more value judgments

brooklyn is pretty interesting. the view is not as therapeutic as looking out into the wilderness at truchas but still nice in its own right and way better than being stuck in suburbia. the main downside is that the streets are fairly noisy at night, so sometimes it’s hard to sleep since i’m only one floor removed from street level. but aside from that urban environments are strange in a good way eg. the density of nearby food / services / etc. is just ridiculously high and our apartment opens into this weird roof area

asimov has been okay. i have once again landed in a job i am completely unprepared for; in particular all of my work either involves R (which i haven’t touched until now), topics in biology which i am not familiar with (i’ve taken a bunch of bio classes but asimov is doing things in far greater depth than anything i’ve studied), or CNNs which i am hazy on (sure i have learned about them but wouldn’t say i’m comfortable). i’m not sure what’s going on here but i think interviewers need to realize that the questions they ask to test “ml understanding” are just not helpful in screening for people who truly know what they’re doing. that being said my boss is pretty nice and insanely smart; he’s basically the entire computational biology department and runs dozens of projects on his own and i literally don’t understand how this is possible

one thing i’m more acutely aware of now is variation in startup culture. at my previous job there were 3 company-wide weekly syncs along with other meetings i was encouraged to listen to, and they would often run overtime and end up being 1-2 hours each, so everyone more or less knew what other people were doing but it felt a bit excessive. whereas here the meetings are all on my calendar but i was told early on in onboarding “these syncs won’t be relevant for you” and i was sort of surprised by how abruptly that was communicated. this is probably mostly due to differences in size and maturity, but being based in sf vs cambridge probably also has a lot to do with it. and i guess there are a bunch of other differences, like, people at asimov aren’t working until midnight and the founder isn’t telling me i should move to hawaii and etc. in many ways i do miss my healthcare job and probably want to eventually go back if possible, but i know it will take over my life and that’s just not what i need at the moment

also my registration finished so i am officially taking biochemistry (7.05) this semester and nothing else. other things i want to learn this semester include more psych / cognitive science, design, compilers, eastern philosophy but i’m not sure what order to prioritize them in yet. i am more than halfway finished with human learning and memory though so i think the next book i read will either be on one of the other topics (likely compilers) or something more neuroscience-focused

i’ve started listening to 24/7 calm/lofi/ambient/etc youtube streams instead of regular music. sometimes john green runs livestreams where all he does is sign his name on books for 2-3 hours and those are pretty pleasant to tune into as well. i’m not sure what i actually like about these but knowing that thousands of people are watching and seeing live chat messages when i’m not working makes it feel like a more interconnected experience

every february and august i receive a delayed email written by myself 6 months ago, and then i read it and write a new email. the process started august 2019 upon suggestion from qiaochu and usually the emails are still fairly relevant 6 months later because my life doesn’t change that much in 6 months even if a lot of stuff happens, in the sense that i’ll go through another semester of school and still have the same core concerns. and i think that was still true this time, in that i still have some of the same mental health and people issues, but i also had a big reorient from watching bojack and got back into reading/writing more regularly and made peace with not double majoring, and the net effect of all this is that i feel much freer than i have in a long time but this kind of thing is hard to notice or appreciate except in hindsight

that being said i’m experiencing somewhat major fomo from seeing everyone back on campus. i knew far in advance that this would happen but never actually found a good way to deal with this class of feelings other than just not thinking about them, which is not a true resolution. i was talking to several people about the relative value of college recently and the general consensus was the marginal value of an 8th semester of college is at least the value of any previous semester (this is not a universal statement, but it is naturally true if you model college as an exploration-exploitation problem in which case maximum payoff comes at the late tail, and it is also true if you model with some other frameworks). under that assumption it feels like the only way to justify what i’m doing right now is to make real life really really good; more details in a later post but all of this is just a roundabout way of saying that lightloading makes more sense if you think real life > college and gapping or being a regular student makes more sense if you think real life < college, and most people believe the latter because perhaps it is more realistic while i believe the former because i want it to be true