general update

mostly from feb/march

the most important update is that i moved!

• pac heights (where i moved to) and castro (where my office is) are both such sleepy sunny neighborhoods. the hilltop views are killer and i’m really happy that i get to split my time between two of the best parts of sf. it’s really helped with feeling at peace, as has living in a large house with friends and plants and windows

• had fun assembling chairs and bed frames and curtains while moving in. it’s been far too long since i built things with my hands. i still need to figure out other room decorations, suggestions welcome

• i guess i should say a few things about 20mish, the coliving house i stayed in from sept-feb. i didn’t make any friends there and found the culture a bit questionable, but it’s extremely convenient - the location is great for accessibility / transit reasons and they have cheap month-by-month leases. so although i felt very lonely there i think it was the right place to be in while i was waiting for more of my friends to move to SF, and i think if you just need a room to stay in for a couple months it is a reasonable choice

work has been taking up more of my time recently

• i still work on training large language models. we recently finished the first big training run that i was heavily involved in. to be honest it feels… bizarre. bizarre to know that i am writing code that will produce something far beyond my capacity to understand. bizarre to know that in the future we will only create more capable models and churn them out faster. it reminds me of that tweet visualizing all the spacex launches in chronological order - unbearably slow at first, with one launch every few months, but by the end of the video launches are happening more quickly than you can count. take into account that the same process is happening at every pretraining company around the world and i think i can better appreciate why so many ai researchers become doomers

• started conducting candidate interviews and it’s been full of surprises. on one hand i’ve been shocked by how slowly some senior engineer candidates with 10+ years of experience write code; i guess the lesson here is that resumes always look impressive. on the other hand i really love when a candidate chooses to write in a language i’m not familiar with - the most recent ones have been ruby (very beautiful) and c# (very ugly). learning how a new language works is often the highlight of my workday when it happens

• i’ve also been thinking about potential role changes. i am not sure how much longer i want to do engineering for, especially since i am starting to believe large swaths of software engineering will be feasible to automate soon. of course the difficulty here is that probably nobody wants me to work on things other than engineering since that would be a misallocation of skills/talent or something like that, so i need to give this topic some more serious thought

other things

• worked remotely for ~2 weeks to visit friends in boston. ran into an absurd number of people i knew and it was the first time in 6 months where my social battery ran out. seeing everyone again was really lovely, as was playing ddr and experiencing cold weather. i’ve always felt that i’m best at talking to people slightly younger than me (not sure why but it probably has to do with my preference for listening and the topics i default to)

• i spent a lot of time with communities i was heavily involved in during undergrad. it felt like saying goodbye - some of the longing was still present but there was also a sense that this is no longer what i need and i should go. i thought about school quite often last summer and fall but in the past month it’s barely crossed my mind; mit feels like an intense dream i once had. part of me is happy that i’m no longer hung up on the past; part of me is sad that my whole life, even the very best parts of it, will become nothing more than a series of intense dreams

• was a bit underwhelmed by dune part 2, i thought it was decent but not as gorgeous (visually or musically) as part 1; of course the plot is better but i’m watching dune for the worldbuilding, not the plot. also saw tick… tick… boom! live, therapy is an incredible song and i liked how the stage version of TTB focuses more on jonathan larson’s anxiety and earnestness. currently watching march comes in like a lion with a friend, it’s beautiful but feels unfamiliar in that it’s my first time watching an older show in a drawn-out manner instead of just binging through it

• finally got off the waymo waitlist after nepotismhaving dinner with a waymo employee, the experience is very slick! my newest hobby is calling waymos for people when they visit sf. it’s happened three times in the last month

• ordered some yoga mats and started doing a 30-minute stretch routine every night, mostly focusing on hip and shoulder mobility. to be honest it is currently quite miserable (as they say, i hate stretching, i love having stretched) but i think it will get better as i get more flexible, and i also think it will be good to practice choosing to coming back to something i find miserable