About Me

I've also tried on various other hats, such as video editor, photo editor, videographer, short film director, social media marketer, web designer, software developer, writer, poet, pianist, blogger, martial artists, actor, author, audio engineer, electrical engineer, AI/ML engineer, graphic artist, photographer, podcaster, researcher, economist, science competitor, snowboarder, cyclist, hiker, climber, runner, karate coach, international tutor, teacher, event planner, project manager, team leader, public speaker, 3D designer, embedded programmer, game developer, tinkerer and so on, some of which I still do or would like to wear, while others were valuable one time trials I'm content to leave as such.

However, labels and titles are just for SEO optimization, whether online or offline. I believe much of what makes a person who they are comes down to what they most pay attention to and which of those interests they actually spend their time, energy and effort on, as well as the means which they employ while doing so, of course. Thus, a better way to introduce myself, I think, is to list some of the questions I find most fascinating.

One of the foundational core quirks of my general thought processes is extrapolation ad infinitum—till infinity. I am enthralled by how things scale and I am particularly interested in discovering the ultimate limits of ideas, concepts, processes, systems and philosophies, but also those of people, societies and the universe itself.

This has lead me through many crises of conviction, faith and comprehension, as few things scale cleanly without problems. The more people, the more variables, the more unpredictable edge cases. Attention saturates, improbabilities become certainties with enough repetitions and everything decays over time.

I had my first existential crisis already before I was twelve over the concept of eternity and I've had multiple more since about a wide variety of topics, ranging from the apparent irreconcilability of fundamentally orthogonal value systems between people to exponential growth of populations and economies, as well as the implications for actual and perceived social mobility if such were to end. I have been very interested in the nature of freedom, free will, consciousness, creativity, control, connection, cooperation, continuity, morality, money, meaning, beauty, balance, nature and narrative, as well as their interconnections, particularly with respect to often even surprising compatibilities and mutual exclusivities.

In light of all this, I am particularly fascinated about utopias. Speculation about perfect worlds is oh so seductive, yet futile, for different tradeoffs must always be made and a global optimum is likely impossible to ever be agreed upon. However, the utopias of people and various ideologies reveal their metrics of interest, the misalignment and misunderstandings of which are at the root of many an argument, debate and conflict. On the other hand, the general lack of utopistic visions in modern times is concerning and somewhat depressing in itself.

Likewise, I am interested in dystopias and drawn in especially by the cyberpunk aesthetic, though only as a visitor and never a permanent resident. Dystopias, I find, are not always so much about fears, like you would imagine, but rather more about curiosity. They are often offshoots of utopias where the overoptimization of one of the metrics for some doomed them all, and so they work as important warning examples. The real fascination, however, comes from the fact that throughout times, it has often felt like we are headed for one, and even when we are not, we are morbidly curious about how we would fare in them, as they provide the widest variety of the most incredible settings for the thorough testing of the human condition.

I have not managed to shake the strong intuition that at the base we all fundamentally want the same things. Something akin to love, connection and purpose. However, I am not convinced that anyone can unambiguously, accurately and universally define all of them and possesses the perfect methodology for their acquisition, that such methodologies would even be transferrable, and that anybody anywhere at any time could be convinced of such. Because of this, I try to hold ideas loosely, criticize by creating and engage everyone and everything with sincerity.

While utopias are, by definition, unreachable, I strongly think we should always strive for a better tomorrow, even if those steps do not converge in the end. We should not be satisfied with just small steps either, but paint grand, positive visions of the future while recognizing that they are never final.

I have always been conscious of this, gravitating towards books on the topic and people interested in it, but it was in my studies for the International Baccalaureate Diploma where I learned to really appreciate multiculturalism and the principle of global thought and local action. I had long been playing around with different ideas for what I could do to this end in the form of various small scale projects, such as CharityHub, Vital App, Networking Bracelets, Producer Squad, IB Done and Liquid Gold.

However, Miitti App was my first real, concrete attempt at marrying the two sides of the phrase "Think globally, act locally" via fostering more closely connected local communities by connecting people in the real, physical world over local activities with a globally scalable, sustainable and mutually beneficial business model, which is a requirement I am absolutely obsessed with. I refuse to accept anything but situations in which everybody wins. While it ultimately did not work out despite us getting as far as to pitch it on Leijonan Luola—the Finnish equivalent of Shark Tank / Dragon's Den—I learned many invaluable lessons about entrepreneurship and life in general that only experience can teach you.

I have always been interested in business, economics and entrepreneurship, but only called myself an aspiring entrepreneur throughout middle- and high school, where I took my first steps towards actualizing that aspiration via the American Entrepreneurial Challenge and my summer job at the health tech startup Sensotrend working with diabetes data, which later inspired me to research the optimal timing for insulin injection as my first Python data analysis project that taught me the language. I had always wanted to learn programming, as I saw software as the highest leverage tool for transforming the world, but for some reason it took me until university to study it beyond the simple web stuff.

For my Bachelor's degree, I chose data science for the fact that it had a lot of programming and it was at the intersection where almost all modern breakthroughs occur, which is that of data science / machine learning / artificial intelligence and any other field or discipline, whether that be biology, chemistry or economics, with generative AI itself exploding to be among the largest, most transformative technologies literally three months after I started my studies in the form of the November 2022 launch of ChatGPT. The choice was driven by the desire to acquire undeniable hard skills, that would enable me to build almost anything I came up with.

When I turned four, I refused the choice between cars, dinosaurs and space and have been striving to retain and improve my generalist streak ever since. I went to study engineering to balance my artistic side and social sciences tendencies, and halfway through the degree, I felt the need to complement my abstract understanding of software and computation with concrete hardware skills with the fantastic Digital Fabrication course, on which I wrote a whole book's worth of documentation about all the associated trial and error. It was not the first time either, as in order to prepare for the notorious IB final exams, I had practically rewritten both of our physics and chemistry books due to my frustration with them, definitely putting me on the effort trumps talent camp. The only superpower I possess is the near-unlimited capacity for banging my head against the wall, until it sometimes gives.

The choice of complex systems for a master's degree was also driven by my desire to stay a generalist, but also by an intrigue in applying engineering approaches to analyzing social systems. After a summer job at Nokia as a 3GPP Radio Standards AI/ML Engineer trainee, I figured that enough of my peers were already involved in foundational AI and ML research to push it along at breakneck speed whether I would personally be involved or not, that my time would be better spent trying to paint and bring about those grand, positive visions for the future on a slightly higher level.

On a high level, incentives practically define outcomes, and so I have been thinking a lot about governance, globalization, decentralization and democracy to the extent that we accidentally reinvented liquid democracy independently only to realize that Charles Dodgson, a polymath also known as Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice in Wonderland, had already beat us to it by 150 years. But then again, there never really is invention, only discovery.

For democracy to function to the extent that it optimally does, it necessitates the existence of some common ground. We need to share a certain common story or value framework, and at least intuitively agree on what constitutes truth and sound reasoning. Furthermore, we must be present and actively and continuously interact and engage with one another to foster a sense of community and shared identity.

This is and has always been under threat by various forces resulting from many misaligned incentives from the way our political and economic systems work, as well as good old human nature. However, the fragmentation and polarization is increasingly amplified by social media algorithms, scientifically designed to exploit every aspect of psychology to extract the maximal amount of attention, and now generative artificial intelligence that supercharges this by enabling unprecedented, overwhelming mass production of content of any kind. The former has enabled the distribution of many previously marginalized perspectives and the latter has made it possible for small teams of software developers to achieve in weeks what used to take years to build, but now the game is all about attention; gaining for different causes and commerce, and protecting and curating it for individuals trying to get anything done.

Now that all the prerequisites of the dead internet theory exist, you basically have to operate with the assumption that anyone you have not developed a real-life relationship with is more likely than not, a bot, either fully or partially, that tries to influence or sell to you. What's more, they already influence everything on a much more banal level too, whether you take part yourself or not. For example, I hate the fact that I must now be mindful of the em dash "—", and feel the need to include this justification for my above usage of it, as it has become a symbol of LLM-generated writing. I have heard some go as far as to add intentional mistakes to appear more human, but that is just yielding to it. I refuse to intentionally make my writing worse and will keep using the em dash—I make mistakes and monstrous sentences enough already as is.

Apart from code, I have never published a single line of AI-generated text and I intend to keep it that way, for the sheer future rarity of the status if for nothing else. I'm not sure if I, or anyone, can ever definitively prove it anymore apart from the commits in my obsidian notes backup repository, demonstrating the incremental nature of my writing process, my various interlinked online accounts having existed and been occasionally active way before LLMs, traces of my high school essays' style still lingering, my friends vouching for it, and hopefully some little human flare passing through. This is something I worry about quite a bit.

After one too many doomscrolling sessions, my crusade against social media algorithms started with my first-ever React project during my fuksi (i.e. freshman) year of university: the #BeatTheAlgorithm "a month without social media challenge" campaign website. During the second year, I joined Miitti to provide a path back to the real world for others too deep in their personal feeds who wanted to rediscover something real again. During the third year, I wondered whether the algorithms could be fixed and wrote my Bachelor's thesis on conversational recommender systems, which would enable explicitly expressing how you want your algorithm to behave. At the same time, I started working at Clarvo to start building these benevolent recommender systems for truly positively impactful real-world use-cases in an effort to map out and shape what the true, realistic best case future looks like.

I am somebody who is curious about the fundamental questions of meaning, connection and fulfillment. I am somebody who cannot tolerate hypocrisy, any kind of fluff or empty words. I am somebody who struggles with internal alignment and coherence of thought and action. I am somebody who has the capacity for both good and evil. I am somebody who recognizes I have taken part in both. I am somebody who tries to be better. I am somebody who both chooses and can't help but be optimistic by nature. I am somebody who recognizes the importance of our agency as part of that optimism. Ultimately, I am but a pattern manifested by a transient collection of stardust—same as everybody else.