So it turns out writing consistently is kinda hard. First I was busy with work (which involved a 4 hour commute during which I did much less productive things), then it was moving into my new apartment (which has all sorts of issues), and then school started and I'm getting pulled 6 different ways by each of my classes. Needless to say I didn't have the most time to dump my thoughts, and most of the time my thoughts had been pretty uninteresting, or work-related, or not coherently-thought-through, or otherwise unpublishable. Which is ironic because I originally decided that I had to get into the habit of writing tidbits, and I had the thought that the best way of doing that was to remove the internal quality-assurance filter that prevents me from spewing half-baked ideas. Unfortunately, just because you tell yourself that it's okay to write down unfinished thoughts doesn't mean you actually feel that way internally...
On the other hand, I've been pretty active on Twitter. The obvious reason is, it's much easier for me to microblog on Twitter than it is to write a new post for my tidbit blog. The current loop for writing a new post is to 1) open the tidbit file or create a new file, 2) actually write down my thoughts, 3) push the changes to the private rep, 4) ssh into my server and pull the changes, and 5) reboot the docker container so that it loads the new file. This is all the consequence of using my own homebrewed markdown-to-blog framework which I rarely push QOL changes to, but I don't have any plans to migrate, so for the time being, the loop remains very slow. Compare this to just picking up my phone and navigating to Twitter (which I use chronically) and posting about some thought I had. And I have friends/mutuals whose opinions I value, who can respond to my ideas on there. No wonder why I post so much more often on Twitter.
But that's neither here nor there. I want to talk about some things that have been up with me lately. The biggest thing is my internship at X. (No wonder why I spend so much time on Twitter!) I was mainly in charge of improving the search pipeline and models, which proved to be pretty difficult (evidenced by the number of people who still complain about search). I got to meet a lot of cool and talented people (both employees and interns) and learn a lot about software engineering inside 1) a big org 2) with a very flat structure; I also got some hands-on experience with designing and training models for production. (I even got to do a little math, which was cool!) Unfortunately the feeling that I could have done much more lingers with me even now. I think (more like hope) that Twitter search is at least a bit better now than it was before, but I'm not super hopeful as to what degree it has improved. There were also confounding factors from different microservices that were out of my scope that made search worse, and near the end it felt like I was falling into the trap of blaming things that were out of my control, instead of either 1) focusing on the factors that are in my control, or 2) bringing those out-of-scope things into scope. I learned a lot about how to work and communicate effectively, and also how that relates to my own mental frameworks and tendencies. Over all, it was a pretty good experience (though the 4 hour commute was a bit much).
I also moved into an apartment with roommates. It's a pretty dinky apartment with scuffed walls and floors. The furniture looks pretty bad and the kitchen light fixture is cracked and everything. (We got an outlet that isn't properly sealed, so the outlet is just hanging out - we should probably do something about that.) I'm living with two roommates (whom I've been friends with over the past year or so), and so far it has been an experience. I don't think I truly realized how different people live in their own homes until now: There were (and still are) many cases where I've taken for granted that everybody would have the same set of responsibilities and expectations for the shared apartment, but this turned out not to be the case. I'm still adjusting to the others' level of cleanliness (e.g. how often we wipe the kitchen, run the dishwasher, put clean dishes back in shelves, etc) but I'm hopeful I will survive. In the meantime, my stress levels are through the roof.
A factor that confounds with the apartment situation with respect to my stress levels is my classes. I'm taking 5 math classes this semester and still feeling unfulfilled. There's a few cool classes where I've learned things that I haven't already known, but there is a lot of homework associated with those 5 classes, and it seems like once you finish one pset the next one is just around the corner. I don't know why I'm even taking Complex Analysis again - I took it already in highschool (actually I asked my professor about overlap with the class and he mentioned that maybe 80% of the class is already covered in my highschool class - thanks Jana!), and I don't enjoy Analysis as much in general.
Speaking of Analysis, I've also joined a Directed Reading Group reading An Introduction to Ergodic Theory by Peter Walters (I need to update my current books list sometime soon). We've only really covered a cursory introduction to measure theory and the prereqs section so far - which is pretty definition heavy - but I'm hopeful it will get more interesting in the future. In the meantime I need to find a nice proof of the Radon-Nikodym Theorem and come up with some intuition for Lebesgue's Decomposition Theorem. Measure theory is a drag and I can't wait to get to the algebraic parts where I'm more comfortable.
There have been some upsides lately too, though. One of the reasons why I don't have much time lately is because I've been using so much of my free time on cooking. The whole loop of going grocery shopping, prepping and cooking food, and washing the dishes is pretty time consuming, but I've also found it to be therapeutic. It also made me feel more connected to my mother, who has made me dinner for 18 years straight. There's a few Japanese recipes that are fairly regional and that my maternal grandmother had passed onto my mother; I'm hoping she will teach me them so I can make them as well.
I'm not sure I have anything else to say at this moment. I'm pretty much rambling into a text buffer, so I'm sorry if this is a bit unstructured. I'll try my best to continue writing something here (even if it's unstructured or bad) even when I'm busy. I might write more about things I've covered in my DRP, or some other cool things that have been on my mind lately. But I can't really say in advance. Bye!