Hey. I am Sunghyun Cho. I am a Search ML Engineer at TwelveLabs. I studied CS at USC on a Boeing Scholarship and have shipped products at Woowa, Karrot, Grammarly, and Lunit.
I consider myself an accelerationist. Every earthly problem traces back to [not enough energy]{I treat energy as fungible with food, resources, money, and desire}, so humanity's first job is to command more of it. So to speak, an energy version of the [Malthusian trap]{Malthusian trap is a pessimistic theory Thomas Malthus laid out in An Essay on the Principle of Population: population grows geometrically while food grows only arithmetically, so shortage, poverty, and collapse keep recurring.} is encroaching. But traps don't call for a [solution; they call for a breakthrough]{Solutions solve a problem; breakthroughs make it moot. The last Malthusian trap ended not with rationing but with Haber-Bosch.}, and I think fusion is ours. Lately I've been deep in stellarators. A reactor shaped like the Baekje Gilt-bronze Incense Burner would look so badass.
We often overestimate what we can do in a day and underestimate what we can do in a year. I'm also a victim of this. Once you've [built and shipped an app in a single day and watched it hit 230,000 weekly active users]{750,000 visits, 500,000 installs. Then MikeRoweSofted!}, you never quite stop overestimating a day. So lately I keep relearning the value of plans and deadlines. Speed matters not because of time to market but because willpower is the first resource to run out, and you need real metrics before it does.
I've been super into health these days. I never quite got why the rich spend millions on health, but now I do. They've bought everything fate offered except the one thing they can't, a body. So to speak, a person is a carbon computer, and consciousness is the higher-order thing running on top of it. Once you split body from mind, you consider yourself a soul trapped in outdated hardware. The two can't actually be fully separated, so all you can do is take care of the machine. Easier said than done. My own [hardware-maintenance report]{{mini/health}} is embarrassing.
I'm an aggressive early adopter. I pay premiums for something unfinished because I'm buying not the object but a white paper on the makers' philosophy. So to speak, I buy ideas, not products; an insource of bleeding-edge ideas keeps my own thinking sharp. Same for softwares. [For instance, I first tried Notion in 2018]{I mostly remember how slow and buggy it was. It took me two years to come back.}, and I've been on Obsidian since 2022.
I consider myself a humanist. The economy doesn't come first with people slotting into jobs to serve it. So to speak, work gets defined by human things, time, focus, responsibility, cooperation, confidence, stamina; the economy is what falls out of that. Therefore, [just as cities grew to the radius of a one-hour commute]{{0F3111}}, the economy grows to the radius of what a person can do in a day. Technology widens free will, so tasks that used to be too hard get folded into "workable" ones. Therefore, the quiet upside is that people don't actually lose their jobs as technology advances. It creates new jobs for those newly expanded works instead. Technology keeps inventing new goals, new standards, new things to want, and that plasticity of free will is what has been expanding the world all along. Then you might ask, are humans merely puppets? Maybe. But not entirely. Acceleration supplies the power to expand, not the direction. It is us who direct the expansion ourselves. That's why technology acceleration isn't a doomsday machine speeding the old world toward saturation but a way to reach the new one. To me that's the most humanist vision there is.
I strongly reject the idea that AI will eventually "learn" the taste. If AI could catch up that fast, and if taste mattered enough for anyone to chase it, then the big, rich, smart companies would already be shipping tasteful products. They mostly aren't. Outside a handful of firms run by people with real taste, most are still producing human slop. And taste keeps moving. Taste is an endless ritual and intention, not a finished state or goal. You can copy Liquid Glass, but you can't copy the first idea behind it, the reasoning, the discarded versions, the itch its makers felt while refining it, or their instinct for the next alternative. AI's taste will always be a fast follower.
I'm an aesthete. I've loved UI and UX for as long as I can remember, especially the ones with that satisfying, springy feel. On the web it's Vercel and Linear; on iOS it's Zenly 4.0, Airbnb, Luma, Bevel. I'm particularly fond of apps that follow Apple's Human Interface Guidelines closely.
I am an etymologist. Naming and coining them (or just deciding to) is work only a free spirit takes on, and I'm drawn to archaic words and made-up ones. Digging up an old word like [seaflooding]{개부심. a native Korean word for the rain that returns after a lull in the monsoon floods and rinses the leftover silt away; figuratively, to renew something completely} can make my whole day. I coin my own too: an acronym, [Doorknock]{{E84BFC}}; an era notation, [誠鉉]{{E95CAB}}; a neutral job notation for tech founders, [Enginifounder]{{452EB4}}. The irony of naming everything is that I still don't have my [self-bestowed name]{{8A1CBA}}, and the handle anaclumos was [pure accident]{{A798A0}}.
I don't particularly like the Republic of Korea, but I feel a huge responsibility toward my people and their Koreanness. Koreanness is full of wonders nobody really dug into, yet they still feel underdeveloped. That's because it never got ruminated enough. Take Greco-Roman culture: the actual BC version would look crude to modern eyes. It reads as high culture now only because sixteenth-century Florence spent centuries reworking those raw materials into something refined. Every culture starts out cringeworthy. Judging unruminated Koreanness by Hollywood's bar is like grading a 5yo's scribble against an art-school exams. Who knows that 5yo would grow up to be the next Picasso? I've named this reworking the [Neo-Korean Renaissance]{{A39EC8}}.
I used to invest super seriously. I ran my [own quant engine]{{BEC9CB}}, and in 2024 I briefly topped the weekly Toss trading leaderboard twice (Korea's Robinhood). These days the flood of information and the curse of knowledge have worn me down, so I just dollar-cost average into a few companies I like. A quirk: I also collect old currency and bonds. [Collecting seems to run in the family]{{27E083}}. There's no grand plan. I just love holding a physical piece of someone's debt from back when they towered over everyone. My latest is a 1950s Soviet bond.
I think games might be the only way out of the concentration drought. Console games especially, the ones that ask for stamina and focus over long stretches, feel like literature to me. If the novel was the literature of the 19th century and film the literature of the 20th, [games are the literature of the 21st]{{41F737}}. Really savoring a good one is both a skill and a privilege. My favorites: Ghost of Tsushima, Death Stranding 1 & 2, Detroit: Become Human, Splatoon 3, Super Mario Odyssey and Super Mario Bros. Wonder, SANABI, The Last of Us 1 (& 2, and honestly, 2 was fine for me), and Spider-Man 1 & 2. But the number one of my whole life is the Rhythm Heaven & Rhythm Tengoku series!
I aspire the new frontiers that computer science keeps opening. But I know the same technology can be turned to harm and eat away at what makes us human, and knowing that, I still fall into digital media from time to time. Some ask how a man who makes his living off computers can be wary of software, and the answer is that it took me years to separate "I like software" from "I like software, no matter what." Endorsing nuclear power isn't the same as endorsing the destructive fury of the atomic bomb. Even so, I've decided full independence from the internet is basically impossible for someone in this line of work, so I keep experimenting. In 2019 I carried a 3GS on iOS 6; in 2026, an SE1 on iOS 16; I've tried the Minimal Phone, the Sidephone, the Light Phone. Each one comes up short in its own way. A tool must disappear, but a dumbphone just adds one more. I still need to sit with that.
The world is short on selves. At fourteen I decided that individuality, creativity, and dreams had to be walled off and protected, and of the three, individuality is where everything starts. I prefer the word "color" to "individuality," and most of my color comes down to what I like. We all become what we like in the end. I treated it as survival: without individuality, the metaphor called "me" is as good as dead. I think I've mostly figured out who I am by now. But the world moved on. What matters isn't that information exists, it's that something real shows up in the world. So I started [wishing]{That wish, written down in 2021, is the site you're reading right now.} this "me" could become something physical, something you could actually reach. Anyway, it's frighteningly easy to drift along with no resistance. You do things because others do, watch what others watch, do what others say you have to. It happens more than you'd think, and the second you ask "why," there's no answer. To find one you have to know what makes you you, and that you-ness is fainter than the sound of a midsummer breeze. So the self must be [excavated]{A self forms when the shabbiest little anecdotes get rediscovered and deified.}. Individuality isn't handed to you. Only by noticing, recording, and studying yourself do you catch it: huh, so I like this? At some point I decided to invest in that without reservation, to express whatever I love intensely and without a shred of shame. The reward was my favorite line: "this is so you lmao."
My interest in accessibility and internationalization is close to an obsession, for two reasons. First, living in the US, I kept hitting walls whenever I tried to reach local culture and media. Watching brilliant Korean friends lose chances to a language barrier, I realized those barriers become a kind of discrimination whether anyone means them to or not. Second, a product that handles a11y and i18n well tends to be the more careful, thorough, well-built one, because nobody gets to that work until everything else has already cleared a high bar. It's like the fastest way to gauge a product's exquisiteness.
I'm a very extroverted person. Or I was. I still love talking with smart people, and I like being the least capable one in the room. Someday I want to build something that wins on real quality instead of loud marketing or bravado. That's why I keep my role models close: Jensen Huang's persistence, Lisa Su's turnaround leadership, and Guillermo Rauch's pioneering streak.
I want to be the Medici of science and technology. In the wreckage after the Black Death, as a little hope started to stir, the Medici backed brilliant people and [seaflooded]{The Renaissance was born from ashes, not from peace and prosperity. It's my favorite moment in all of history.} a whole industry of art. What moved me is the idea behind it: that you can move exceptional people to build a better future. So I decided to be one of those people and build it with them. The closest thing to the House of Medici today, I think, is a genuinely good company. I mean to turn my daydreams real, lay the road as I walk it, and grow an ecosystem where people can chase new adventures as far as they want. The most beautiful future blooms from present pain.
