From the Oculus Kickstarter to Pico Project Swan. A decade of extended reality — what the industry got wrong, what it quietly got right, how Ready Player One compares to 2026 reality, and where smart glasses are taking everything next. Written by someone who has been researching and building in this space the whole time.
Felix Kjellberg went from using Bandicam in 2020 to fine-tuning a 32 billion parameter language model on a $41,000 GPU rig in 2026. He beat GPT-4o on a coding benchmark. Here's what he actually did, why the headline is simultaneously accurate and misleading, and what it means that a non-ML person can now do serious ML work at home.
From an Indian perspective. The myths that stop students before they start — CGPA, institution prestige, needing to already know the field. How to cold email, what professors actually want, how to read a paper, and the one thing about research that nobody warns you about. Written from experience, not theory.