Jerry Liu

Strong Relationships, Loosely Held

Sun, 28 Jun 2026 16:32:47 -0400

The best relationships in my life are seldom the longest ones.

One of my best friends Carolina entered my life by storm, a whirlwind of entrepreneurship and road trips in France during the summer of ‘16, topped off with some trauma bonding during the attack in Nice.

As I traveled the world the rest of that year, we’d end up calling every day; I thought of her as my remote traveling companion. But then I started working in earnest in San Francisco, and she started a serious relationship, and just like that we barely chatted for five years. Until we had a mutual friend Ameera pass away, and we touched base again. After all that time the closeness and goodwill never went away. I went to Valencia and hung out with her for a while, and once again we were the best of friends. It’s not the same youthful exuberant friendship, but a deeper closeness, and I would trust her to pick me up from the airport or help out if I’m ever in trouble.

Emotional Bids and Other Neurodivergent Learnings

Sun, 01 Mar 2026 01:56:12 -0700

Well, 2026 has just started and my autistic ass has already learned a few new social patterns. Had some truly surprising revelations and thought I’d share for fellow neurodivergents who also need to consciously and explicitly think about social conventions.

1. Emotional Bids

I was today years old when I learned that not everyone takes everything literally.

I know it sounds like a joke, but like, only a little bit.

I was in a conversation with a friend, and it got heated, and she said,

Don’t you remember X about me?

And I’m like no, I don’t remember X. But I do remember A, B, C, D, E, F, G.

And in my mind, that’s evidence, that’s me proving I did remember most of the stuff we talk about.

It may surprise you to learn that my brag about the capacity of my memory did not assuage her yelling at me; in fact it made it worse.

What I didn’t realize was that she wasn’t asking a factual question. She was making what’s called an emotional bid: a bid for affection, reassurance, alignment. What she was really asking was:

Do I matter to you?

And specifically the request is

I want to know that I do matter to you.

In that frame, whether I remembered X was essentially irrelevant.

About Me

Fri, 16 Jan 2026 00:07:10 -0500

Hi, I’m Jerry. Sometimes I write software, but mostly I just think about stuff. Sometimes I write my thoughts here. I’m always open to conversations, about anything. I’d love to learn what you’re interested in, truly 100% I promise, so hit me up! My gmail is personjerry@ Boring Stuff For my day job, I lead the AI engineering team at Numeral. Btw we’re hiring! I also mentor and consult for mid-size companies on AI-related strategy, product direction, and engineering processes.

The AI-Scalable Startup

Fri, 02 Jan 2026 23:09:58 -0500

When I joined my first startup after leaving a big tech company, I was excited to move fast. No bureaucracy, no committees, just ship code and grow.

On my second day, I pushed some code to unblock fast experimentation for an upcoming growth sprint. I proposed a change that let us safely roll out new React Native builds via CodePush to a subset of users, without waiting on full App Store releases.

The response came back from a senior engineer: “This is going to orphan old App Store installs. Did you learn about our release processes?”

I looked for the relevant docs. There weren’t any.

They continued: “There were a lot of decisions made to get us to this point, it’s not a vanilla CodePush setup.”

I asked where those decisions were documented. Slack threads? A design doc? Pull requests? There was nothing, just institutional memory.

Six Big Bets

Sun, 14 Dec 2025 13:03:06 -0500

You don’t get to take unlimited big bets in a single lifetime. You get a small number of windows where risk tolerance, energy, capital, and conviction align.

In The Black Swan Nassim Taleb frames this as asymmetric exposure to unlimited upside with limited downside. And startups are one of the clearest modern mechanisms for that kind of asymmetry. But what’s often missed is that these opportunities are finite. You can’t swing endlessly. Most of life is spent accumulating the resources—knowledge, capital, relationships—that make the next swing possible.

What follows are six moments where those resources briefly line up.

Manhattan Winter

Sat, 15 Nov 2025 02:31:42 -0500

I thought I was cool Walking to Equinox Soho In my Canada Goose At 0 degrees in the Manhattan Winter Only for my panache to crumple instantly As a pleasant cigarette smoke wafted into my nose From a nameless dark man In a thrifted French beret And cheap leather jacket Eclipsing me like I was nothing As he read Poe out of a hardback Draped on the ground Over the nondescript metal stairs

Understanding Relationships

Sun, 19 Oct 2025 21:05:18 -0400

I’ve been chatting with a few female friends about dating.

Dating in New York, they say, feels like every guy operates with the emotional depth of a vending machine: Insert coin, select option A (situationship) or B (serious), dispense relationship if available.

Meanwhile, I’ve had conversations with guys who brag about “only doing long-term relationships” as if it’s a personality trait, a mark of maturity, and “situationships” are beneath them. There’s some cognitive dissonance between these two observations, and it got me thinking about how I understood relationships when I was younger, and how I suspect many men still do.

I think for a lot of men their understanding of relationships stops developing shortly after high school.

Rice Field

Wed, 17 Sep 2025 17:28:31 -0400

Reverberations: Waves flooding a hollow trunk floating in a rice field. 1 The husk splits, roots finally spreading into soil I’ve been taught to reject, for it was, after all, beneath me. How hard it is to support yourself with both feet off the ground. I am bamboo now- hungry for growth, nourished by the music of both earths that claimed I didn’t belong. Eyes open to the melody I’d always been:

Self-Reflection at Thirty

Mon, 15 Sep 2025 01:03:25 -0400

Thirty years, the maven, mind’s eye, a Raven. Confidence awaken, unleashed roars the Kraken. Castle becomes a haven, banished the Phantom, craven. Moves made bold, brazen, The Lion’s heart, emblazon. // 30 Kingdom yet lays hidden premonitions surge unbidden Mountainous doubts arisen, precipitous self-prison. Steps inexorably quicken, calloused skin must thicken. Royal writs, inevitably written, promised Throne I sit in. // 60

Unread Books

Thu, 19 Jun 2025 17:19:22 -0400

The Japanese have a word for it: tsundoku. It means acquiring books and letting them pile up unread.

I do this constantly myself, at times unhappy for being wasteful, but there was part of me that loved it. Having the books on my shelf signals something positive and meaningful to me. So I asked myself, why am I ok with buying books I won’t read when the internet has everything?

Well, the internet is infinite, which is why of course everyone that has a cell phone is imminently informed on all topics all the time. Oh, is that not true?

I think the realization became clear when one day I watched a senior employee in action versus a junior. The junior didn’t even know what to search for.

There is a huge difference between known unknowns and unknown unknowns.

You Are the AGI

Wed, 11 Jun 2025 05:05:03 -0400

(For context: AGI stands for Artificial General Intelligence, which means an AI that matches or exceeds human-level reasoning across all cognitive tasks, rather than specific tasks like chess. The common disposition in tech is that it does not yet exist, and debate whether if/when it will exist and what the ramifications will be)

You exist.

You’re not omnipotent or omniscient, merely a sovereign agent of high influence, and you have to interface with 8 billion unpredictable agents.

You’re self-aware, observe yourself and the world, and you’re highly efficient at optimizing.

You understand humanity and social systems insofar as they understand themselves with pre-existing conditions, and you can watch and learn iteratively, but they have never interacted with something like you before.

What’s your move?

Life and Insecurities

Sat, 07 Jun 2025 18:56:33 -0400

In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except that life comes with insecurities.

Insecurity is a near-universal human condition.

Ironically, people who appear most confident often turn out to be driven by the deepest insecurities. They may dominate conversations, make grand pronouncements, or display what looks like pride. In reality this betrays a defense mechanism against a sensitive area in themselves that they have yet to address.

This suggests that insecurity works differently than most people think. It’s not simply about lacking confidence or self-esteem. There’s a more specific mechanism at play that needs to be understood in order to move past the platitudes of “Just be yourself” or “Fake it until you make it”.

Einstein, Hawking, and Tao

Thu, 29 May 2025 03:08:32 -0400

AI tech era— Engineers clambering to deprecate themselves. Billboards peek from snow, promising the future, now— Yet progress, glacial. My pocket is filled with Einstein, Hawking, and Tao; My purse is empty. Discuss on Hacker News

The Zombie

Mon, 05 May 2025 22:12:19 -0400

The zombie wakes Begrudgingly leaving its bed Bindings falling away Dirt seeping from his eyes As he recaptures the art Of setting one bony foot after the other Stumbling past the doorway with a groan Down into the catacombs Where lies his Treasure The Elixir in the Holy Grail His bare minimum consciousness Delivers him to unto the sealed shelf And he rips open the jail of his Ambrosia A juxtaposition against the tenderness

Days in the Bay

Thu, 24 Apr 2025 00:54:30 -0700

Tech craze, Zuck pays. New space, house Hayes. Buy vase, few Ks. Partays, loud bass. Work days, bus chase. Delays, long face. Thick haze, cold Mays. Years’ daze, fast pace. Lone gaze, sad phase. “Need praise,” shrink says. Replace old ways. Mom stays, embrace. Her Grace, allays. Her love, always.

Cheap Thrills

Mon, 10 Mar 2025 02:32:23 -0400

The doctor, the entrepreneur, the engineer, and the ghost sit in a rented red Fiat endlessly driving from Nice to the winding bends of the Alps. Cheap Thrills from cheap speakers echoes in the crisp mountain air, but our ears register only the sound of youthful invincibility and infinite potential. Every year I find myself pulled back into that tiny car in my memory and I think, It must have been a hot summer,

Summer in Portugal

Sat, 01 Mar 2025 04:03:11 -0500

I followed every coefficient backpropagated every label but for all the good of ten million data points and a thousand machines I taught to learn how humans “behave” I myself never learned why she changed her mind about her love for me on the coldest sunny day that summer in Portugal

He Writes

Sat, 01 Mar 2025 03:48:33 -0500

on days she sleeps my muse i light a candle and imagine the wisps that billow in reverse! coalescing into the vein in my forehead; it pulses and carries mango coconut -scented ideas to me.

Google's Lost Moonshots

Sun, 15 Dec 2024 16:10:11 -0500

After 6 years of consulting and startup adventures, I’ve been trying to get back into big tech. While browsing Reddit and Blind to get a pulse of FAANG nowadays, I’ve noticed something fascinating: Google, the company that defined “moonshots” in Silicon Valley, no longer commands the extreme prestige it once did.

Moonshots

Google’s still a great company, but once upon a time, Google was defining the future. They didn’t just build products - they invented the language we used to talk about innovation. In that period, “moonshots,” “10x thinking,” and even their slogan “don’t be evil” were legendary, at least in my eyes and those of my peers aspiring to go into computer science. I don’t think they were just marketing; I like to imagine they were genuine artifacts of a culture that believed in doing massive, world-changing things. I know that’s an idealized version of them, but it was easy to believe when you’d hear conversations about the tiers of their free food, silly hats, and even slides in their offices, all in contrast to the boring desk jobs we’d come to imagine for the typical white-collar worker.

Borderless Is Inevitable

Mon, 08 Jul 2024 20:52:54 -0400

The world is shrinking, and some people are upset. Today I read on article on Hacker News “What does a world without Airbnb look like?” which talks about the negative sentiment against long-term tourists in Barcelona, and it corroborated the discussion I saw on the Digital Nomad subreddit yesterday “Cancel Barcelona Trip?”.

Mobility

When I was a kid, my family moved from China to Canada. The ease of it all seemed normal to me. Make a life in a new country? No big deal. As I grew up, I realized this wasn’t far from the truth for most of the developed world. If you’re in a Western country and dead set on becoming a citizen of another, is it really that hard? Not really.

This is the world we created after World War II. We asked for peace and open borders. Now we’re surprised when people use them?

Use Your Potions and Scrolls

Tue, 16 Apr 2024 19:21:08 -0400

I find that when I play RPG games, I often hoard single-use items like potions and scrolls, saving them for some future critical moment. I finish games like Skyrim with a backpack full of unspent resources, reserved for a crisis that never actually arrives. What’s the point, then, of all these items?

Just like I save items in games, in real life I too am reluctant to ask for favors or promote my own projects. (Sometimes I even save all my favourite treats and I never eat the last one). I treated these social and professional resources as if they were single-use “magical items”, not to be wasted but reserved for some important-yet-undefined future magnum opus event.

Recently I played Baldur’s Gate 3 and I decided to try something new: I would actually gasp use my items as needed, as they were intended, without undue reservation. Not only was it actually fun to use my fireball scrolls and blow stuff up, but I also discovered new layers and hidden quests. For instance, using a ‘Speak with the Dead’ scroll on a certain suspicious corpse unveiled a questline I would have otherwise missed.

How to Talk to Your Date versus Your Customer

Wed, 14 Feb 2024 16:48:14 -0500

Introduction

When I was younger, I thought dating was primarily about “impressing” someone enough that they would somehow find you attractive. After discussing this with my therapist, I now understand that my lack of self-confidence led me to feel like I had to “deceive” others to be liked because I didn’t like myself. Thus, inauthenticity.

That line of thinking and mindset led me to be single for a long time, and since then I’ve always paid attention to how I communicate and how I might communicate better. Coming from a nerdy, introverted, engineering background, it has taken me some time to reach my somewhat adequate level of socialization, but I’m enthusiastic to inform the reader that a psychologist friend recently dubbed me “almost certainly not autistic” 😎👍

No More Code Monkeys

Tue, 29 Aug 2023 01:57:11 -0700

In the fast-paced world of software engineering, an industry characterized by an average tenure between 1-2 years¹, the notion of seniority has always been somewhat fluid. It is an environment where you’re expected to go from “new grad” to “senior” within 36 months, which presents a pace much faster than in most other professions. But this swift movement through ranks, and perhaps the structure of seniority itself, faces disruption at the hands of emerging technologies, namely Language Learning Models (LLMs) like Copilot and ChatGPT.

The Changing Dynamics of Workflow

To understand the seismic shift that’s underway, you only need ask the seasoned engineers in your team: has Copilot or ChatGPT had an impact on their workflow? Anecdotal evidence² will tell you that in a vast majority of cases, these tools have indeed been game-changing, despite the shaky early criticisms of Copilot. LLMs have the potential to churn out low-level code, provide debugging insights, and even advise on high-level architecture, amplifying productivity in an unprecedented way.

The immediate repercussion is a trend toward hiring fewer interns and junior engineers. In a world where an LLM can provide most of the heavy lifting and augment the efforts of a mid-level or senior engineer so effectively, the traditional utility of the junior engineer as a “code monkey” diminishes.

Therefore, as a young engineer you may be worried about your career prospects, especially considering the spate of recent layoffs in big tech companies.³ ⁴ ⁵

How Naming Shapes Our Conversations

Sat, 08 Jul 2023 20:13:04 -0400

At dinner the other day my Chinese dad brought up whether English had a term for the Chinese word 鲜. In fact, there is: umami. But it’s not a word common for English learners, and I think even native speakers may not use the word frequently or have encountered it at all, unless they have an interest in cooking.

The word itself, as you may be able to tell, is loaned from Japanese, which leads me to speculate that it wasn’t a concept that anglophones thought much of until more recent times.

But does that mean the taste didn’t exist? Presumably those taste buds were there the whole time. And yet, before I knew of the word umami I would kinda just round to the nearest concept, approximately “saltiness” or “savoriness”, and my understanding is that others do the same.

But that’s less than ideal.

Fish are very umami and salty, but a food doesn't have to be both

Why Does Creation Happen in Silence?

Mon, 20 Feb 2023 12:43:10 -0600

This morning I read Creation happens in silence, a short and sweet blog post about how the vital moments of the creative process happens in silence, and often in isolation.

I think there are advantages to sharing your work as quickly as possible, but I agree that the initial synthesis should be done alone with one’s thoughts.

Procrastinators like me often don’t realize the importance of this space and may not understand why it’s so hard to get started. The reason why we need this tranquility to begin the process is because the first steps are messy and weak. You see, procrastinators are perfectionists who see this grand perfect vision, and the first draft never lives up that expectation. ¹

But you can’t get started without making a first, ugly move, and so you just get stuck.

ChatGPT Pro Gamer Tip

Mon, 30 Jan 2023 03:16:03 -0500

So if you know me, you know I love self-help books and I collect too many and don’t read enough of them (as they’re overfilled with anecdotes and only a few actual points). Also I keep finding new ones I’m interested in.

Well, ChatGPT solves this problem. You can ask it for a summary of a book that you don’t have any access to, and it will miraculously generate the contents for you. And that’s with as much detail, in whatever format. For example:

Thanks again, ChatGPT!

Is AI Better Suited for Art or Engineering?

Wed, 25 Jan 2023 16:52:08 -0500

ChatGPT is super hot right now, and its two biggest uses are to generate art and to generate code.

Which astounds me, because while I enjoy the occasional AI portrait or landscape, I wouldn’t trust the code my interns wrote much less a black box AI system.

Despite the flaws, probably safer than an AI-built bridge

3 Tips for Navigating the Startup Journey: Lessons Learned from a Former Facebook Engineer

Wed, 18 Jan 2023 20:50:20 -0500

I started my career as an engineer at Facebook before leaving to build a startup. Transitioning from a well-defined engineering individual contributor role to a nebulous startup leadership role meant a lot of falling on my face and a lot of lessons learned.

Here are 3 tips to keep in mind if you’re starting on this journey and want to fail less than I did.

1. Focus on What Matters by Zooming Out

In every context, it’s important to not get stuck on unimportant details.

When building an early stage startup your time is one of the few resources you can spend, so you better be spending it wisely.

The Process Is the Goal

Sun, 01 Jan 2023 01:48:31 -0500

It’s January 1st 2023, so I imagine everyone is making their New Years’ Resolutions. I want to talk about setting these goals and how it helps us.

I recently read a blog article titled The Power of Starting Again, which talks about the invigoration of restarting the new year with a clean slate. I appreciate the sentiment of encouraging action, but I think the reasoning is off.

Specifically, I’d like us to not focus as hard on the goals themselves.

I Miss MSN Statuses

Mon, 05 Dec 2022 16:43:23 -0100

Anyone else remember setting their status on MSN Messenger before Facebook took over?

Everyone was on that platform at the time, and if you were online you were expected to reply instantly. Crazy times.

For your status you’d usually just write what you were doing, or passive-aggressively signal that you were mad at someone. Definitely fun as an adolescent.

How to Explain Pointers to Normies

Sun, 16 Oct 2022 18:19:56 +0200

Nobody has ever asked me what a pointer is IRL, but here’s what I would say if they did.

Good Conversations Have Lots of Doorknobs

Sun, 21 Aug 2022 21:50:19 +0300

Link to article. My thoughts below.

This is an article by a psychologist relating improv techniques to conversational patterns.

The piece is interesting because it explores some archetypes of people in conversation, how we might conceptualize what we’re doing in conversations, and how we might improve our conversational skills to bring out the best in each other.

Quote:

Givers think that conversations unfold as a series of invitations; takers think conversations unfold as a series of declarations. When giver meets giver or taker meets taker, all is well. When giver meets taker, however, giver gives, taker takes, and giver gets resentful (“Why won’t he ask me a single question?”) while taker has a lovely time (“She must really think I’m interesting!”) or gets annoyed (“My job is so boring, why does she keep asking me about it?”).

Blogging as Structured Thinking

Thu, 18 Aug 2022 05:09:08 +0300

When’s the last time you just sat down and thought about stuff?

For me, it’s not a regular habit, but I think it should be, and I think formalizing it as “blogging” is the way to make it happen.

While it could be just a me-problem, I suspect in the advent of the Instagram and TikTok eras I’m not the only one constantly on a media-powered serotonin high.

Early Stage Product Questions

Fri, 01 Apr 2022 11:26:26 +0200

Who What When Where Why and How - A Short Silicon Valley Poem

The CEO looks at the market conditions to identify a problem that a user segment has.

Consumes: when, where

Answers: who, why

Loss, Grief, Sadness

Sat, 19 Feb 2022 04:15:24 +0200

Link to original comment on Reddit. Quoted in full below.

Alright, here goes. I’m old. What that means is that I’ve survived (so far) and a lot of people I’ve known and loved did not. I’ve lost friends, best friends, acquaintances, co-workers, grandparents, mom, relatives, teachers, mentors, students, neighbors, and a host of other folks. I have no children, and I can’t imagine the pain it must be to lose a child. But here’s my two cents.

I wish I could say you get used to people dying. I never did. I don’t want to. It tears a hole through me whenever somebody I love dies, no matter the circumstances. But I don’t want it to “not matter”. I don’t want it to be something that just passes. My scars are a testament to the love and the relationship that I had for and with that person. And if the scar is deep, so was the love. So be it. Scars are a testament to life. Scars are a testament that I can love deeply and live deeply and be cut, or even gouged, and that I can heal and continue to live and continue to love. And the scar tissue is stronger than the original flesh ever was. Scars are a testament to life. Scars are only ugly to people who can’t see.

As for grief, you’ll find it comes in waves. When the ship is first wrecked, you’re drowning, with wreckage all around you. Everything floating around you reminds you of the beauty and the magnificence of the ship that was, and is no more. And all you can do is float. You find some piece of the wreckage and you hang on for a while. Maybe it’s some physical thing. Maybe it’s a happy memory or a photograph. Maybe it’s a person who is also floating. For a while, all you can do is float. Stay alive.

The Future Historians of Silicon Valley

Fri, 22 Oct 2021 03:25:57 -0400

One of the most common university majors for past presidents is History. In fact, students of history find their way into some of the most “influential” professions, with careers in politics, policy-making, and law.

Those who study history learn of the decisions that were made in the past, the reasoning behind them, and the results thereafter. Thus those who study history might have a better understanding of policies that they are working on, the options available to them, and the potential consequences.

Although this kind of history-based work sits firmly in the humanities, it’s not all that different from what we do here in Silicon Valley.

Lists of Startup Tools Are Not Useful

Sun, 03 Oct 2021 00:23:05 -0400

There’s a common trend among companies, blogs, and even Github repositories to create a list of “tools” for startups. Here’s a startup built on that premise: Startup Stash. Here’s a Medium article: 400 Free Resources And Tools For Entrepreneurs, Freelancers and Startups. Here’s a Github: Awesome Startup. Here’s a VC resources page: Antler Toolbox.

I too love being overwhelmed with options.

When I saw the first of these appear, I think it was a list on GitHub, it was pretty cool and I even bookmarked the site. But by now, these resource lists are becoming incredibly useless and boring.

Why Video Games Aren't Art

Fri, 24 Sep 2021 19:55:14 -0400

I play a fair amount of video games, including emotional, aesthetic games like Florence and complex, open games like Dwarf Fortress. Over the years there are periodically discussions about whether video games are art. For example, here are articles from Time and London Review of Books on the subject.

These discussions tend to ask about the aesthetic and entertainment values of the medium, trying to address the question of what exactly makes art, art. But to peel back the layer of indirection, art at its core is anything that is culture; It is a shared experience.

And interestingly, that’s what disqualifies video games.

On OpenAI Shutting Down Projects

Wed, 15 Sep 2021 16:29:45 -0400

OpenAI recently shut down one of their clients’ chatbot projects and this was discussed on Hacker News with plenty of arguments on both sides. I’m of the opinion that we should default to be on the side of OpenAI for this one.