Crimson
  • Performative reading embodies the double-edged nature of college life: at once private and public, intimate and staged, raw and strategic. This duality unsettles me, but it also feels honest. College is a performance of becoming. Reading performatively may look pretentious, but perhaps it is also just another way of rehearsing the selves we are still learning to grow into.
    Read with the Performative Man: A Defense of Public Reading | Arts | The Harvard Crimson
  • To describe biological functions, we need a vocabulary that contains concepts such as amplification, adaptation, robustness, insulation, error correction and coincidence detection. For example, to decipher how the binding of a few molecules of an attractant to receptors on the surface of a bacterium can make the bacterium move towards the attractant (chemotaxis) will require understanding how cells robustly detect and amplify signals in a noisy environment.
    From molecular to modular cell biology | Nature
  • Life, it’s actually not about just adding up our results. Life is about so much more than this!!! It’s about who we are, and who we become, on the way to these results.
    Your Dad, the Magician by Elina Svitolina | The Players’ Tribune
  • Tom West practices the "Mushroom Theory of Management" – "keeping them in the dark, feeding them shit, and watch them grow." That is, isolating the design team from outside influences and, instead, using the fear of the unknown to motivate the team.
    The_Soul_of_a_New_Machine
  • The combined findings indicate a decrease in PTSD symptoms, reduced depression symptoms, enhanced emotional articulation, increased mental resilience, self-esteem, and positive mental health. The qualitative data support these results, and also add improved emotional connection, increased emotional acknowledgment, and enhanced self-compassion. Based on the combined results of this mixed method design we understand that the TFAT protocol led to a clinically significant reduction in PTSD symptoms and improved mental health, demonstrating effectiveness of AT for trauma in this case. This is the f…
    Effectiveness of Trauma-Focused Art Therapy (TFAT) for psychological trauma: A mixed method single case study - ScienceDirect
  • Harvard St. Commons is a community for ambitious founders with a bias toward action. Historically, our residents have been cracked minds building at the edge of what's possible — across biotech, ecommerce, AI, fintech, and more.
    Harvard St
  • Princeton’s senior survey results are nearly identical to The Crimson’s Senior Survey: about 38 percent of 2023 graduates who were employed took jobs in finance and consulting; adding tech and engineering, the rate is close to 60 percent, compared with 53 percent in 2016, the earliest year for which the data is available
    Why Gen Z College Students Are Seeking Tech and Finance Jobs - The New York Times
  • Nobody sat me down and said, “Julia, you should want to work at McKinsey.” Nobody had to. Harvard doesn’t convince you. It just stands next to you until you start leaning. Information travels through air like pollen. By sophomore spring, I knew the names of firms I had never researched, understood hierarchies I had never studied, wanted things I couldn’t remember deciding to want. That’s the trick. The wanting feels like yours. I caught ambition the way you catch an accent – slowly, then all at once, until your own voice sounds foreign.
    What Harvard (almost) stole from me - Julia Alvarenga
  • At Harvard, success is not something you choose. It’s something you absorb.
    What Harvard (almost) stole from me - Julia Alvarenga
  • It puts a price tag on awe and watches you do the math.
    What Harvard (almost) stole from me - Julia Alvarenga
  • There is a scene in the movie version of Carl Sagan’s book Contact where the main character, an astronomer who has detected the first radio signal from an alien civilization, is being considered for the role of humanity’s representative to meet the aliens. The international panel interviewing her asks, “If you could ask [the aliens] just one question, what would it be?” Her reply is: “I’d ask them, ‘How did you do it? How did you evolve, how did you survive this technological adolescence without destroying yourself?” When I think about where humanity is now with AI—about what we’re on the cusp…
    Dario Amodei — The Adolescence of Technology
  • Gershwin's reputation in this country rises and falls with shifts in the balance of power and prestige between popular and classical music. When pop rules, as it does today, Gershwin is the father of us all. When pop palls, and it may yet again, he is a blot on the musical landscape.
    Misunderstanding Gershwin - The Atlantic
  • If all the procrastinator had left to do was to sharpen some pencils, no force on earth could get him do it. However, the procrastinator can be motivated to do difficult, timely and important tasks, as long as these tasks are a way of not doing something more important.
    Structured Procrastination
  • Harvard is known for being a networking mecca, but this attitude can often spill over from finance events into the dorms. People are commonly used as social capital, a goal to check off from the to-do list. This makes defining relationships between people tricky—is this a friendship or is this a social stepping stone, a transactional interaction that holds little weight, a meal that will never be grabbed?
    The Lonely Side of Harvard
  • I quit my internship at the largest investment bank in Latin America (RIP) to join a bunch of 20-somethings building startups. Why? Because I’m insane. Because "carpe diem" is not just something I go around saying. Because Steve Jobs inspired me to stay hungry (and so did Regina Lin, as she starves her interns) & foolish. Because I won’t settle until I am a part of something that will change the world, forever.
    (99+) Post | Feed | LinkedIn
  • I want to watch Shloe’s movies and I want to see Mark’s musicals and I want to volunteer with Joe’s non-profit and eat at Annie’s restaurant and send my kids to schools Jeff’s reformed and I’m JUST SCARED about this industry that’s taking all my friends and telling them this is the best way for them to be spending their time. Any of their time. Maybe I’m ignorant and idealistic but I just feel like that can’t possibly be true. I feel like we know that. I feel like we can do something really cool to this world. And I fear — at 23, 24, 25 — we might forget.
    Even artichokes have doubts | Yale Daily News
  • That feeling didn’t survive Harvard intact. The machine is very good at what it does. It doesn’t kill your wonder. That would be too obvious. It just makes wonder feel like a luxury you can’t afford. It puts a price tag on awe and watches you do the math.
    What Harvard (almost) stole from me - Julia Alvarenga
  • But I often think about what it felt like to sit in that room, eighteen years old, watching a professor talk about a book he loved with the kind of reverence most people reserve for their gods, their mothers, their dead. I think about the way he held the paperback like it owed him nothing and had given him everything. I think about constantly feeling like the whole world was made of questions worth asking, and that asking them was enough. That asking them was the point.
    What Harvard (almost) stole from me - Julia Alvarenga
  • The snails and their apparent protected status sent me into a spiral of anxiety. I walked with my head down, afraid that one smushed shell would cost me my visa
    To Feel at Home in a New Place, It Helps to Think Like a Snail - The New York Times
  • When she made an egg sandwich on the skillet, she pressed her hands onto the bread as Tara had taught her, to make sure it was cool before she put it into her mouth. She can feel warmth and coolness, but not the more extreme temperatures that would cause anyone else to recoil in pain.
    Ashlyn Blocker, the Girl Who Feels No Pain - The New York Times
  • I fail. A lot. I have little or big failures every day and that’s ok. It takes a lot of trying to get through life, and a lot of failing, too. The Bible even says in James 1:2-4, “My brothers and sisters, be very happy when you are tested in different ways. You know that such testing of your faith produces endurance. Endure until your testing is over. Then you will be mature and complete, and you won’t need anything.” This refers to being tested in faith, and it applies to a lot of kinds of tests, too. Because I went through the failures I did, I learned a lot more than I think I would have ha…
    Taking the L | MIT Admissions
  • He entered academia while dreaming of politics, but didn't find satisfaction in the former or success in the latter. By the time I was born, in 1975, he was drinking too much, smoking too much, and worrying too much. Then he started to run.
    Why I Run. - EBSCO
  • Is math invention or discovery? The answer’s both, but here the harder task is knowing how it switches. So you see, most truths are found with constructs, which in turn are built from truths like chickens and their eggs. One needs to know, should this fact raise concern, that constructs can be daft; just logic’s dregs.
    3Blue1Brown - Math Poetry
  • How could that funny face That seemed to be common place Project you right in to space Without any warning
    Frank Sinatra – Ring-A-Ding Ding Lyrics | Genius Lyrics
  • My mother now is taking her sheers and cutting through live shrimp. When I was a child she peeled each flushed grape until only the pale fleshy bead remained. She placed them onto a plate in one shining mound, deseeded, in front of me. How I sucked and bled the fruit of all their juice, hypnotized in front of the buzz of television in each version of my childhood. I am her daughter. This is certain.
    Love | The Poetry Foundation
  • During a moment when much of modern friendship advice emphasizes trying not to overshare, venting—once treated as a basic expression of closeness—has come to be seen as risky, even impolite, Julie Beck writes. The fear of being “too much” or of “trauma-dumping” has led many people to hold back, Julie notes. Taken too far, this caution risks flattening friendship itself, she warns. Listening to your friends vent can be draining, yes—but it can also build intimacy.
    The Messiness of Friendship - The Atlantic
  • Recently, over multiple late night debates with Julia, we have quite extensively discussed the premise of whether who we become is shaped more by our own abilities and choices, or by perception, circumstance, and birth. While our conversations were entertainingly long and often strayed far from the premise, we kept coming back to this image of people filling the vessels they are placed in. Moving to Canada, for example, was my parents taking an active step to place me in a bigger vessel I could grow into, rather than overflowing in a smaller one. Similarly, Julia heading from Burnaby South to …
    A Month Alone in Toronto— Kevin Jose Thomas
  • The tide ebbs and reveals orange and purple sea stars. I have no theory of radiance, but after rain evaporates off pine needles, the needles glisten.
    At the Equinox | The Poetry Foundation
  • My family would march around under my grandmother's orders. Everyone, including my umma, who didn't cook, would have red rubber gloves that matched the color of the sun-dried red chili flakes.
    Gimjang, and Lockdown - Doobydobap
  • SEQUENCE-BASED PROTEIN MODELS FOR THE PREDICTION OF MUTATIONS ACROSS PRIORITY VIRUSES
    Publications — Debbie Marks Lab
  • writing feels so vulnerable: the inner murmurings of your mind exposed in the transparency of translation
    plight of the oversharer
  • My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!" Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.
    Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley | Poetry Foundation
  • The school itself is somewhat jarring. You don’t know what kids with money think/act like until you’re actually in a room with them. Imposter syndrome assuredly sets in and you need to keep reminding yourself that you deserve to be there. The hardest part for me was starting at such a disadvantage because I didn’t go to a school with the quality of teaching or advanced classes that a lot of other students took for granted. Adjusting to the class difficulty took some time. Most top schools have ‘low income’ groups (GEMS at Stanford) that you can leverage for first hand advice from older student…
    Low Income students of prestige schools like Harvard, MIT, and Oxford, what is it like and How did you get there? : r/AskReddit
  • In 2025, 12 people and 12 tiny decisions changed my life January: I cut a trip to Japan short on a whim to go to SF, where a few amazing humans (Paul Klein IV, Ron Nachum, Theodor Marcu, Michael C., Melisa Tokmak, Philip Bogdanov) re-introduced me to the world of startups. February: Kamryn Ohly and I enrolled in Jim Waldo's CS 262: Distributed Computing, which meant we started pulling all-nighters together. March: Kamryn Ohly and I decided to get coffee and talk about our future lives in big tech, only half joking when we'd wonder if we'd peaked in college. April: Abby Miller sent us a Harvard…
    (99+) Post | Feed | LinkedIn
  • Worked on Photos, Memory Creation, and Apple Intelligence at Apple, selected to demo live to Craig Federighi (CTO of Apple). Been a student-athlete on Harvard Varsity Sailing. Research with Harvard Medical School investigating neurocognitive functions and MRI-based brain structural factors. Co-Directed Harvard Tech for Social Good.
    Grace Li
  • exactly one year ago today I posted my first video online if you ever doubt how far you can get in a year, here’s what 365 days of consistent effort led me to: 0 to 111 videos (not all created equally, some short form, some long, some personal, some public) 0 to 166,723
    mylene mae (@mylenesmind) / X
  • I play the carillon, a keyboard instrument which rings bells often mounted atop a tower. I'm currently an Associate Carillonist at Berkeley's Campanile and a student carillonist at Stanford's Hoover Tower.
    michelle pan
  • send a message to mas863admin at cba.mit.edu with a subject of "fab class application", briefly describing your fabrication background and interest in taking the course, your institutional status, and include a small picture (to help connect names with faces). Send from your you@mit.edu account if you have one. There is no preferred response; each semester a balance is sought between beginner and expert, serious and silly, undergrad and grad, ... .
    fab.cba.mit.edu/classes/MAS.863/file/app.html
  • “How To Make (almost) Anything” (aka 4.140 aka MAS.863 aka 6.943) with Zany Inventor Scientist Neil Gershenfeld.
    How To Make (almost) Anything | MIT Admissions
  • More broadly, writing is one important way I think and make sense of experiences. It is the case, by choice, that my notes, from class notes to todo lists and journal-like entries, are very scattered across mediums and I don’t use a system to preserve or organize them well. This makes me particularly appreciate when I have a(n at least somewhat) polished, easy-to-find, honest record of what and how I was thinking at a previous moment in time.
    What stops me from writing | Kat Huang