update

roughly from early oct - mid nov

lots of good content recently:

• read berserk, easily my favorite manga of all time now. tldr former mercenary struggles with trauma / revenge / emptiness and learns to become a better person

  • it’s kind of gross (lots of monsters, gore, and generally creepy stuff) but the art and prose are so good that i think it’s worth it

    

    

  • i think the main reason berserk is so appealing is that it very clearly holds the view that life is an endless series of struggles and manages to depict that beautifully:

    • “Before I knew how to walk, this [hammer] was in my hand. Before I could decide if I liked it or not, I hit the iron in front of me. After that I was so busy trying to improve and craft better stuff that one day I woke up an old man! Just like folks who live don't know why they're alive, I don't know why I keep hammering.”

    • “I don't have wings, so I guess I'll look up at the sky and crawl along the earth. I don't think I can be violent like the swordsman after all, and I really don't have the courage to run away like Rosine did. But at least I think I'll try crying and shouting and biting my way through.”

    • “There is no paradise for you to escape to. What you'll find is just a battlefield.”

• read lashing out hurts you the most. i don’t usually record blog posts here since i go through a lot of them, but this one was something else. truly the story of my life. i don’t really agree with the author’s use of the word shame, but aside from that everything is spot-on:

  • “You can’t state your needs out loud because you feel like you don’t deserve that much, and also you’ve spent your whole life pretending you don’t have needs at all. You can’t respect the needs of the people around you because you suffer under the illusion that you’re serving their needs around the clock. You feel this way because you don’t give yourself anything you really need. You feel this way because you don’t know what you need or want.”

  • “Mummies stumble sightless and numb through the world, thinking that they’re protected, thinking that they’ll never have any reason to hurt anyone. But even when mummies are quiet, they’re hurtful and they’re depressed, because they’re not really there. They can’t be. They’re too protected and hidden to be seen or heard, to connect and love, to forgive themselves for their many wounds.”

  • “I started to realize that I was operating under a giant stack of faulty assumptions about how other people saw me. Subconsciously, I believed that people saw me as a little weak and pathetic, no matter what I was doing. I experienced myself as unimportant, a joke, a little desperate. I didn’t realize this before. I just thought I was moody and life was difficult and people were callous. I didn’t recognize how absent I was from most social interactions, how performative I was just to please people, how anxious I was when it didn’t seem to be working, how distracted by shame I was in everything I did.”

  • “Feeling invisible and powerless isn’t just an inconvenient drag. It’s dangerous. When you walk around feeling small and helpless, you tend to bulldoze other people without knowing it. You assume that they don’t respect you (the same way you disrespect yourself) or that they don’t think of you as significant or they don’t like you that much. So you bring a giant pile of weapons to a tea party and then wonder why people react like you’re some kind of a ghoul or warlord.”

• read song of achilles, which was really good up until the ending when (in my opinion) a bunch of characters suddenly behaved super out-of-character in a way that was deeply unsatisfying. the book also made me reconsider if i like men or not. anyway i probably still prefer circe overall, but am super excited for more greek-mythology-inspired novels by madeline miller!

• watched eternal sunshine of the spotless mind for the second time. the first time was four years ago and i hated it; upon rewatch i think it’s one of my favorite movies of all time. i was probably just bored and didn’t understand what was going on last time. really good portrayal of how peoples’ personalities and desires interact with their relationships in really intricate ways and how this causes people to love in cyclical / repetitive patterns

• watched taylor swift: the eras tour because i was curious what concert films are like. obviously the music and production were really good but i found it really exhausting to fixate on a single person for 3 hours, especially when she isn’t that good at acting (no offense intended, it simply isn’t her main priority). i think the best moment was the key change in love story

some vaguely work-related stuff

• spent a couple weeks at work helping analyze an rfc on ai accountability. tldr the NTIA asked us to help them understand the public’s views on ai. we published a summary; didn’t find anything particularly surprising but hey i think it’s pretty cool that we worked with a government agency!

• in my free time i did a small lit review where i read a bunch of econ papers on the impact of automation / ai on labor markets, mostly out of curiosity. i shared my notes here; some people told me it was the most thorough commentary on this topic they’d seen so far, which is hilarious and a bit sad since, idk, this topic is kind of important?

• did a separate lit review on llm training where i read papers on various techniques (model sharding, activation checkpointing, etc) and quantified the effect of each thing on model training time. unfortunately i don’t think i’m allowed to share this one though

other stuff

• saw my first (partial, solar) eclipse! i got pretty lucky in that i happened to be at stanford when it happened and there was some educational nasa-adjacent org giving out glasses to everyone

• went to a cat-themed party! they had really cute cat lamps and i’m considering getting one now

  

• was paranoid about potentially moldy laundry (from the dryer not working as well as it should have) so i added white vinegar to my laundry loads. i’m still a bit confused that a) it’s fine to add this stuff to laundry b) clothes don’t smell like vinegar afterwards, but overall it was surprisingly effective

• around ~20000 people came to sf for apec a few weeks ago, mostly from east asia. it was fun walking around chinatown and seeing how packed it was but it also made me kind of sad. i guess i realized how alone i’ve been recently