update

the past ~3 weeks

• started and finished obama’s memoir, a promised land. it covers his life up until his third year as president (there’s a sequel in the works). i’d say the main thing that stood out to me was how incredibly lucky he was to go from completely obscure (outside of illinois) to senator to running for president in the span of around four years. his summary of his election campaigns is probably the best part of the book and he does a good job of explaining how he was able to relate to and inspire people very different from himself. his summary of his actual time in office is a bit of a chore to get through and made me pretty sad because it highlighted how much obstruction there is in washington these days

• reread the hunger games trilogy for fun. it’s my first time touching these books since elementary school and wow they’re so much better than i remembered them being. i think i mostly enjoyed the action as a kid but the things that stand out to me nowadays are a) how good the narration is b) the depictions of romance / guilt / moral ambiguity / trauma. lots of little passages that go way over your head as a kid and that you only appreciate when you’re older like “Slowly, with many lost days, I come back to life. I try to follow Dr. Aurelius’s advice, just going through the motions, amazed when one finally has meaning again.”

• started reading words without music, philip glass’s autobiography. i will probably have more thoughts on it soon

• watched past lives and liked it. it’s a very slow and simple film about love and distance, the kind of movie that i usually get bored by, so it’s nice to see my tolerance is going up. i won’t say much else about it other than that it has good character writing and the last ~45 minutes are great

• also watched into the spider-verse and across the spider-verse. both have great art and music (see the prowler theme for one of my favorites). the first movie is a pretty standard superhero movie so i didn’t find the plot super interesting, but the sequel does a lot of novel things with the multiverse idea and is very good in general

• realized some of my math background for optimization and inference is shakier than i thought so i’m working through pen and paper exercises in machine learning. i might switch to something else if i find a better collection of problems to work on though, as this one seems pretty surface-level

• i’ve been thinking a bit about accelerationism. had a conversation with a friend recently where both of us were unable to ethically justify working in tech, especially ai. it really is starting to feel like a race to the bottom where everyone involved knows what they’re doing is reckless but nobody can afford to stop. i’m not sure if this is something i should ask my coworkers about. anyway i’ll write a longer post about this when i am more informed

• thinking about the claim that it takes ~5 years to get really good at something (eg. this was approximately true for me and math contests) so in 50 years you should be really good at ~10 things, or really really good at ~5 things, or something like that. it’s not clear to me if there’s a specific thing i want to get very good at over the next few years. the obvious choices are something related to computers or music or people but it’s something i need to think more about