Who is Miles

I am 19 and live in NYC. I am currently learning how to build semiconductors and integrated circuits as fast as I can. I like to run and do other exercises like rowing or lifting weights sometimes too. I am learning some physics, math, and theoretical computer science.

In approximate chronological order, I have:

• Conceptualized and created a tree that grows cheese
• Architected and developed block towers much taller than myself
• Built a bedside table with some help
• Attempted to build a boat
• Moved to Singapore
• Wondered how a computer works and messed around with logic gates on an iPad app
• Made a gravity-defying paperclip with string and a magnet
• Made an electric motor
• Learned a little about how to code
• Moved back to NY from Singapore
• Read the book "But How Do It Know" to learn how a computer works
• Learned what Turing completeness means from a video
• Made a passive PCB and coded an Arduino BLE microcontroller for a very custom mechanical keyboard
• Made a 32-bit adder out of logic gates on a bigger iPad with a nicer app
• Tried to build some walkie-talkies (my friend Wyatt will do a better job)
• Started running a lot
• Made lots of good friends
• NOLS AKX-4
• Worked at Voyant Photonics during the summer doing some very cool optical and electronic component testing, writing some software, and generally helping out
• Ran a mile in 4 minutes and 45 seconds
• Tried to teach a math course about algebraic thinking to kids (no one scanned my QR code to sign up and actively recruiting people proved to be difficult)
• Worked at Voyant again
• Ran the Van Cortlandt Park 4k cross-country course in 13 minutes and 59.7 seconds
• Learned some Verilog and submitted a design for a cell of John Conway's Game of Life onto the Google-sponsored GFMPW-0 in 5 days (didn't get selected to be manufactured)
• Ran in the NY cross-country state meet
• Applied to Deep Springs (the essay prompts and things I wrote for both rounds can be found here, don't worry my views on political economy and epistemology have improved since (the former more than the latter))
• Got into Deep Springs (exciting!)
• Learned about ML audio compression techniques specifically those in Lyra v2 (these days these algos are way cooler again my friend Wyatt has got it under control)
• Graduated high school
• Started at Deep Springs
• Designed a totally asynchronous cortical mini column with leaky integrate-and-fire neuron models in digital logic with Verilog. After 3 weeks of working many hours a day on this hoping to get it onto GFMPW-1 (what would ultimately be the last Google-sponsored tapeout), I just missed the submission deadline due to some syntactical misunderstandings about how to implement bidirectional in/out ports in Verilog. This was very sad :(
• Dropped out of Deep Springs after finishing my first year
• Worked for a friend building software infrastructure used to experiment with automatic differentiation-enabled ultrasound reconstruction algorithms
• Built a very cool site for turning unstructured or poorly structured documents, webpages, and images with text in them into very natural-sounding narrations. This project got ditched because the Eleven Labs reader app dropped in my last couple of weeks of development and it is nearly as good and much more free than what I was making
• Printed images and text at a 750nm raster size using the photolithography machines at Columbia Nano Initiative
• Now I am doing the stuff it says at the top