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I'm Miara Sung, a Korean/American philosopher living in Amsterdam. I wash dishes for a living. I think about langauge, racial capitalism, and the divine.

Previously, I was a software engineer at Microsoft. I also did social currency research with a grant from Ethereum people. After that, I served as CTO of a Korean startup writing software to translate webnovels automatically.

At Microsoft, I was in the Windows Systems and Delivery (WSD) team as an intern, then in the Microsoft Search, Assistant and Intelligence (MSAI) team. In WSD, I worked on Windows internals, building a tool that computes disk drive metadata. I used dskmgr a lot and asked lots of questions about IOCTLs. I also wrote a letter to the Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer which went somewhat viral in internal emails, the intern Slack channel, and Blind, mostly of comments from white people who were mad at me. In MSAI, I worked on autosuggest functions on Microsoft Office products, and later on building the assistant you could talk to in natural language to do things. This was in 2018-2020; the technology now seems ancient, and is obsolete, with the rise of LLMs, and my former team is now managing Copilot.

After Microsoft, I worked on blockchain research for a bit and briefly ran a consulting firm where I took payments in my own currency. As my own currency wasn't accepted by my landlord, I paid rent through an Independent Ethvestigator Program grant, sponsored by Vlad Zamfir. I mainly studied social currency, or the idea that people could simply print their own money and spawn their own economy. The idea led to the rise of SocialFi, but I wasn't very happy about the culture and I left blockchain for good.

Then I went through a period of, let's say, doing street performance art. In one such performance, I went to an ATM. The ATM next to mine was being used by a family. At my ATM, in deliberately large motions, I entered my PIN code multiple times. Then I walked away from the ATM, pretended to sneeze, and dropped my card. The next day, I found a few uses of my card at the grocery store, the gas station, and so on. I locked my card after about a week and a thousand dollars. After that, I donated all my money, around $200k, and took out $80k in credit card loans to donate to random people I met on Twitter, friends of friends, who were facing homelessness, needed money for a funeral, for college, and so on. I didn't pay rent and donated that money instead. I was homeless for some time, though not because I was evicted, before my mom brought me to Korea.

In Korea, I briefly thought of becoming a professional interpretor/translator. I was especially interested in translating literature. I matriculated at the Hankuk University of Foreign Studies for their interpretation and translation master's program, but I dropped out immediately and worked on Toonyz, a webnovel platform powered by AI translation and AI generated media. I was practically forced at gunpoint to work here and while I'm somewhat proud of the AI translation algorithm I built, I was never a fan of the AI generated media thing. Working on Toonyz made me intimately familiar with LLMs, their limitations and strenghts, and I was left with a lasting impression that, with some engineering tweaks, their translation is freakishly good, enough to translate literature. I left Toonyz to come to Amsterdam, where I currently work as a cook.

I've lived in Seoul, Bloomington, IN, Allendale, NJ, Carrollton, GA, Berkeley, Seattle and New York. I was born in Seoul, went to kindergarten in Bloomington, went to elementary back in Seoul, middle school in Allendale, and high school in Georgia. Then I went to UC Berkeley, where I studied computer science and enough classes to construe a broadly philosophy-linguistics-anthropology-poetry major.

I've done poetry readings at Seattle Lit Crawl, Oakland EM Wolfman, New Orleans, and was invited to read at Hugo House. I'm a member of Kundiman PNW, though I'm not very active these days. My poetry has appeared on a number of magazines, and is forthcoming in Abolishing Capitalist Totality, a collection by Archive Books.

I also read and write on some philosophical issues, cultural theory, that kind of thing. At Berkeley, I founded Philosophy of Computation at Berkeley and taught a course on philosophy of computation. My most recent publication is Acceleration and Time, where I build on Fred Moten to advance a theory of the universal machine as an aesthetic of blackness. Recently I've begun to get involved with Mimbres School, taking classes and programming things for them. It's a thriving intellectual community orientated around the central problem of studying money as an empirical problem, in an anti-economics, anti-philosophy, anti-disciplinary way; join us!

A long time ago, I made the indie game 6180 the moon with some friends.