Hi there. This is Youwen. I study abstract nonsense and hack on computers at UC Berkeley. Welcome to my corner of the World Wide Web.

Sunrise, parabellum.

I help run functor.systems, a small computing community, and tinker with MIT OpenCompute ⁂ I care about free software. I developed functorOS, an experimental NixOS-based Linux distribution ⁂ I like hacking, and hackathons. I helped organize the 2026 SB Hacks, the headliner hackathon of UC Santa Barbara, and was briefly its Director of Development ⁂ Previously, I was at UC Santa Barbara. I also spent a semester in the CS department at Tsinghua University ⁂ See about for more about myself, or now for what I’m up to right now. Or explore the other pages on this website □

And every science, when we understand it not as an instrument of power and domination but as an adventure in knowledge pursued by our species across the ages, is nothing but this harmony, more or less vast, more or less rich from one epoch to another, which unfurls over the course of generations and centuries, by the delicate counterpoint of all the themes appearing in turn, as if summoned from the void.

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Sep 12, 2026

Consider , the set of all languages decidable by LARPing. Consider the GPT-6 Astra oracle . We posit that , the languages decidable by LARPing equipped with the Astra oracle, is equal to the universal set . That is, there is no limit to the larp.

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B.A. Mathematics, Computer Science
University of California, Berkeley (‘28)
Visiting student, CS department
Tsinghua University (S26)
B.S. Mathematics, Computer Science
University of California, Santa Barbara (cut short)
in BerkeleyCalifornia, USA
near San FranciscoCalifornia, USA
previously in BeijingChina
previously in Santa BarbaraCalifornia, USA
previously near Salt Lake CityUtah, USA
previously in ShanghaiChina
Imagine what we can become.