Monadic. 🌯

By Ananth Venkatesh @q9iquantum9innovation

I hack on reproducible systems and study abstract nonsense. This is my website, blog, and internet real estate (subject to land value taxation which I don't pay for). It's purely functional and open source.

In civilizations without monads, dreams dry up, mutation takes the place of purity and the Rustaceans take the place of Hasklars.

—Simon Haskal

Heads up! This site is highly experimental and incomplete. It's slated to replace my old website, which you can view here.

$ whoami

The Ancient Greek playwright Euripides once said: “Every man is like the company he is wont to keep.” Bartosz Milewski continues, “We are defined by our relationships. Nowhere is this more true than in category theory. If we want to single out a particular object in a category, we can only do this by describing its pattern of relationships with other objects (and itself). These relationships are defined by morphisms.”

The analogy is clear—understanding people is akin to understanding the categories that they inhabit. We are defined by the morphisms that connect us to other people and organizations bigger than ourselves. In this spirit, I will answer the question “Who am I?” through an exploration of the relationships that connect me to the world at large.

I'm a member of functor.systems, itself a proper subset of the OpenCompute Laboratory (stylized OCλ). I (pretend to) study mathematics with computer science (course 18-C) at Mass Tech, where I'm a sophomore ('28). There I've been able to work with the Zardini Lab on categorical design theories. I spent my first year in the Experimental Study Group (ESG) and now work as a teaching assistant there. Before that, I helped with the CoronaSurveys project and spent two years leading research into robotic control systems at Team 1280.

$ whereis $(whoami)

That's a monadic bind, by the way. Calling whoami must alter the state of the world to obtain the current user's name. We ignore these side effects and delay evaluation until after the result is piped to whereis. The result of this command, however, is non-deterministic (see below).

I grew up in the East Bay in California. Nowadays I split my time between Danville, Calif. and Cambridge, Mass. The former is the intergalactic headquarters of functor.systems and the latter is the seat of Mass Tech.

Above left: Danville, California
Above right: Cambridge, Massachusetts

$ ls

It turns out organizing my thoughts coherently into a single site proved more complicated than I initially expected. Rather than clutter up the main menu with an assortment of links, I've attempted to come up with a more sensible organization of this site in the explore page.

Most of the other tabs are self-explanatory. About gives a more detailed introduction to who I am and what my current interests are. I update it semi-regularly, and it's a good springboard for a focused exploration of this site. For my contact information, see the contact page.

I also keep a colophon for this site. I realize this is rather unconventional—but I think it's well-motivated given the nature of this site. I also have a history of making these. If you're interested in the technical details involved in putting a project like this together, it will make for a good read. It's continuously updated with the newest developments as I update the underlying site-builder technology. The colophon also contains important credits for relevant design elements, like this site's unique typography.

Finally, this site also serves as a blog for me to philosophize about the universe and its many intricacies. In keeping with the tradition of public intellectualism promoted by prominent thinkers like Bartosz Milewski, John Baez, and the applied category theory community as a whole, it seems that blogging has given us a powerful new tool to spread knowledge. You can find the full record of my blog posts in the archive. It's quite sparse at the moment given that it launched relatively recently, but my hope is that it will grow into a useful repository of knowledge in a few years. Like the rest of this site, it's an interesting experiment that I'll come to learn from in the future.

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