what are you? To define is to limit

Reading 501 Great Writers: A Comprehensive Guide to the Giants of Literature. so many great writers. philosophers, artists, poets, novelists, politicians.

A few that caught my eye:

“pride, envy, avarice – these sparks have set on fire the hearts of al men” – Inferno, VI

Emerson in “Self-reliance” exhorts everyone to pay attention to their own “inner laws” ahead of societal expectation or religious beliefs. It is the individual, rather than the institution, which is truly sacred. “Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist”

Memoriam A.H.H

I hold it true, whate'er befall; I feel it, when I sorrow most; 'Tis better to have loved and los Than never to have loved at all.

Hiroshige prints and drawings by Prestel

• Ochanomizu
• Kanaya– the distant bank of Oi river
• The small port and the inlet in Awa province
• Rough sea at the whirlpools at Awa
• The Sea at Satta in Suruga Province
• A Sudden Shower over Ohashi and Atake
• Fireworks over Ryogoku Bridge
• Evening view of Saruwaka street
• The Timber-yard at Fukagawa
• The Drum Bridge and Yuhi hill at Megueo

The Cost of Living by Deborah Levy

we either die of the past or we become an artist.

Ideas come to us as the successors to griefs, and griefs, at the moment when they change into ideas, lose some part of their power to injure the heart; the transformation itself, even, for an instant, releases suddenly a little joy. – Proust, Du côté de chez Swann

writing was one of the few activities in which I could handle the anxiety of uncertainty, of not knowing what was going to happen next

good things that happened today

• read Art of Doing Science and Engineering
• chats with friends
• protein shakes that tastes good
• the sun and the weather
• the walkable city
• the bus drivers
• sfpl, north beach branch
• got to study and make my cheat sheet
• read about famous writer's + looked at some Hiroshige art
• printed my cheat sheet for free
• saw a cute children's playground
• saw more flowers by the street
• saw a lot of italian restaurants with people enjoying their time chatting
• visited Cloud-Hidden Plants, there's so many fancy schmancy plant things
• visited city lights again, discovered a few interesting books
• walked all the way home from the library
• i live in chinatown and I see chinese people everywhere and tourists from all over the world
• i have a rooftop in my apartment that I can go to clear my head
• I can use prayer as a form of catharsis

not so great things

• anxious about the people at the library, some of them are sketchy, not feeling safe, worried someone will steal my things
• feeling out-of-place and alone
• losing sense of direction and meaning
• missing a problem or idea to obsess about
• feeling like I'm not working on anything important or useful
• financial anxiety, tuition and braces cost upcoming
• feeling guilty of not making it on my own
• lacked in-person social interactions
• not feeling secure about myself
• feeling nostalgic and longing and yearning
• seeing this program as a "I have to" instead of a "I get to"
• not feeling understood by people around me, haven't found people that get me, that I click with instantly, still going through the initial phase of friendships with everyone, i guess this takes time
• feeling bloated

live your life at Last Lecture Series: How to Live your Life at Full Power — Graham Weaver

The voice of fear will lead you to a life that’s too small

• face your fears (take the nail out of your head)
• follow your energy
• go all in

you don't know what your future self wants

when we make promises to someone, i.e. when we promise to love someone till death do us part, we are making promises that a stranger is going to have to keep. our future selves might not share the our views, our perspectives, our hopes.

• i foresee myself spending a lot of time at the gym and library
  • spending an hour at the gym is a good investment into my future self, even though it might steal energy away now, it will increase it in the long run, and provide mental benefits
  • the library is a like a free bookstore, it's so fun to borrow any book I want. I'm going to have a mini library at home.

my schedule today

• 4am woke up, worried i was late for quiz
• 6am woke up again, went back to sleep
• 7am got up to get ready
• 7:25 cooked soba noodles for lunch
• 7:40 studying
• 8:30am walking while studying on my phone
• 9am quiz, simpler than expected, all that studying and worrying last night was for nothing
• 9:40 chat with other students
• 10am stats class distracted and not focusing
• 12pm lunch with classmates, discussed best fast food place
• 1pm class, working on something else, not paying attention again
• 3pm went to T mobile to get free pickleball set
• 3:30 went to trader joes to buy unsweetened oat milk
• 4pm reached home
• 4:30 walked to ymca chinatown gym
• 5:30pm went to chinatown library to pick up 13 books and magazines
• 7pm cooking miso soup for dinner
• 9pm meal prep for tmrw
• 10pm laundry and homework
• 11pm homework + youtube
• 12am homework + blog

Daniel Pennac, a French writer, said: "Le temps s'arrête quand on lit. Comme quand on aime."

Roughly translates to English as: "Time stops when you read. As when you love.

gym-ed for the first time after almost 7 months, so insecure when high school students are in the gym are stronger than me. but i think my first set went well. I need a more structured routine. i need to streamline when i cook my meals, when i make my protein shake, when i call friends and family, when i do writing, when i code, when i go to events, when i study. lots of variables to optimize.

—

passed by warm springs and it brought back some familiar memories and feelings I used to have back then. i would be travelling back from SF. i was a differenet person back then. different problems, different wants and needs. it’s scary how much one year can change someone, but one year is a lot of time. I’m getting older, i have to start priotitizing, my decisions hold more weight now, my words and actions will start to determine the kind of person I am, my identity will start to shape into something solid, not malleable and spongy

remember Ben. POSITIVE and BRIEF. the only two things you need to keep in mind when someone asks you something. AVOID NEGATIVITY and make it SHORT. don’t complain. don’t go into the details. just focus on the good things. there’s enough negativity in the world.

next time before meeting friends i need to start practicing some answers in my head. i also need to remind myself of some common courtesy, asking people what their name is, introducing myself and saying goodbye to everyone directly to their faces. smile, and be kind hearted. compliment people. it’s so hard to socialize in a group of 10 tho, i am so bad already with a group of 3. i can’t be put on the spot, i get a major case of spotlight effect. also I need to be better at telling stories, i guess I don’t talk to people enough, or people dont ask me questions. when people ask me things, I often answer so badly, when it comes out of my mouth i start cringing at the things I say. I don’t know how to fix that. how to i have charisma? I also need to participate in conversations, I often just let other people talk, when I can inject my own opinions and thoughts, I guess I never did that much when I was growing up, which makes it hard now. I feel like my opinion doesn’t matter? or that I might say something dumb?

also i realize hanging out with friends is going to cost money, and it's really bad to quantify how much it costs to hang out. it reduces the relationship down to the quantifiable, when you can't put a price tag on friendships. but it's also hard since i'm not earning anything as a student, and i'm using my dad's money to have a good time.

so grateful for M for driving me back to home, was feeling so anxious about getting back late and not being fully prepared for quiz tomorrow, i’m glad I met him.

ismael kadare's paris review interview

• "Negative creation for a writer is what he doesn’t write. You need a great talent to know what you shouldn’t write, and in a writer’s consciousness nonwritten works are more numerous than the ones he has written. You make a choice. And this choice is important. On the other hand, one must liberate oneself from these corpses, bury them, for they prevent one from writing what one should, just as it is necessary to clear up a ruin in order to prepare the site for building."
• "I write two hours in the morning, and I stop. I can never write more—my brain gets tired. I write in a café around the corner, away from distractions. The rest of my time is spent reading, seeing friends, all the rest of my life."
• "Writing is neither a happy nor an unhappy occupation—it is something in-between. It is almost a second life. I write easily, but I’m always afraid that it may be no good. You need a stable humor; both happiness and unhappiness are bad for literature. When you are happy, you tend to become light, frivolous, and if you are unhappy your vision becomes perturbed. You have to live first, experience life, and later write about it."

reading about dog cloning, never knew this existed wow

• hoi polloi - the masses, ordinary folk, used In a derogatory way to refer to popular opinion
• Via Gen pets - $50k to clone your deceased cat or dog
• the ethical issue of monetizing bereaved pet owners, and using two other nameless dogs/cats in the process of making the artificial pup/kitten
• can’t recall much from the things I’ve read, worried my brain can’t store information anymore, its leaking with holes.

notes from church

Luke 22:3 Satan entered (Eserchomai) him = metaphorically, it means an evil thought entering Judas, betraying Jesus for money

Luke 19:9-10 today salvation has come to this house, because this man is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man has come to seek and to save that which was lost

Are you like Judas or the elder son in the prodigal son?

The dangerous sin is the hidden sin rather than the visible sin

Hidden sin is only between you and God

Sin is not necessarily criminal acts, it’s also your thoughts and words and behaviors and desires and greed and envy and spite and anger and bitterness and lust.

Charles Spurgeon “The nearer a man lives to God, the more intensely has he to mourn over his own evil heart”

I like this church so far, even though they’re all Indonesians, it’s a relatively small church, a tight-knit community, of families and friends and young adults and kids and uncles and aunties. I think I can pass as indonesian being light brownish yellow? But for a moment I felt out-of-place, I wanted to be back in Ames at the chinese church. But it wouldn’t be the same anymore. There’s always stages in life, and it’s always difficult crossing from one to the next, there’s an uncomfortable transitory phase. You have to get used to the different languages, the new people, and the new environment

Basketball was fun with them, haven’t played with a group in so long. I just keep missing my shots which makes me feel like a failure. i was mostly ok even though I played right after eating, so surgery actually helped a lot. Also it was windy and cold, so that’s my first time plying without sweating much.

I'm actually so slow at math, couldn’t play 24 well, was always the last. Is it anxiety? Is it self-doubt? Is it brain fog? Is it sleep deprivation? Was I always this slow? I remember i took an IQ sample test wi try my neighbor and I was quick at math. Maybe I’m just slow now. I wonder if I can be fast again.

What’s the right amount of studying? I study too little and I might be underprepared. And if I don’t do well, the damage was self-inflicted. Too much and it’s opportunity cost, I could’ve worked on something else. This is like a early stopping problem. When is the right time to stop the search, can studying be framed as a search problem? You’re searching for material that you might not be familiar with, and spend more time on the unknowns than the knowns. you practice and understand and encode, and hopefully it all sticks before you forget it all again in a few months or weeks. It applies to life too, when is the right time to stop and let go? To stop searching for answers? To stop spending so much time on the same things, chewing on the same bone, saying the same things, and just move on? Is anxiety and forlorn and longing a sign that it’s not worth clinging on? Or it’s all part of the process?

I placed a hold on a ton of journal/diary/notebooks of famous writers from SFPL and I’m excited to read them. I want to write in a way that I won’t cringe at myself if I read it the next day or week. (Not a year since writing ability improves overtime and this shows progress). I think I’m still figuring out a structure for these blogs. Or at least some form of purpose or goal. So I don’t spend too much time thoughts dumping. Reading their journals can help me organize these daily entries.

I read and consume so many things in a day. I find little snippets of text that I want to borrow for use in my own writing, like collecting sea shells and rocks from the beach. Also interesting ideas that I might want to resurface in the future. But how do I organize all of this? My brain only keeps what it needs. Is there still a use to reading if i only remember fuzzy and inaccurate versions of what I read? How can information retrieval be more accurate? Why is it that I forget what I read so easily?

Staring at my iPhone at night in my dark room is probably not a great idea for my sleep. I need my desk light, please ship it asap Temu.

“We are not going in circles, we are going upwards. The path is a spiral; we have already climbed many steps.” – Hesse, Siddartha

• Freedom is no fear
• The Hawaiian prayer Ho'oponopono is powerful for acknowledging that a wrongdoing has happened, asking for forgiveness, thanking, and loving. It can be directed towards other people, your emotions and feelings, to the universe, and to yourself. It is about restoring balance.
  • I'm sorry
  • Please forgive me
  • Thank you
  • I love you
• i would honestly prefer take econs or finance right now, watching just 5 minutes of this video and i realize i have zero finance knowledge
• someone said reading Sylvia Path’s journal was like putting your head in an oven, i wanna read it so bad now
• locked out of my room so I read New Yorker’s June 2024 issue that I borrowed from the library, read about Taiwan’s history and it’s pretty interesting. I realize for any current events, you can follow the thread of significant events in history that led to what you see today. Keep traversing backwards, ask the deeper questions, and you discover how things came to be today. Things like the Dutch ruling Taiwan, then Chinese, then Japanese, then the murky agreements between US and China and Taiwan that led to independence? I forget, I skimmed through the text. But much respect for Taiwanese, shouting “We are Taiwanese”. It also talks about how if an East Asia war broke out, it would have severe consequences, this guy wrote about how Japan should be preparing to defend Taiwan, and how you can make Taiwan an island that would deter China from attacking it. Oh and how XI is pushing to bring back Qing dynasty ruling? Unifying china into one?
• It also made me realize how much of the world I don’t know, that I never cared to know. i never have a strong urge to support a particular cause or to fight against a system. maybe i’ve just been living in a safe and privileged bubble, or the people I surround myself with aren’t the activist/political type.
• lately i’m forgetting why i’m here. why i’m spending so much of my dad’s money to be here. spending 4 hours at an art book fair, looking at art books by artists trying to make a living. enjoying myself, making a shrinky dink. i’m not pushing myself enough? the delicate balance between working hard and also relaxing. of doing what’s fun but also what’s hard. of striving for something great and also remembering that health matters. that every possible choice and action and word can change the trajectory of my life. i think i’m happy? am i happy? i still don’t know what i want. i feel like i want things other people want and that if i get those things i’ll be happy but i’m really not. why am i so empty sometimes? sometimes i realize i’m just surpressing a lot of emotions and I think i’m doing fine but it overflows. I’m sometimes excessively emotional and sentimental. but i guess it’s fine to let it out. i scroll back to old photos of people that are really far away, nostalgia is a double edged sword. i can’t look back to the past. i must resist the temptation of the past, a cozy and warm nook where I become apathetic. i remember how I felt so comfortable being with my family. i realize i do miss home, but being home wasn’t sustainable. i realize change is necessary. and change is hard. and change always requires sacrifice. and to live with that means acceptance, it means growing, it means holding up your end of the bargain of life, of doing good work, being kind, putting your gifts and talents to use, and being optimistic about the future, having indefinite optimism.
• I should sleep. i think i need more structure for these blogs. i want to make a book out of these entries one day. I also want to write better. i have to read more letters, and Sylvia Path’s journal and Kafka’s letters? what genre is this? autobiography and memoir?

Psalm 118:24: "This is the day that the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it"

• K indie artists: ALEPH, Black skirts, 10cm, dasutt, 92914, 1415
• my plant with the pink edges is called a peperonia jelly plant
• watched I Was An MIT Educated Neurosurgeon Now I'm Unemployed And Alone In The Mountains How Did I Get Here?
  • a hospital's goal is to make money, so they convince you of treatments (surgery, meds) that don't address the underlying issue.
  • he found common factors of people who healed: had healthy diets (low salt diet) (plant based), sweat and exercised, went to saunas. avoid smoking and overdrinking. had a meaningful community. good sleep. low stress
• opt-in vs opt-out for organ donation, people are less likely to opt-out because of status quo bias, default, choice architect, nudging human behaviour in policy making and experiments.
• I'm a costco member now
• so nice to meet up with old friends in sf and walk around in SF to continue conversations
• was in the most chaotic and messy mcd in my life at Market St, there were homeless, normies, 4 kids with bikes, i was leaning against the wall listening to clario and I felt so estranged, sf can really make you feel alone if you're not with other similar people, and it's unnerving being out alone at night.

Notes from Max Greenwald of Warmly (Deep End ODF episode)

the Early founder Bermuda triangle

• idea and vision
• Cofounder
• Money

When things get hard, you will fall back on doing things that feel accomplishable

Which sounds more fun?

Building the new feature than you can finish by tomorrow morning or pounding the pavement for hours on linkedin setting up user research where people will tell you why they hate your idea

Be aware of things that gives you energy and makes you feel accomplished and push away from them when you find yourself trending towards them when the going gets tough.

• quiz
  • Spent 45 minutes reviewing and checking answers repeatedly
  • questions i keep asking myself:
    • Where could I have made a mistake in this question?
    • Is this answer actually correct?
    • Could it be a different answer?
    • Can this answer be verified?
  • i need to view quizzes and exams in a different way to make it less pressuring, i also need to study more efficiently
• Notes from Experiments Book
  • Psychology vs. Economics Rules
    • should your experiment be psychological or economical?
    • psych: Difficulty navigating a website on first try = design flaw
    • econ: Wait until several interactions to decide if new design is easy or hard. the small blip of users leaving initially is inconsequential
  • Heuristics
    • Availability heuristics: Assessing frequency or probability based on readily available memory.
    • Representativeness heuristics: Making judgments based on previously formed stereotypes.
  • Framing
    • Gain frame vs. loss frame.
    • Risk averse vs. risk seeking.
  • Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL)
    • Randomized control trials for effective evaluations of development policies.
    • Example: Does giving new textbooks to schools in Kenya improve educational outcomes?
    • Cross-sectional correlation can be misleading (e.g., schools with textbooks may have access to good teachers and better parents).
  • Investing in Student Health and Facilities
    • Reduce poverty by ensuring policy is informed by scientific evidence, primarily through field experiments.
  • importance of policy making
    • Organ donation: Only one third of people get organs out of 100k; this policy issue is a matter of life and death.
• Scale AI
  • Spacious and modern office at 650 Townsend, 600k sq ft.
  • Hoping to see Alexandr; crazy that he started the company at a young age (19?).
  • Feeling too insecure to talk to anyone there.
• Tesla
  • Realizing past work was messy and incoherent.
  • Need to structure a story for interviews.

• wow orthoworks is great i’m surprised a bigger orthodontist chain charges lower, which I guess makes sense, independent dentists have to charge higher to pay for the equipments, i always though it was the other way around
• the iTero scanner is so cool, the one in Ames was so tedious and uncomfortable
• those flower looking plants are called Echeveria
• 4 for $20 mix and match at Safeway jackson st, cashback + no flies + no ordering in cantonese, my cashier was cantonese tho
• Cold Nights by Ba Jin is so sad, the ending where the wife comes back and realizes the ex-husband is dead and it ends with her walking in the cold at night. the letter she wrote to him was so human, so raw and real, i like reading letters. We need to bring back the art of writing long letters
• sfpl is so cool, i can borrow 100 physical items and putting for free up to $2
• finally get to have art as therapy in my hands
• almost got a panic attack in the library, spent 5 hours here mostly studying and reviewing that it was diminishing returns
• I could technically have a mini library at home if i borrowed a ton of books
• Library is only 9 min away so it’s convenient
• I like that they have magazines too , going to read the New Yorker more
• Its a blessing to have friends to call while walking
• So worried for the first quiz, more than I’ve been for finals at Iowa, feeling like i can’t trust myself, where is my faith?

got Wi-Fi today. cooked miso soup for the first time here. glass containers are here. small round plastic containers for nuts and cooking condiments are here. our trader joe's grocery bags are here. one step at a time. I want to start building. I want to make full use of my time here in SF. I want to meet people, learn from them and start building something useful, something valuable. I wanna get into SPC and YC. I want the O1 visa.

I want to work on fun side projects that get me out of bed, fired up, coding it non-stop. I don't want to be stressed out about quizzes or exams. I wanna be stressed out about whether I can get users, whether I have PMF, whether I'm working on the right idea. I don't wanna stress out about a few points that I lose on a quiz and whether my grades will be good enough. I don't want to be taking classes for the sake of classes. I want to learn for the sake of learning, to see my classes as an opportunity to go back to the basics to make sure I have the fundamentals and not as boring and tedious requirements that have no value to my future because I can just use ChatGPT to do most of the things in the future. I want to enjoy my time as a student after this is just gonna be work, I want to learn to live a little, and not be bogged down on the tiny details, optimizing towards the wrong thing, playing the wrong games.

It's hard to bring myself to study in SF because it to me was always a place of experimentation, of building, of excitement and creation. And these classes require me to go into the zone of doing a lot of practices that I feel like don't add value. But one thing about these exams is it made me realize that my flow of thinking is really flawed. I reach for the simpler and erroneous solutions really quickly and I don't spend time thinking through a problem. My brain is lazy. So I guess there's actually value in these quiz and exams. It makes me spend more time thinking about making sure that I learn how to notice patterns, how to apply prior knowledge onto a new problem and how to be more accurate and specific in my logic and thinking so I just have to work harder in terms of understanding and applying.

I really like it when I get DM's from people on Twitter I think one of the joys of my life is when I have messages from internet strangers, people who I've never met and probably will never meet in real life. I like building an audience. I like to have a public presence, running experiments and creating artifacts. I like to provide value through writing or through code. But I still have so much to learn. I have a long way to go. I still don't know what I want, but I guess there's no rush to figure that out.

getting easy questions wrong in arguably the easiest quiz I'll ever have in this program injected so much self doubt into my bloodstream that I immediately felt so alienated from everyone else who had no issues at all. i started to catastrophize, jumping from one worry to another in a never-ending domino effect. i never truly missed home until today, it wasn't the homeless nor the smell, nor the lack of structure and support system, it was the simple 16 question 22 minutes quiz and red boxes that made all the pieces fall, it shattered my worldview, robbed me of my confidence, the optimism and conviction, and replaced the glamor and sparkly of the city, with the gloom and misery. it made me notice all the sad things about the city, the minimum wage workers, the drug addicts and homeless, the empty stores. i lost my footing, i kept going in circles, wondering about why this happened, why it affects me so much, what this means from here, how this sets the tone of how i should focus in the future, what change i have to make, what expectations i should hold, and the attitude i should have towards the examinations. i started getting worried about the headaches i have, possible due to accutane, about my theoretically sufficient sleep that never seems to give me the energy i need, and about the future. it made me worry about not being able to handle the pressure, the expectations, and life in general.

the worries

• $6k for 18 months,$3k initial payment, this is so much money
• should i get dental insurance? is it even worth it? do i actually save? how to find the cheapest but not sacrifice quality?
• how do not fumble in future quizzes and exams so I won't get bad grades and fail to get good practicums
• how to study well, but not too much? how can i prepare just enough? i felt doubt in my answers, so maybe that's the sign. i have to study to the point where i have confidence in my answers
• how to cope with setbacks and unmet expectations and disappointments in a way that is constructive and productive
• how to deal with the headaches? how to get better sleep?

some wins and reminders of the bigger picture

• i get to be in SF!!!
• this is what i wanted, i am living the dream, and i have to live up to it
• don't expect it to be easy or straightforward, it is supposed to be hard, you're supposed to fail and fall down, make mistakes, it's all part of the dance
• quizzes and exams don't define me, i am more than my grades
• i visited a dentist and she was very nice and friendly, now i have an option for braces
• i get to do this cool program with a bunch of cool individuals and learn stuff that I won't have the motivation to learn myself
• i have korean and japanese and chinese grocery stores to explore and try out recipes
• i get to live with W and do stuff with him
• i have a father who is supporting me financially
• i have my mom i can talk to about my problems