labor

last friday my internship ended, and the week since then has been pretty good

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immediately after work finished, i revived a project i started in june of trying to translate english into chinglish. my nlp algorithms for this are still incredibly basic and far from great, but i decided i simply didn’t have time to try to perfect them and that it’d be more important to deploy something asap. it felt like one of those timelines where i’d either release a prototype by the end of summer or get busy with school and forget about it forever, and you can see the results on my twitter thread

overall i’d say the experience was a lot more enjoyable and productive than i expected — i more or less worked all day on saturday / sunday / monday and learned about serverless computing and docker and chrome extensions and cors and other miscellaneous topics, which was cool. getting twitter engagement was nice too, though i was hoping to get new followers and that didn’t happen. oh well i will try again someday; i probably just need to post things with higher retweet potential. anyway i’m mostly happy because this was my first time being this focused on coding for this many days in a row

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on thursday i finished reading bhagavad gita. after asking people for preferred translations a few posts ago, multiple of my hindu friends each responded with a different answer, so i ended up ignoring all of them and continuing with vedabase. it was an interesting read, though some parts were extremely confusing, probably just because of lack of context on my part. one of my friends recommended gandhi’s interpretation of the book for clarification so i skimmed through that as well and it was quite helpful for being less confused. the ideology felt surprisingly similar to stoicism (especially the parts on not identifying the self with the body / ego, resting in motion, letting go of results) except with more of the worldbuilding that typically occurs with religious frameworks. one thing i haven’t fleshed out my thoughts on is how literal bhagavad gita is — some people seem to think it refers entirely to conflicts within the mind and other people think the real-life battlefield interpretation is at least partially correct, and i feel like i don’t actually have a problem with either of these views?

the following thought has been bothering me: the fact that i was enthusiastic about reading bhagavad gita means that i was probably already the type of person who would find its teachings agreeable even before i began reading. and more generally, i think that the non-hindus who choose to read bhagavad gita are, for the most part, the people who would benefit the least from reading it, because they are typically the people who already partially understand and buy into its beliefs. i believe the same adverse selection is true with every other philosophical framework as well, and it is worrying because i think some of my friends desperately need to hear some of the messages in bhagavad gita but will not be able to do so, in the same way that there are probably ideologies i really need exposure to that i will simply not discover on my own. we usually hear about confirmation bias in the context of echo chambers and political polarization, but i think the effect is equally strong here and i just find that… profoundly sad, i guess. where would we be if we actually had access to the ideas that would challenge us to grow the most? 

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other things i’ve been spending time on: 

• i watched the entirety of midnight gospel with one of my housemates. it was very trippy but pretty good and definitely the most information-dense show i’ve seen. i liked episode 1 (which argues that drugs are never good or bad; only the contexts they’re used in are good or bad), episode 4 (which talks about truly listening when other people talk, among other things), episode 5 (buddhist commentary i talked about a few posts ago), episode 7 (about death), episode 8 (about death and love and meditation)
• i’m trying to decide whether to take 6.172 software performance engineering or not. the content is interesting and reasonably applicable, but probably nowhere near useful enough to justify spending 20-25 hours a week on it? i’m leaning towards not taking it because i think more of the hype comes from people wanting to take a hard class to feel better about themselves than from people actually having a sense of how much they care about the content, but my final decision probably depends on how many other commitments i end up having (notably, whether admissions blog accepts me and whether i continue singing. most likely ‘no’ to both but we will see)
• i had some ideas for things to do at mit. one was to turn my dorm room into a free hotel service, which will happen barring the return of stricter covid policies (more on this in a later post). another was a club where people are explicitly banned from talking about classes and internships and research and clubs, though i am no longer as enthusiastic about this idea because i don’t believe in my ability to attract people outside of circles i’m already in, so this is probably not happening unless someone else wants to take over (contact me if you’re interested). my most recent idea is a group where we make educational tweets and tiktoks every week and experiment to understand how to best achieve virality, though i’m not sure how much interest there will be for this. emphasis on making educational content, because i know you can achieve virality by eg. being extremely cute or inflammatory, and i want to understand other pathways better
• people keep asking me for two sigma referrals, and it’s especially annoying when the request comes from someone whom i’ve never had a legitimate conversation or interaction with. i refer everyone who asks anyway, because live and let live i suppose, but sometimes i wonder if referring more people is actually immoral
• i started following this psychiatrist youtube channel and so far i like them a lot! they also stream on twitch occasionally and those streams are cool too. the content is interesting, especially because they openly acknowledge a lot of the problems within therapy and are extremely transparent about when something they say is illogical or may not help the patient much

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i feel like i’ve gotten around as much done during the past week as during the entire duration of my internship. i can’t tell if that’s because i’m in a better mental state now than when i was at home, or if work was tiring me to the point of not being able to accomplish much outside of my job, or if i was just using my job as an excuse to procrastinate on everything else i wanted to do this summer. probably a combination of all three, though one of my housemates says it’s primarily the second factor — they believe that work is exhausting people in a way that makes them default to hedonism instead of caring about the state of the world or anything beyond their immediate surroundings

and to some extent that is what i’ve observed in my jobs as well. the two non-work conversations with my aws coworkers that i remember best are when they talked about how to buy the nicest desks with the cheapest discounts and when they said they couldn’t make any weekend plans because it was raining. the two non-work interactions with my two sigma full-time coworkers that i remember best are the time one of them asked me if i read bio textbooks to help me fall asleep and the time someone asked about weekend plans and i was too intimidated to say i wanted to work on an nlp project because they were so clearly expecting “fun” answers

i guess i am a little disappointed in myself. disappointed because, as freeing as this past week has been, i shouldn’t have had to wait for the end of my internship to get around to finishing up everything i wanted to do this summer, especially given how much other stuff i was able to balance while working at asimov this spring. i am certain that i had the time, energy, and attention to explore a lot more, and as much as i’d like to pin the blame for this on the soul-draining nature of my job, i know that this is really about my inability to adequately manage my physical and mental states in june and july. i am not sure what exactly needs to change — my main guesses are being more physically fit and not living at home and focusing more on pursuing peace rather than pleasure — but i will do better next time