general update
short post
i’ve been pretty busy but almost exclusively with things i am working on voluntarily, and that’s been a really nice feeling
school-wise, my schedule hasn’t changed much since my previous post. i spent a lot of time in the past month shadowing the distributed systems class and writing a golang implementation of raft with persistence and snapshots. at this point i feel like i have a much better understanding of how to write and debug distributed systems, but not of how i would come up with a protocol like raft myself
i’ve been helping a friend film some hobby projects. this past weekend they were filming a short they wrote, and i helped with boom mics and audio capture, except i have zero experience with these things so i messed up a lot. i think helping with film sets is interesting because the scripts involved are very different from the kind of writing i’m used to (blog posts and short stories) - every detail in every scene needs to be thought through in advance so that they can actually shoot the scenes at a reasonable pace, and i think that’s very impressive because it’s not something i’ve ever had to do in any of my writing
started going to ml systems reading group every week. so far it’s been pretty interesting, and it’s cool to be in a reading group mostly filled with phd students because they all have a much better understanding of the general literature than me, but this also means i talk very little during discussions
i had a funny idea to build a website that teaches people web development, and the way they learn is by building the website itself. to be more precise, the website will have an embedded html/css editor, and users will use the editor to build a second html/css editor which behaves identically to the original editor. this project is ongoing (it’s taking a while because i’m trying to using it as an opportunity to learn how to do css the right way) but i hope to have a reasonable version finished soon
writing-related stuff:
i had some drafts from when i took a short stories class last fall that i never got around to finishing, so i’m trying to flesh those out now and get them to a place i’m happy with. it’s kind of sad that i stopped working on these for over a year, but within that time i’ve gotten some fresh ideas that fit together well, so i’m not too upset about this
i’ve been thinking a lot about style and how i want to blog. the language i use in writing has gotten more plain over the years, and i think that’s helpful for communication but it’s maybe also boring and not very memorable? at the same time i feel like i’ve read a lot of blog posts where the prose is pretty but there isn’t really a point being made, and the author gets away with this because the post is written well enough that uncritical readers don’t realize nothing is being said; i’ve also read lots of posts which sound too good to be true, where it feels like the author must be distorting the truth so their words can flow better. i guess the tldr here is that there are lots of weird behaviors which can emerge when you actively prioritize sounding better while writing nonfiction, and i’m not sure how to go about changing how i write without straying further from truth
i’ve been meeting a lot of mit people that i like and wish i’d met earlier. it turns out you can get really far just by following friends of friends around with some light filtering for kindness and passion. i’m not sure why i didn’t try this earlier
went to a wind ensemble concert that i enjoyed a lot! my favorite part was that some of the pieces were arranged for winds + brass + violin + vocals and the orchestration and mixing was done very well, so this instrument combination sounded extremely natural when it almost never does. see this recording, from 15:48-29:26 and 56:44-1:03:30 for specific examples