short post

some updates:

• a few weeks ago there was a fire show by the spinning arts club at mit and it was one of the prettiest things i’ve ever seen. i did not realize how expressive people spinning balls of light around themselves could be. they had a nice balance of music and choreo and might be my favorite performing group at mit now. i think the fact that it was very cold and dark outside contributed to how much i liked the performances, because it meant that the fire was the primary source of light and heat for the audience
• i had the option to either go to hack lodge or redwood remix over january and was struggling to decide between them. ultimately i decided on hack lodge, because redwood remix seemed to be encouraging participants to apply their existing research methodologies to a bucket list of language model problems, rather than allowing participants to develop or modify the methodologies themselves. i still want to get some experience with interpretability research, but would prefer to work in a less constrained environment
• splash (a program where mit students teach local high schoolers for a weekend) happened three weeks ago; the most interesting class i helped with was about diffusion models. it was nice to see splash running in-person again after three years 🙂 and also a bit unsettling, because the program ran almost identically to how it ran in 2019 so a lot of memories resurfaced
• i’m still not sure what i’ll be doing after college. nanotech has been growing on me throughout the course of the semester and is one of my favorite technical classes at mit now (along with computation structures and infectious disease) but i will probably stick to software for a few years
• on a related note, i had an interview with a company i was excited about where the interviewer said i had one of the best responses they’d ever heard to the question of “what are you looking for in your next role?” (my answer was a summarization of one of my blog posts.) i was surprised to hear this given that i lack a lot of clarity on the question; i think it’s also the first time blogging has helped me on an interview

additionally i’ve been rediscovering my love for making and serving food at scale, which i haven’t done in around two years now:

• helped make massive batches of mashed potatoes, tofu, and fruit for ~120 people at a thanksgiving event
• helped make ~350 batches of popcorn for a black panther 2 showing

for some reason making lots of food has felt more rewarding than most of the other work i’ve done recently. this doesn’t really make sense given that i never make anything complicated or difficult and don’t care much about the taste of the food i consume. i should probably figure out what’s going on here and see if i can find the same sense of fulfillment in my other work

on a separate note, i’m considering a move to substack. the primary reason for this is that the email subscriptions feature has poor visibility in wordpress and is very prominent in substack. however, i’m not sure if a) i actually want to be in peoples’ inboxes (i feel like most of what i write isn’t interesting enough to warrant an email so people might get annoyed and unsubscribe?) b) it seems like i move blogging platforms approximately once every four years, so maybe i should just host something myself. let me know if you have any thoughts!