god mode?

• i finished coursera intro machine learning! i think next i will read more ml papers like franklyn suggests or learn related topics. convolutional neural networks is probably first on the list, and there’s a coursera for that too
• i read Germinal and was slightly disappointed, mostly because one of my friends kept saying it was really good and it was only slightly good. I think I am not a big fan of naturalism/Zola in general- it feels like victor hugo but worse in that he writes large french plots with rich characters and such, except unlike hugo the story just felt lacking in emotional impact. idk the book also claims to be about class struggles and industrialization but it really just feels like its about the flawed protagonist imo
• alibaba results came out and somehow i got 70/140 points despite only solving 2 out of 7 problems 😐 final rankings aren’t out yet but probably didn’t place; my fault for spending 3 hours getting nowhere on a medium combo q. old habits are back i guess but i couldn’t have done much better, maybe 80-90/140 max anyway
• i did 2 funny math problems. one was an application of k-means algorithm from machine learning and the other was an fe i started 2 years ago- it holds the record of probably ~30hrs? for time i’ve spent actively thinking about a non-research problem (most of it was spent being dumb). you can find the problems in most recent aops posts if you’re interested

i watched some more things. surprisingly they are all shows and not movies:

• game of zones was hilarious even though i have no clue what happens in game of thrones. seasons 4+ were really well-made, and its really impressive how much basketball they were able to communicate in 5-10 minute episodes without ever animating an actual basketball game. the finale does not count as all the action is offscreen, though im told this is just a GoT reference
• watched steins;gate and liked it a lot 🙂 it definitely wins the award of “saddest happy anime” if that makes sense. admittedly the first 10ish episodes are a bit slow, but that’s sort of a necessity for the plot and characters to work out and they’re enjoyable to watch regardless, and everything afterwards is insane. character design in general was good and this is probably the most well-written anime relationship i’ve seen so far? so yeah it’s just good in general. apparently pacing and character depth are the most common complaints against the show? but i really thought they were both fine
• also did a “speed run” of steins;gate 0 since i heard it was significantly worse than steins;gate and didn’t want to invest 9 hours into it 😛 using undisclosed methods i watched it in 3ish hours. from what i saw a lot of it was filler (except the first and last few episodes, along with 8 and 16) so i don’t regret my decision; i think i still managed to see all the parts that i would’ve enjoyed anyway. i am perfecting the art of optimal speedrunning 🙂 
• finally watched looking for alaska and it was amazing! definitely recommend watching but only after reading the book. the book is noticeably flawed, but it’ll help you appreciate the show more. like omg the casting, setting, and all the interactions were literally exactly how i and apparently many other readers imagined them and all the additions really helped flesh out some secondary characters. really glad they decided to do an 8-part series instead of a movie 🙂 choice of music was also on-point

looking for alaska has been one of my favorite books ever since i picked it up in a bookstore in china during the summer of 2015. i was on vacation with my dad and he mostly just left me alone in various bookstores around beijing as i didnt care much about seeing people/places in china anyway. its ridiculous how nostalgic it makes me for a high school experience i never had, one at a private school full of substances and loss and coming of age, even to this day- it just feels eternally relevant, and probably will at least until im out of college. i would say more about what the story means to me but its already eloquently encapsulated in john green’s video and the single line “i wrote the book because i wanted to go home”. (also, highly recommend the vid it’s only 4 minutes)

honestly if i end up living for a long time i can’t imagine not eventually writing a book, so if i want the book future-me writes to be good then present-me needs to get a lot better at writing. after going through 21w.022 i think i do need to start larger-scale projects with more characters, so maybe i’ll start experimenting this summer 😮 no guarantees though, i haven’t determined my hierarchy of priorities for this summer yet there are too many of them

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so i got extremely stuck on my urop again. as a result we moved onto a related topic about analyzing spanning trees and nonempty subgraphs related to optimization which is cool! unfortunately i likely wont have much time to think about it once my internship starts and this problem seems pretty hard too 😦 

but more importantly i don’t know how to become a better researcher. i don’t know how to become smarter or better at solving problems. i know the answer used to be to do olympiad problems and etc. but i’ve probably gone more or less as far as olympiad problems can take me, or at least thats how it feels because of diminishing returns and such. im confident in my ability to learn new things and apply them, but not confident in my ability to get better at learning or applying things. i know that at some point i was a lot worse at problem-solving and got significantly better and math had something to do with it, but i dont know what the relationship was, how to replicate it, or exactly how much of it was improvement vs memorization vs introspection because honestly you can get so much better at problem-solving simply by remembering more or having more self-awareness

i used to think it was just a matter of GOD MODE (ft. derek zhu) or mamba mentality or whatever you want to call it (they mean the same thing, for those unfamiliar) but after watching some kobe videos (example) i think there’s just no equivalent to basketball training in my life. i wish it were that simple, that you could feel something akin to physical exhaustion after a workout and know you’d gotten better, that there was an easy way to measure your day-to-day mental progress, but i suppose it’s time to accept that most things arent like that. im going to do my best to keep channeling god mode anyway, not because i know it’ll get me where i want, but because its just my preferred setting, and if things do turn out well it’ll be a pleasant surprise i guess