- i visited corona heights park with a friend and it might be my new favorite or second-favorite spot in sf! (previously the undisputed favorite was yerba buena gardens.) it’s very accessible, has nice rocky/sandy colors, and the views are great – sort of like twin peaks but better in my opinion, because it’s noticeably closer to the rest of the city. i might also be biased by the fact that when i went there was a dj who’d brought an entire keyboard + mixer + speaker setup to the top of the park, so everything was very lively
- work is still pretty fun! i’m wrapping up my compiler + language development work, which has been very enjoyable to dive into, and i also got to explore model quantization along the way. it still doesn’t make sense to me that you can convert most float32 neural networks to int8 without much loss in accuracy, but i guess classification was never about numerical precision. my coworker commented that model quantization, despite being a popular technique, has probably only been implemented a few times in the history of the universe, which was cool to think about
- unrelatedly, i have also acquired a new job responsibility, namely managing the company twitter account. so far it’s just been me posting memes about gpus and machine learning when i feel like it (ie. rarely), but we’re planning to share some more serious content like technical blog posts soon
- some people i met last month invited me to do a writing retreat with them! we went on a weekend road trip to monterey, which has lots of fun cliffs and rocks to climb. it was surprisingly productive – i am usually pretty skeptical of people saying they will do work while travelling (i guess you could say i’m skeptical of anyone ever doing work voluntarily unless i’ve previously seen them do lots of work) but we actually managed to set aside around 6h/day to focus. i revived some drafts from the short stories class i took last fall and tried to finish one, but it is still bad. oh well. regardless, the trip was very pleasant and i am grateful (and surprised) that people whom i haven’t spent much time with have been so welcoming and kind to me
- re the books i mentioned two posts ago: i read on earth we’re briefly gorgeous and was left quite confused. i understood the plot, but the language and prose made grasping anything else very frustrating; i guess novels which resemble extended poems are probably not for me. anyway, next up i am starting order without design, which will probably take much longer to get through
- stumbled on this gem which hasn’t left my brain since: “The part of life we really live is small. All the rest is not life, but merely time.” i really wasn’t expecting a mock interview with a classical philosopher to make me cry
- i went down a rabbit hole of revisiting childrens/YA fiction that i’d previously read ~10 years ago. now that i’m older and better at reading, i can see how much effort went into worldbuilding and character voicing. i’m reminded of the bojack arc where diane gives up on writing a serious memoir and begins writing a childrens series which she views as a downgrade – “I’m working on this middle-grade fiction series. I mean, who am I, Rick Riordan?” it turns out being rick riordan is way harder than people think
- my friend gave an interesting response to one of the main questions in my previous post, namely: how can you do impact-oriented work while also not believing you can change other people? this isn’t a view i fully agree with, but i admire its simplicity and strength, so i’m sharing it below:
- When Arjuna is sent to fight in the war, he must fight to win, because that is the duty of a warrior. He must also accept that it might be the universe’s plan for him to die, but that doesn’t change the fact that his duty is to fight to win.
- I do not care about the outcome because my goal is to do my duty. The only thing up to me is my actions, not the results. I am only entitled to my action, not the fruits of those actions.
- I am motivated to do my duty because that is how I serve my higher purpose and it brings me satisfaction to do so, regardless of the outcome. I want to do the best work possible, because that’s all I can control. External feedback is important only because it tells me how to improve and make the best work possible. I do want to succeed and improve humanity and have a large impact, but I also know that may not be part of the universe’s plan.
- So I shall work as hard as I can, and try my best to succeed, so that when I fail, I will know it’s not because I didn’t try, but because the universe has a different plan, which is fine by me.
A Slice of My Mind 
-omg cliffs and rock climbing sounds super fun, speaking from experience.
-yeah nah i can’t imagine doing work while traveling, traveling is a full-time occupation for me. what do you mean people don’t usually get tired after not doing much /j
-id love to go on a writing retreat sometime hmm. now that i think about it, i… i can. i guess this was just one of the many things that i automatically classified as ‘other people things’ and never considered that it could be a possibility for me
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