school started

updates from the past ~month

• i’ve been performing desensitization therapy on myself and it’s worked pretty well so far!

  • in december i went to the dentist and noticed my gag reflex was much stronger than it had been the last time i went to the dentist, to the point where doing mouth x-rays was extremely uncomfortable; this was also making it difficult to brush the teeth in the back of my mouth well. so a few weeks ago i started brushing up to the point of barely tickling the gag reflex and then keeping my toothbrush in that position while practicing relaxation techniques; by doing this every day i’ve gradually gotten back to the point of being able to brush all my teeth comfortably again

  • i should probably do this for my fear of heights and fear of insects at some point. it’s been on my to-do list for a while but i haven’t had a good opportunity to set something up

• some things i did in sf other than hacklodge:

  • went to stanford dish and lands end, they were pretty nice trails

  • followed a friend’s recommendation and visited fisherman’s wharf at night. it was very spooky because there were no tourists, so the area was super empty and quiet, to the point that all you could hear were boats creaking nonstop, and if you looked across the water in the right direction you would see the alcatraz lighthouse spinning around and around. my friend called this the best thinking/reflection spot in sf and i’m inclined to agree now

  • i accidentally stumbled upon the twitch headquarters while walking around downtown sf. they have a cool office where one of the walls is a giant touchscreen, and the staff are very friendly!

• i still don’t think i’d enjoy being in sf full-time but it’s always refreshing to visit for a few weeks because of how ambitious the culture is

• went back to mit and helped teach web.lab (a student-run web dev class) again. i wanted to challenge myself a bit so i ran an office hours session from 4pm-12am with no other staff and it was extremely exhausting but also extremely fun. also some of the projects this year were extremely polished, eg. this 3-d collaborative editing website and this multiplayer egg game

• this semester i’m enrolled in one class and listening in on six others, because i like classes but dislike grades. the classes are:

  • programming language design (6.s050). this is the one i’m actually enrolled in. the course staff seem pretty cool and very passionate! i think i’ve seen a decent chunk of the material in this class already from a) having friends who talk about pl b) working with various languages over the years c) taking program synthesis last semester, but it will be good to learn this stuff in more detail. course website here

  • climate policy (11.169). unclear how this class will go because we’ve only met once and didn’t cover that much content. i might have to stop going to this one because the professor seems to be having trouble with sharing course materials to non-students. it would be nice to get a more concrete understanding of climate policy options though

  • design for the web (6.s063). also a very well-staffed class; in particular, one of the professors is part of w3c and helps set the css standards along with other important internet things, while the other is a former tcs / algorithms professor who decided usability is more important than algorithmic optimality. i’m familiar with some of the web development content already, but css and ui are definitely my weak spots so i think this class will be useful to sit in on. course site here

  • inference and information (6.437). this is a class on information theory, bayesian and non-bayesian inference, etc. my statistics background is surprisingly weak - i have intuition from linear algebra + analysis + probability but never actually learned statistics - so i think this will be good to pay attention to

  • statistical physics (8.044). this class explains a lot of phenomena like temperature and the notion of physical equilibrium. i don’t have a super great reason for listening in other than that it clarifies parts of the world i’ve been confused about, and seems relatively self-contained (by physics classes’ standards, at least)

  • distributed systems engineering (6.824). i will be doing all the readings and assignments for this class, mostly because i want to get better at systems and haven’t written much distributed stuff before. golang seems very beginner-friendly and extremely enjoyable to write code in - it’s only been a week and i already feel like there are many concepts (mainly related to concurrency and rpcs) that are just so much simpler to express in golang than in eg. python or c++. it took me a few days to get used to but now i think it’s really beautiful. course site here

  • shape analysis (6.838). the main reason i’m listening to this class is that the instructor, justin solomon, is the best cs lecturer i’ve encountered at mit (though joe steinmeyer comes close). he is extremely enthusiastic and also has a very soothing voice. anyway, this class is mostly about computational geometry; along the way they discuss topics like topology, variational calculus and optimization, and laplacians. i think it’s cool material, but even if it wasn’t cool i would probably still show up to learn how to teach and communicate better. course site here

• watched all three seasons of mob psycho 100 and i think it’s now my favorite anime of all time. it has superb art, character writing, and manages to cover a lot without taking itself too seriously. nominally it’s about a kid struggling to control his psychic powers while navigating adolescence, and an adult who claims he’s a psychic because he hates being ordinary but now also hates himself for being a fraud; i think it’s very reasonable to watch the show while treating psychic powers as a metaphor for other properties eg. intelligence

  • i like that the main storyline in mob psycho is about self-acceptance rather than a hero’s journey. that’s not entirely accurate - after all, the two concepts aren’t exclusive and every story has elements of both - but it comes pretty close to expressing how i feel about the show. in my opinion it’s much harder to write a good show about self-acceptance than a traditional hero arc, but when done well i think the end result is more relevant (that’s also one of the things i like about bojack). after all, i don’t really see myself as on a hero’s journey, but i do have a lot of self-acceptance plot points

  • one of the insane things about mob psycho is that the action scenes are incredibly well-animated despite being irrelevant to the show. most animes have high-quality fight scenes because those are the most important part of the plot and represent the climax; in mob psycho the action isn’t that important because the story isn’t really about fights, yet the animators still choose to create beautiful extravagant fight scenes even when they could’ve gotten away with much less. the animators’ love for the show is really apparent here