- i am basically done with school now! in the spring i will only be taking one class, and on pass/fail, so i won’t need to think much about exams / homework / grades for the foreseeable future 🙂 i’ll most likely take datacenter computing or programming language design and listen in on a mix of cs and bio classes. maybe also some policy or materials science if there are good course offerings?
- the goal next semester is to listen to a lot of classes, write more (both code and english), finalize what i’m doing after college, try some makerspace stuff, and maybe do some research
- updates on job search – i’ve decided not to return to exafunction even though i enjoyed my work there, primarily because i don’t want to be bound to the bay area full-time; i’m prioritizing remote and hybrid work. there’s a research group i’m very excited about because they seem to have a good mix of kindness and interesting direction but i might not get an offer from them (we’re doing a trial project on january 4th and 5th to see if we work well together); i’ll write about my thought process in more detail and less secrecy after that’s over
- the subject of recruiting is extremely frustrating because i’ve put a lot of thought into it over the past few months and want to write publicly about it but probably shouldn’t say anything of substance until the process is over in case recruiters are reading >_< this actually sucks
- i watched rick and morty season 6 last week. it’s definitely an improvement over seasons 4 and 5 and i highly recommend it to sci-fi enjoyers! (though seasons 1-3 are still better, probably)
- this past weekend i helped make popcorn for a world cup finals showing. around 100-200 people came so it was very lively 🙂 it occurred to me that since the world cup takes place every four years, most people only get to watch it once while in college, and it usually takes place over the summer so the experience of watching it with your college friends is actually extremely rare
- some reading:
- i survived thus spoke zarathustra. it seemed to be deliberately confusing and was not enjoyable to read, though i understand the appeal (it’s basically a collection of song-like essays on morality). at this point i think i should give up on trying to read more nietzsche
- i read candide and found it enjoyable 🙂 tldr the main character has a series of adventures while trying to apply the philosophy of optimism to everything he encounters, and eventually he realizes that instead of philosophizing he should just do the work in front of him (“we must cultivate our garden”)
- after two years of procrastination i finally finished the periodic table. it’s a chemist’s memoir, divided into 21 episodes, each of which is centered around an element. sometimes it gets boring because the author includes (in my opinion) too many details about his work and about unimportant characters, but the stories where he actually focuses are quite good. the ones i liked were hydrogen, zinc, iron, phosphorus, gold, cerium, and chromium
- i am still contemplating the move to substack. i think my reluctance comes from the fact that i consider substack more “official” than wordpress and therefore associate it with better writing, and i don’t think my writing is very good so it feels out of place. i realize this is a ridiculous reason to not do something, so i’ll try to overcome the mental block soon
A Slice of My Mind 
just keep a private blog
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leaving a downvote on the move to substack
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