Week 1149 -- Hello World
Last week was my 22nd birthday!
I didn’t really feel any different about turning 1 year older, although one thing that is dawning on me is how fast each year goes by. It sometimes feels like I’m still 19 or 20 but I have to remind myself that I’ve graduated college and am an independent adult now. Maybe it’s because my lifestyle hasn’t changed too much from Berkeley to SF; I’m still living with roommates, spending a lot of hours on school/work, and found a new local salad shop that I go to 5 times a week (thanks Souvla!).
I’ve been journalling on and off for the past few years and I want to challenge myself to write and reflect at a more consistent pace. Google tells me there’s been 8.043 days since my birthday which is exactly 1149 weeks. Starting from this week, I’m going to try logging down life updates and my personal reflections at the end of each week. Hopefully it will be fun and interesting (and not too cringe!) to look back on someday.
This exercise is somewhat inspired by the book “Four Thousand Weeks” by Oliver Burkeman. I haven’t read it yet but the title itself was certainly eye-opening to ponder about.
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Anyways, here’s some stuff that happened last week:
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I went back home to celebrate my birthday with my parents, grandpa, and cousins.
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Coincidentally, one of my dad’s college friends came to visit from China and I heard a lot of interesting stories about my parents’ college lives. This got me thinking that I should learn more about my parents’ lives at some point. They’ve shared a lot of childhood stories in the process of imparting values onto my brother and I, but there’s also a lot of family history that I don’t know about.
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My onboarding mentor is leaving Retool this week which I’m quite sad about but also happy for him to move on to new things in life.
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I worked on fixing some tech debt which was not fun but very necessary for my current project of bringing multiplayer editing into Retool. I love working on this project except when we have to deal with tech debt :’(
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I bought a Midjourney subscription and it’s been one of my favorite purchases. The product is so fun to play with and the UX of using Discord is surprisingly intuitive. They reportedly bring in 200M ARR in revenue with a full time staff of 11 people which is insane!!
- here's one of the cooler pictures I've generated:
prompt: trees, miyazaki hayao, winter season themed abstract 3D dof graphics
- here's one of the cooler pictures I've generated:
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I also did some reading last week:
- "The Lifecycle of Software Objects” by Ted Chiang
- Chiang describes a world where humans can raise digital entities that have certain personalities and aptitudes depending on their AI genome and how they are raised. It touches on some ethical questions regarding consciousness and self-determinism of these digital entities.
- IMO it was interesting to see how people might use and interact with these AI bots in the context of modern generative agents products such as Character AI and RizzChat and more.
- “The No-Stats All-Star” by Michael Lewis
- Lewis describes how Shane Battier contributed to winning basketball games without putting up a ton of stats. He was great at defense and had a deep understanding of the analytics behind the game. For example, he’d know which areas of the court were lower percentage shots for opposing players so he’d try to force them into those zones. He was less concerned with the outcome of any particular shot and more focused on reducing his opponents’ probabilities of scoring instead. Whether or not a individual shot goes in can be thought of as a matter of chance. Over the course of a game or a season, the number of shots that score will converge towards the expected value dictated by the probabilities.
- My takeaway from this is to put yourself in situations where you can play long term games, focus on optimizing your inputs, and don’t be emotionally affected by the outcomes both good and bad.