may update

life has been very pleasant 🙂 

• it occurs to me that i never actually mentioned what i’m doing this summer. the main reason for this is that the startup i’m working at, exafunction, was in stealth mode, but this changed around a month ago. anyway, exafunction is a four-person team based in mountain view that does a lot of performance engineering and ml infrastructure. i’m pretty excited to learn how to write good low-level systems and to see what working at a tiny company is like!
• my zero-knowledge crypto work wrapped up recently. we open-sourced our code, wrote a blog post, and shared on twitter. i honestly wasn’t expecting much attention, but then vitalik buterin (creator of ethereum) retweeted our post >_< as a result i now have around 120 new twitter followers and they will probably all unfollow me once they realize most of my tweets are not about crypto 😐 
• elections happened for ohms, my a cappella group, and i have been chosen as one of the music directors for next school year despite having little singing experience and minimal knowledge of hindi / south asian culture. i expect it’ll be fine because i trust myself to learn on the job, but i was surprised at this outcome. anyway, i think running rehearsals will be a good way to learn how to better manage a team, and i have some management strategies i want to try out. for instance: the amazon trick where everyone has to remain standing up during meetings, to encourage people to get to the point
• final projects for classes were not very noteworthy. one (for 21m.385 interactive music systems) was creating a musical variant of wordle and the other (for 6.338 parallel computing) was parallelizing and performance-engineering julia code for some cryptography algorithms; they were group projects and i had competent team members for both, which was nice. i’m not super happy with the code i wrote for either project though; i feel like i’m hitting a wall where my code is not very messy but not very well-designed either, and i don’t understand how to reach the next level of software engineering yet. i hope i can figure this out at exafunction, since i’ll be working on a different level of the stack than what i’m accustomed to and will have an actual coding mentor for basically the first time in my life (my boss at aws does not count)
• other classes were also okay. somehow i was the only student in my 7.26 infectious disease class who wasn’t a biology/bioengineering major and the only one who didn’t have the cell biology prereqs, but i still did better than the class median? anyway, i think infectious disease has been my single favorite mit class so far; it was a really nice overview of viruses + bacteria + fungi + parasites, immune responses, experimental methods, and we also got to talk about each of influenza, covid, hiv, salmonella, tuberculosis, malaria in reasonable depth. the only thing you need to understand most of the course content is the intro biology class (7.01x) so if the topics i listed above sound interesting and you’re an mit student with minimal biology background i recommend listening in. i remember when i first became interested in biology senior year of high school, two of the main areas i wanted to understand better were molecular mechanisms and personal health, and this class focused on both so i think it was a very good fit for me
• i read circe by madeline miller. the setup is sort of like the percy jackson series, except written intelligently and for adults. i thought the plot was decent (i generally like greek mythology) and the prose was very good. like ugh i wish i knew how to write these paragraphs:
  • When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist. They called me nymph, assuming I would be like my mother and aunts and thousand cousins. Least of the lesser goddesses, our powers were so modest they could scarcely ensure our eternities. We spoke to fish and nurtured flowers, coaxed drops from the clouds or salt from the waves. That word, nymph, paced out the length and breadth of our futures. In our language, it means not just goddess, but bride. 
  • I watched her dance, arms curving like wings, her strong young legs in love with their own motion. This was how mortals found fame, I thought. Through practice and diligence, tending their skills like gardens until they glowed beneath the sun.
  • Daedalus did not long outlive his son. His limbs turned gray and nerveless, and all his strength was transmuted into smoke. I had no right to claim him, I knew it. But in a solitary life, there are rare moments when another soul dips near yours, as stars once a year brush the earth. Such a constellation was he to me. 
• some friends i lived with in new mexico came to visit. hanging out with them was nice, and then one of them gave me a copy of the art of doing science and engineering, which i read over the past week. it was a pretty good mix of technical and non-technical content. my favorite technical chapter was an overview of counterintuitive results in n-d euclidean space (eg. a unit sphere has ~0 volume for large n), while the non-technical chapters focus on how to do better work. some of my favorite takeaways:
  • you probably won’t do important work if you don’t focus on important problems
  • the metrics you use determine what results you get. eg. iq is normally distributed because iq tests are literally calibrated to produce normally distributed scores, and this says nothing about the actual distribution of intelligence. similar issues with organizations using metrics like # lines of code written or quarterly pnl
  • (lightly edited because multiple people found the original quote problematic) It is well known the drunken sailor who staggers to the left or right with n independent random steps will, on the average, end up about sqrt(n) steps from the origin. But if there is a pretty treasure in one direction, then his steps will tend to go in that direction and he will go a distance proportional to n. In a lifetime of many, many independent choices, small and large, a career with a vision will get you a distance proportional to n, while no vision will get you only the distance sqrt(n). In a sense, the main difference between those who go far and those who do not is some people have a vision and the others do not and therefore can only react to the current events as they happen.
  • all this is a timely reminder that i should pick some directions to commit more strongly to for a few years. i spent most of college exploring pretty aggressively and trying to become a generalist, which i think was the right choice, but lately i have been feeling a bit lost and deciding on some longer-term projects should help
• had my first good 1:1 conversation with an uber driver! i try to talk to all my drivers but usually it doesn’t go well, and i can never tell if it’s because they don’t like me or don’t want to talk or something else. this particular driver previously taught at small colleges for a few years. i mentioned that i don’t think i’d enjoy being a teacher full-time because i would be very sad at the end of each school year when my students left, and then he talked about how he practices buddhism and detachment in his relationships with his students. i wish more of my talks with strangers were like this
• i will be in the bay area from 5/29 to 8/13 let me know if you’ll be around and want to hang out!