it's my last day in SF for probably a long time. i wanted to visit a thrift store and get one piece of clothing, something i can wear as an outer layer, a casual jacket. i searched for thrift stores and found moody vintage to be a potential spot. from the hotel i walked along polk street, making a stop at Hoi An 1608 for pho. it was good.

at moody, i found a nice Carhartt denim jacket. mission accomplished. my last stop was russian hill book store, but just as i entered and started browsing i got boomed, and rushed back to the hotel to lock in.

i ordered echigo home cook curry to W's house, packed some stuff into the small luggage i bought, and then went to the airport. on the plane i read advice on upskilling by Justin Skycak. it was a good reminder about the importance of consistency, how to build skills, how to learn etc.

mood: 3/5

wake: 8:45 sleep: 2:00

meals:

• breakfast: pistachio nuts
• lunch: pho viet 1608
• dinner: echigo home cook chicken katsu

til:

• the PDX airport uses wood from locally salvaged Douglas fir trees, keeping it rooted in Oregon’s natural heritage.
• ZGF, the firm behind the Portland Airport redesign, designed iconic projects like the seat of the U.S. State Department in Washington, D.C., the Randall Children’s Hospital in Portland, and even parts of the Stanford University Medical Center. they're known for sustainability and blending natural elements into their designs
• learning and upskilling is all about deliberate practice and practicing how retrieval, so information is consolidated in your long term memory and can be loaded into working core memory

links:

• How AI impacts skill formation

stayed at the hotel literally the entire day after that just working, taking meetings. was also feeling stressed about contract and money involved in my move. i felt a sense of pressure to get it right, because it is a big move and i want to feel secure about it

mood: 2/5

wake: 10:00 sleep: 1:30

meals:

• breakfast: pistachio and cashews
• lunch: poke bowl from onigilly japanese kitchen
• dinner: chicken pho from saigon

grateful for: doordash

til:

• Python Type Hints and Future Annotations
• Thoughts on the Hiring Market in AI
• Nikon COOLPIX AW110
• sayings
  • 事缓则圆 (good things take time)
  • 塞翁失马焉知非福 (what looks like a loss might be a redirection. not everything lost was meant to be kept)

links:

• How I Prepared for DeepMind and Google AI Research Internship Interviews
• Bryan Cantrill: Andreessen’s Folly — The False Dichotomy of Software and Hardware

saw the motel in the daylight and it was very pretty. went to Peet's Coffee again to get work done. got hungry and went to eat ramen at hinodeya. bought dandelion chocolate red packet for T. passed by Fireside Camera and couldn't resist getting the charmera.

left to the FOUND hotel but this time in Nob Hill. i liked the one in Mason St more. it felt more japanese-like with the narrow corridors and small rooms, and the kitchen area and for one, an actual table in the room for working. this one had a HUGE closet space for absolutely no reason, and no table for me to work on.

went to W's house for laundry. worked there until midnight, when he got mad and kicked me out.

mood: 3/5

wake: 8:45 sleep: 2:00

grateful for: W

meals:

• breakfast: leftover japchae
• lunch: pork katsu ramen (hinodeya)
• dinner: hainan chicken rice with KALE and tomyum soup

at 2pm it was time to go to my dentist appointment. my dentist first told me the good news, that braces can come off. but the bad news was we can only do it on friday and i planned to leave on thursday. no big deal, i just had to move some plans around and miss my flight. talk about premature optimization. i seem to think the world revolves around me.

i packed and moved to my next hotel. in my head, i had booked different locations so that i could experience SF as much as possible before going back to Austin, so i stayed at the Marina Motel. that way i get to explore a bit of chestnut street.

after dropping off my things, i walked to peet's coffee and ordered another matcha drink, this time with pistachio milk. i booked more hotels and flights. i decided to just fly to seattle because why not?

at night i worked on a sofa and a single wooden chair, trying to eat korean food out of a plastic container.

mood: 3/5

wake: 9:00
sleep: 4:00

grateful for: dentists

meals:

• breakfast: pan fried buns
• lunch: dumplings
• dinner: korean beef stew with kimchi and rice

til:

• Cardamom is a spice made from the seed pods of various plants in the ginger family

to get some work done, i went to Saluhall, which is a food hall right beside IKEA. the space is nice, but there were barely any people here. i have not tried the food, but i can foresee this place closing down just like the San Francisco Centre. the sad reality of these spaces in SF.

at night i had dinner with W at Hon's Wun Tun House. i had been craving clams since i last had them on a cold windy day in SF. below was our order:

• 酸辣汤 (Hot & Sour Soup)
• 咖喱鱼蛋（Curry FiShanghai Balls)
• 清酒煮大蚬 (Clam with sake broth)
• 凉瓜牛肉 (Beef stir fried bitter melon)
• 家乡炒米粉 (Hometown Style stir-fried vermicelli)

as a chinese-malaysian i rate this place a strong 9/10.

i stayed at FOUND hotel at Mason St. it was surprisingly nice and clean given the location.

mood: 5/5

wake: 9:00
sleep: 1:15

meals:

• breakfast: fried rice ground beef
• lunch: mad greens bowl
• dinner: Hon's Wun Tun House bitter melon beef, clams sake

grateful for: wei

til:

• biomarkers are like a label on your cancer cell that tells doctors what type of cancer you have
• her2 = human epidermal growth factor receptor 2
• its a protein that sits on the surface of cancer cells like little antennas
• normal cell = few antenna
• her2+ = many antennas 100x more
• her2-low = more than normal
• her2-zero = barely any
• IHC is immunoHistoChemistry
• stains the HEr2 proteins and count them
• counts the her2 gene copies (blueprint for making her2 proteins)

mood: 2/5

wake: 10:00 sleep: 2:00

meals:

• breakfast: -
• lunch: ground beef fried rice with kimchi and cashews
• dinner: ground beef fried rice with kimchi and yoghurt

grateful for:

til:

• memory is a web of connections, when disparate neurons fire together, they wire together. connecting new words and grammar to sounds and ideas you have personal connection to makes it more sticky
• american english, R sound is back of mouth, L is tip of tongue against front teeth, japanese has an alveolar tap, where tip of tongue is on alveolar ridge, ra ri ru re ro, clown and crown sounds like kuraun

i woke up feeling giddy like it was christmas morning knowing there was snow outside my apartment. i hadn't seen snow since the 2022 winter in iowa, a cold and gruesome time, yet i think back on it fondly. i wore my only winter jacket i had left, brought my camera out and took pictures. that was the only time i left the house today. it felt like i'd travelled to a different world — like those movies where the sun is dying and the world is ending.

mood: 4/5

wake: 11:00
sleep: 1:30

meals:

• breakfast: soy drink
• lunch: salmon ground beef rice
• dinner: ground beef rice

grateful for: snow

til:

• Hirokazu Koreeda: Maborosi (1995), Still Walking (2008), Like Father Like Son (2013), Nobody Knows (2004), Our Little Sister (2015), After the Storm (2016), Broker (2022) and Shoplifters (2018).
• La bise is the traditional French greeting involving brushing cheeks and making a kissing sound
• keshi is from houston TX
• ad wrapping an SFMTA bus costs around $20k per 4-weeks

links:

• Olivia Tai
• Guidelines for Being a Grown-Up
• Modern-Day Social Etiquette You Should Know
• GQ's 125 Rules for the Modern Gentleman
• Lucas Burtin

weather in austin dropped as low as 4°C. my brain could not comprehend how austin's temperature could get so low. but i secretly enjoyed it. nothing beats a warm and cozy home while the weather outside is gobsmackingly freezing. it's something i could never experience in malaysia.

mood: 4/5

wake: 11:00
sleep: 2:00

meals:

• breakfast: -
• lunch: salmon with rice
• dinner: pork wantons

grateful for: heating

til:

• Spanish, French or Japanese are faster than English, but when you measure how much information they send per second, all human languages sit around the same universal speed limit of ~39 bits per second. Some cram more meaning into each syllable and speak slower, others fire lighter syllables faster, and your brain + familiarity + rhythm do the rest of the illusion.
  • Coupé, C. et al. (2019). Human language has a universal information rate.
  • CNRS (2019). Similar information rates across languages despite divergent speech rates.
  • Pellegrino, F. et al. (2011). A cross-language perspective on speech information rate
• more about the waterdrop filter: the filter is like a sponge made of tiny beads. these beads are coated with special chemicals that grab bad stuff from your water (like metals and minerals). overtime they fall apart and release trimethylamine (TMA). boiling makes it worse because they turn into gas and goes up your nose. as cold water they stay dissolved and you don't smell it much.

links:

• Patrick Collison - Novels
• Goodreads - Alan Kay's Reading List
• General Zuo's Chicken - another trip to china by Nancy

  i see the culture fully expressed in every facet of life, instead of reduced down to “szechuan cuisine” or one stereotypical asian role or tv show. i feel understood looking at all the on sale signs of items always pretending to be on sale because chinese will only buy things on sale

  just another diluted version of chinese culture.

  adidas neo-chinese style that’s been overtaking the internet with its blend of east and west, and how beautiful i find the blend of culture

  ‘you will be important one day because you understand both sides.’

• The Walt Disney Family Museum - Tyrus Wong and the Art of "Bambi"
• Wikipedia - Paper sons

dreamt that i was late to an exam and did not study for the exam too. double whammy. i've had a lot more exam dreams since i joined OE.

discovered isometric NYC, a side project from an engineer at Deepmind who wanted to build a giant isometric pixel-art map of New York City. he goes into the nitty-gritty of fine-tuning Qwen/Image-Edit models to generate each tile, how he did the training, scaled the generation, handled edge cases, and built micro tools at every step. it's not often you see someone approach a vibe-coded project with that level of detail, and you can tell he has real experience building things.

i liked the part about how as an artist, a big chunk of time in creation doesn't require creativity — it's just "slog". every creative field, be it animation, video, or software, is full of tedious tasks. you can argue that these tasks are what refines your instinct, but the quality of your art may just be defined by the quality of your decisions instead. to quote: "how much work you put into something is just a proxy for how much you care and how much you have to say."

i think i agree to a certain extent. i think everyone has to go through the grind of tedious work to appreciate the effort that goes into craft. if all art creation was easy, would people still want to pursue it?

i really want to recreate this project for my home town, Kuala Lumpur. maybe one weekend when i have too much time on my hands.

mood: 3/5

wake: 10:30
sleep: 3:00

meals:

• breakfast: banana pumpkin seed yoghurt
• lunch: hainanese
• dinner: hainanese and kimchi

grateful for: Lee's Kitchen

til:

• violin is smaller higher pitched, soprano voice (tuned GDAE, while viola is larger, lower pitched, alto voice (tuned CGDA)
• grounding = standing on grass/dirt/sand barefoot so electrons flow into your body
• muon optimizer, created by keller jordan, a neural network optimizer designed specifically for hidden layers in NNs, using matrix orthogonalization rather than element-wise adaptive learning rates in Adam / AdamW. orthogonalization is done efficiently using Newton-Schulz iteration rather than expensive SVD
• waterdrop pitcher once it is exhausted, it releases TMA, which is the same compound that gives fish their characteristic fishy odor.

links:

• Cannoneyed - Isometric NYC

  What’s possible now that was impossible before?

  The biggest joy of this project was the ability to build tools at the speed of thought. As a software developer, I think of a million little tools I’d like to have but would take a day or a week to build. With Claude or Cursor, I can whip them up in 5 minutes. This is absolutely transformational - it’s like having an infinite toolbox

  composability is huge and even more valuable in the context of vibe coding. The Unix philosophy of small, modular programs that do one thing well means that we can easily compose smaller tools into utility functions that can be reused by higher-level applications. By designing pieces of functionality in a modular way, you can most effectively leverage the coding agent - it’s easier for you to specify simple behavior, it’s easier for the agent to build, debug, and test these modular pieces, and it’s easier to stitch them together into higher level apps later on. This is standard software engineering best practices, and it’s more relevant now that the cost of code is approaching zero

been reflecting on how i'm progressing and whether i'm growing at work and what i can do better. went to get ramen outside my apartment. it's not as good as marufuku, although i think getting it as takeout plays a role in that experience. the few times i went to marufuku it was with loved ones, so i might just be biased.

mood: 3/5

wake: 11:00
sleep: 3:00

meals:

• breakfast: banana
• lunch: sweetgreen chicken wildrice bread yoghurt
• dinner: ramen tatsuya miso pork ramen

grateful for: ramen

til:

• tuna swims constantly even when they're sleeping that's why they have developed muscles
• goose only lay eggs during breeding/mating season
• kairuku language in papua new guinea
• "What's a question that I didn't ask, that you think I should know about?"

links:

• Terminal-Bench
• Noam Brown on landing a research job at a frontier AI lab
  • "Keller graduated from UCSD with no publication record and was working at an AI content moderation startup when he landed a cold call with Behnam Neyshabur (who was at Google) and presented an idea to improve upon Behnam's recent paper. Behnam agreed to mentor him, which led to an ICLR paper"
  • "Later, Keller got on OpenAI's radar thanks to the NanoGPT speed run he started. All his work was documented and it was easy to measure his success, so the case for hiring him was strong"
• GitHub - gpu-perf-engineering-resources: A curriculum for learning about GPU performance engineering
• GPU Glossary - README

cooked steak and spinach with turmeric rice.

saw an instagram post that SF's biggest mall is officially closing. i remember going up to SF and stumbling on the mall in 2022, one weekend, during my summer internship at Tesla. it was a typical mall. but year after year watching it slowly die out, it was both sad yet practical. i wish this place could be repurposed into something more useful like a coworking spot, or a big muji store, or an apartment, or a school. so many possibilities.

mood: 3/5

wake: 10:30 sleep: 1:30

meals:

• breakfast: -
• lunch: steak spinach rice
• dinner: steak rice

grateful for: cows

til:

• the word cheugy, describing something that is slightly outdated or trying hard to be trendy

1. watch a horror movie (for funny reactions) on teleparty
2. play an online game together (it takes two is fun)
3. cook the same meal and have an at home dinner date
4. send each other surprise food deliveries
5. read a book together and talk about it every week
6. virtual workout session at home
7. create a shared playlist together
8. make vision boards together
9. do a personality test together
10. plan what dates you want to have once you see each other again
11. virtual house hunting to imagine your dream home
12. send voice notes and vlogs instead of text
13. write each other real letters and mail them
14. make a shared photo album for different things (meals, travels, pictures together)
15. make a shared life bucket list
16. build something collaborative online (website, notion page, a cool app?)
17. play minecraft and explore the world and build your dream house
18. meditate and journal in silence but in each other’s presence
19. play we’re not really strangers online
20. go on facetime dates (might drain your battery though!)

mood: 2/5

wake: 10:30 sleep: 3:00

meals:

• breakfast: pumpkin seed, yoghurt cumin biscuits
• lunch: gimbap
• dinner: salmon chicken, mother earth bowl

grateful for: salmon

links:

• Robin Hanson - Write To Say Stuff Worth Knowing

austin has the quiet energy of the midwest. got sweet greens. i've been switching things up, so i'm not eating the same thing from flowerchild every day. got matcha latte from Local Foods.

the thing i keep coming back to: you can't compete with someone having fun. am i having fun here? what's stopping me from having fun?

mood: 4/5

wake: 11:00
sleep: 2:45

meals:

• breakfast: cumin cracker banana nut butter
• lunch: sweet green miso glazed salmon
• dinner: leftover + rice

grateful for: the internet

til:

• peter naur programming as theory building (link)
  • "the designer's job is not to pass along 'the design' but to pass along 'the theories' driving the design"
  • any modification can be done many ways that all "work." but viewed through the lens of theory:
    • Some extend the theory naturally (elegant)
    • Others contradict the theory (patches/hacks)
    • Only someone with the theory can tell the difference

links:

• The Missing Semester of Your CS Education 2026
• My six stages of learning to be a socially normal person

some excerpts from Stay True:

• american life is unbounded promise
• immigrants are discussed in terms of push and pull dynamic: something pushes you from home, something pulls you far away.
• opportunities dry up one place and emerge somewhere else
• they chose the occasional loneliness, the meandering lifestyle, the language barrier
• bob dylan, beatles, neil young, aretha franklin, ray charles
• the who, jimi hendrix, pink floyd, blind faith

is going out to cafes without a charger a productivity hack? the time pressure forces you to lock in, and it also prevents you from overworking.

i love central market. it's the best grocery store i've ever been to. full stop. i got ny steak, almond milk, pistachio milk, spinach, blueberries, bananas, kimchi, tofu, coconut yoghurt.

mood: 4/5

wake: 11:00
sleep: 3:00

meals:

• breakfast: rice chicken beef kimchi
• lunch: 6pm taco deli chicken res rice avo mash pumpkin seeds
• dinner: -

grateful for: tex mex

til:

• Pharmacy Benefit Managers (PBMs) are the reasons why drugs are expensive in the US, the middleman who price drugs high.
  • 80% of drug transactions are dominated by a few major players like CVS Caremark, Express Scripts, and Optum RX
  • incentivized to favor drugs with higher list price so they can demand larger rebates from manufacturers, to increase their own earnings
  • collect billions in fees and markup drug prices, and keeping the profits rather than lowering cost
  • a product of US private insurance model. unlike SEA like Malaysia where government is the dominant payer, and are negotiating directly with manufacturers.
• you can use this js code to expand all github items

(function clickLoadMoreButtons() {
let loadMoreButton = document.querySelector('.ajax-pagination-btn');
if (loadMoreButton) {
loadMoreButton.click();
setTimeout(clickLoadMoreButtons, 1000);  // Adjust timeout as needed
}
})();

i dreamt that i was sensitive to light and couldn’t face the window or look at my phone. i knew my boss had slacked me and i tried reading it but it was just blank. the weird thing was i tried covering my eyes and i could still see through my hands. i even remembered asking siri to ask chatgpt what was going on — and the oddest part about that was that i was using siri.

played on the nature of daylight by Max Richter on repeat. it was used in Arrival (2016) and Shutter Island (2010), two films with really good endings. the kind that stays with you for a few days, even weeks. it was written as a protest against the 2003 Iraq War and a meditation on personal and societal violence.

What I wanted to try and do was try and create something which had a sense of luminosity and brightness, but made from the darkest possible materials

– Max Richter

mood: 3/5

wake: 14:00
sleep: 3:55

grateful for: music that moves people

meals:

• breakfast: -
• lunch: chicken spinach biscuits
• dinner: rice chicken beef

til:

• BaseModel and Configurables

links:

• Factory Methods Python

heard someone say ai workflow automation walking on the streets, but to be fair i was right outside the google sail building.

went to the public library to pick up my free 3d print. if you're an austin library card holder, you get one print for free each month. i got my first, and probably last one.

got a call — i might have an autoimmune disease. i have to see a rheumatologist. it instantly filled me with anxiety. i was fully healthy until i turned 19, when covid lockdown started. since then, problems have come up almost every year. but my life has adapted to them — i got to go home to receive the care and treatment i needed. things happen, but that doesn't mean there aren't solutions. i need a perspective shift on suffering.

simone weil believed that intense suffering is the point where the soul is closest to God, provided it leads to a state of humble, patient "waiting" and attention. qualities that are hard to come by in today's achievement-seeking, fast-paced, attention-fragmented world.

mood: 2/5

wake: 10:30
sleep: 4:44

grateful for: T's patience for me

meals:

• breakfast: cashews and cumin biscuits
• lunch: steak bowl from honest marys
• dinner: leftover w yoghurt

til:

• google has 417b queries per month
• 3,600 calories a day is the average american adult consumption
• clinical trials cost (source)
  • median CT enrollee cost is ~$40,000
  • standardizing care (20-30% of cost) take the sickest slice of the population and place them in a new system where sponsor pays for all the care, this ensures the best standard of care to properly conduct the experiment and avoid variables caused by diff background therapies. this includes more testing, visits, best-in-class medicine.
  • institutional premiums : a significant portion of expense is a premium paid to institutions (rather than individual physicians)
  • location competition: placing trial at famous high performing health systems (md anderson) because these systems are congested with trials, slowest and most expensive to operate
  • regulatory friction: decentralized ethics clearance system (IRB) which requires seeking approval from every individual hospital system involved (4% cancer enrollment), unlike Australia which utilizes single nation system (25% cancer enrollment)
  • enrollment delays: waiting for patients, drug development takes 7-10 years, half of that time is waiting for patients to enroll. this cost is escalating at 7 to 8% over the last decade
• next.js app router vs page router
  • in app router page loads in layers so you can stream HTML in chunks rendering certain pages faster so one slow data dependency doesn't block the whole page

links:

• The entangled brain
• The Most Dangerous Mindset I See as a Therapist
  • "Genius is the infinite capacity for taking pains." — Thomas Carlyle
  • something easily gained is easily lost
  • if you've been using AI for programming for a while, and you feel dumb when you don't have it, it's not because your brain has melted and it doesn't function like it used to, it's because you've forgotten how it feels to endure discomfort for an extended period of time. that's the skill that has atrophied as a result of relying too much on AI assistants.
  • when you're doing something you haven't done before, you're going to spend most of your time confused, and trying to figure things out, that's normal!
• Going direct: notes on Eli Lilly at a trillion
• Annotating for Agents
  • how to provide visual feedback to llms with precision

starting to close out my PRs and can feel the weight lifting from my shoulders. i keep realizing that claude often leads me down the wrong paths — i'm still figuring out the best way to use it without being misled. having AI at the start of my first real job is a blessing and a curse.

watched blade ii. i can't recall when i watched blade i, but i remember liking the feel of it. it felt like the matrix, but a vampire edition. the first blade was released in 1998 and the matrix in 1999. so maybe that explains why. the techno, moody, dark cinematography. the leather costume. the ONE. the martial arts. one theory i read is in the late '90s, Hollywood leaned into cyberpunk stories to tap into the anxieties about rapid evolution of technology, the internet, and questions about reality. i also liked that donnie yen was in blade ii.

mood: 4/5

wake: 10:30
sleep: 3:40

meals:

• breakfast: pumpkin seed, yoghurt, smoked salmon, cumin biscuits
• lunch: hainanese chicken
• dinner: hainanese chicken

grateful for: late '90s movies

discovered i was in the internet phone book issue 1. i love the concept. an entire book of personal websites. wanted to get my hands on it but it did not seem possible. i got in my waymo with my xteink x4 in hand, reading a few pages of Stay True. it's hard to get some in between time to read when my waymo only takes 5 minutes to get to the office. then it's work, and when i get home, it's more work. the only in between time i have is when i'm eating but i'm usually on Youtube. other times it's chores, and calling with T or friends or my parents. how does one read in this day and age?

mood: 3/5

wake: 10:40
sleep: 4:15

meals:

• breakfast: blue corn chips avo hummus and yoghurt and pumpkin seeds
• lunch: moon bowl beef avo kimchi
• dinner: leftover w rice and cucumber

til:

• 6.2k open gate fujifilm xm5
• curiosity is a love language

links:

• The 2025 Intellectual Output I'm Proud Of
• Best Books, Essays and Poems of 2025
• Hiro Isono
• curius

grateful for: waymos

the x-ray and MRI experience at ARA was great. i was given a blanket, and the tech even asked for my music requests while i was in the machine. of course i went for ghibli soundtracks.

i was in and out in under an hour.

mood: 5/5

wake: 10:30 sleep: 2:51

meals:

• breakfast: pita bread, avocado hummus, smoked salmon spinach tofu
• lunch: miso chicken soup with mung bean noodles and chicken and seaweed
• dinner: leftovers above and cauliflower and tofu

grateful for: healthcare workers who are nice and explains what is going on

baking models today, learned the choices for attn_implementation:

1. Eager: computes the full $\text{softmax}(\frac{QK^T}{\sqrt{d}})$ matrix and store it in GPU memory, causing $O(N^2)$ memory
2. SDPA - scaled dot product attention. it picks the best kernel for your hardware, if flash attention available, picks that.
3. flash attention – breaks the Q,K,V matrices into tiles that fit in SRAM (on-chip memory), computes attention for each tile, and accumulate result without ever materializing the full NxN attention matrix. O(N) memory

mood: 3/5

wake: 10:00
sleep: 0200

meals:

• breakfast: tofu, spinach, smoked salmon, pumpkin seeds, yoghurt
• lunch: hu tieu kho, shrimp, pork belly & crispy shrimp dumpling soup
• dinner: leftovers

til:

• sdpa attention
• continuous batching, prefill-decode disaggregation, kv cache, prefix aware and expert layer routing for llm inference
• when model training, imagine you’re trying to steer a car to stay in the center of a lane.
• Gradient = the steering instruction (“turn left/right”)
• Grad norm = how hard you’re yanking the wheel overall
• Hủ tiếu = noodle, khô = dry

links:

• timecapsule LLM
• Making Software
• If you have multiple interests, do not waste the next 2-3 years
  • build an idea museum
  • write 1 idea 1000 different ways

grateful for: noodles

went to christian life austin, the theme was about living intentionally. we don't just fall into a good career, a good relationship, a good business. we spend time to nurture our hearts.

i learned about the prayer that Jabez prayed in 1 Chronicles 4:9.

the prayer:

1. starts with a promise – "oh, that you would bless me"
2. influence and ministry – "and enlarge my territory"
3. asks for God's presence – "Let your hand be with me
4. protection – "and keep me from harm, so i will be free from pain"

i find it hard to pray consistently — i've been falling asleep in bed before i finish my prayers. that tells a lot about how much i actually believe in the importance and power of prayer. the above is a good template to start with.

i had an idea for an app that tracks prayers so you can look back and see how many were answered, and remind yourself to pray for people — both loved ones and strangers.

mood: 4/5

wake: 10:35
sleep: 2:00

meals:

• breakfast: smoked salmon tortilla yoghurt pumpkin seed
• lunch: steak cauliflower rice
• dinner: steak cauliflower rice

til:

• the red juice that comes out of steak is not blood its myoglobin the protein that stores oxygen, mixed with water from meat and turns red when oxidized
• 30 minutes of leaf blower has more pollution than driving a pickup from texas to alaska
• leaf blowers are banned in washington
• feluca (a traditional wooden sailing boat on the Nile in Egypt)

grateful for: steaks

lunch at flowerchild. i got yakisoba noodles, this time without sauce. then went up to the office to work.

i got my austin library card. i was looking forward to getting this card not for books but for one free 3d print each month. i submitted a print job for an xteink x4 case using a free design i found online.

then went to TJ, got steak, smoked salmon, bananas, spinach.

mood: 4/5

wake: 10:00
sleep: 3:35

meals:

• breakfast: tofu spinach
• lunch: yakisoba chicken noodles
• dinner: yakisoba chicken noodles

til:

• postage stamps cost $0.78
• ponzi scheme was named after italian con artist charles ponzi, who arbitraged international reply coupons for postage stamps
• transformers are a strict superset of CNNs, can handle multiple modalities, and also take advantage of parallelism (source)
• "easy things should be easy, and hard things should be possible" - larry wall on perl
• syncretism: merging of various beliefs/schools of thought
• candles have memory. when you first burn a candle, you have to be careful not to let unmelted wax remain around the edges. doing so will cause tunneling, where the surrounding layers become harder and less likely to burn evenly
• you can rent the entire isabella stewart gardner museum for 30k

grateful for: libraries

went to the office, ordered hainanese chicken rice with extra chicken for lunch and dinner. worked from 1pm till 3:30am, kept getting stuck on integrating my feature into a new system. the pressure of moving fast is making it hard to slow down, understand the big picture, and solve things methodically. i guess that's something you learn with more experience.

got my xteink x4 in the mail. i love the rise of calm technology, single use devices that do one thing extremely well. this pairs well with my innioasis y1.

a few useful links for the device. gathered from this video by pixel leaves

• epub to XTC converter - convert epub files to XTC format
• BMP wallpaper converter - convert images to BMP format
• Crosspoint flash tool - a website to help u flash with just a click of a button
• Crosspoint user guide - use guide for crosspoint

mood: 2/5

wake: 10:30 sleep: 03:50

meals:

• breakfast: tofu spinach
• lunch: hainanese chicken
• dinner: hainanese chicken

til:

• XTC (Xteink Text Container) is a proprietary e-book format created specifically for Xteink devices. Here's what makes it interesting:
• BMP = bitmap file

grateful for: crusou, founder of Xteink for making the device

parents left for malaysia today. i wasn't as sad this time, knowing they'll be back soon once i'm settled in miami.

went to the office after two months. back to flower child. tried out a biking simulator where you could play games. it was addictive. the animation was minecraft-like. it felt more fun than a peloton. peloton is corporate gym, this expresso HD feels like a local-owned fitness center. took a break at night to catch up on my blog. this place is my safe place, my way of decompressing.

mood: 3/5

wake: 10:00
sleep: 01:26

meals:

• breakfast: soup
• lunch: mother earth bowl
• dinner: mother earth bowl and tortilla

til:

• the word sauna is ancient finnish, the only finnish word adopted into English language
• finnish dry sauna = wood-lined room heated by a stove with stones, and water is thrown on the rocks to create steam
• 4+ sauna sessions per week = 40% reduced risk of dying from any cause bryan johnson

grateful for: expresso hd upright bike

meetings about CT and business review. got overwhelmed by everything needed to get it out. my mind kept racing and i kept getting switched between contexts until it felt like it was going to burst. i was scatter-brained.

one negative pattern i want to kill this year is my tendency to believe that if there's a deadline or an urgent task to complete, i can just power through it and strap myself down in front of my laptop and the answer will just appear. if i just grind on the problem, i'll get everything done.

but what i'm finding in reality is that i just get more and more overwhelmed and the problems dance around my head, taunting me. i need to learn how to handle urgent pressure while still delivering quality work and, most importantly, taking care of my health.

mood: 1/5

wake: 9:05
sleep: 2:15

meals:

• breakfast: miso soup with tofu
• lunch: salmon, zucchini, sweet potato
• dinner: falafel and basmati rice and cauliflower

til:

• prettier, react native and excalidraw was created by Vjeux

grateful for: parents

i haven't gotten a haircut in austin yet. my last cut was done by T and she did a good job, but a few strands of hair that fell to the front of my forehead were starting to bother my eyes, poking mercilessly.

i looked up korean haircuts in austin and cnn hair salon was the first that popped up. i read through google reviews, chose the barber with the best comments, and put in my credit card to book a time.

when i arrived, i felt intimidated. all the barbers were korean. i quickly googled 'nice haircuts for asian men with thick, straight hair.' i pulled up substack while i waited for my turn. when i sat down, the lady with short, dark red hair and tattoos on one arm spoke softly. she took a quick sip of her starbucks iced coffee before she politely asked what i wanted. i showed her the picture and she looked at it for a while, calculating the steps needed to get from the mess on my head to that picture.

she worked with precision. the scissors and razors moved swiftly around my head. every cut was calculated. i didn't say a word. i never know what to do while sitting in that chair. i just close my eyes and try to relax. i always feel so tense there. having someone cut your hair feels vulnerable, it's almost as if one wrong cut and your life is ruined. at the end she even washed my hair and styled it with product. she told me she was finished, and i thanked her. the total came up to be about 35 and i tipped 5 dollars. this was the most expensive haircut i've ever had, and also my first time getting a "korean" cut. my experience was 10/10 and i'd come back again if i could.

i also got my TX driver's license today, which i'll have to soon surrender once i move to miami. i'm not a fan of this design. i miss my california license. the golden bear with a star has become a boring black circle with a star. it compensates for the boring color with galloping mustangs.

mood: 4/5

wake: 10:30
sleep: 01:00

meals:

• breakfast: mom cooked soup
• lunch: mom's noodles
• dinner: chicken, turmeric rice, zucchini

til:

• the texas DL were updated in august 2025 to have a tamper-resistant polycarbonate and a laser-engraved black star for REAL ID
• mustang is a free-roaming horse coming from the Spanish word mesteño meaning wild

grateful for: korean barbers

first standup of 2026. time to get back to work. i had anxiety coming back to this day — all the pressure of work came flooding back in. i try to hold onto my core values and remind myself of the mission and the impact.

finally got my new camera battery charger and lens hood, labelled on amazon as JJC Lens Hood for Fujifilm Fuji and USB Dual Battery Charger for Fujifilm NP-95 FinePix. i like the idea of upgrading accessories for a third-hand fujifilm camera — the art of maintenance.

i couldn't stop working till late at night, parents had to literally feed me food. i'm so glued to my computer. this has to change in 2026. also spent hours trying to decide a date to move to miami and sent my lease notice of intent to vacate.

mood: 3/5

wake: 10:30
sleep: 02:00

meals:

• breakfast: moms soup w potato and pumpkin
• lunch: moms soup
• dinner: noodles and chicken

til:

• jjc (founded 2005) is a chinese third-party camera accessories company based in shenzhen that makes affordable alternatives to expensive first-party gear. they got iso 9001 certification and multiple patents. they make everything from lens hoods to battery chargers to remote controls

grateful for: companies that remake products at a lower price without sacrificing quality

my dad asked chatgpt for churches in austin, and it recommended christian life church. they had four services that go as late as 1 p.m. so we decided to go for the 11:30 one. to make use of time, we first went to uncommon objects for a bit of antique shopping, an activity my mom loves.

when we got to christian life church, we were welcomed with open arms. they told us about 6000 people attend across all services. when we stepped foot into the main hall it felt like a concert. you had people standing at the door to check your bags, and people guiding you to your seats. if you were a first timer, you get special seats with the best view. we felt like VIPs.

the worship was great. the music, the energy, i loved it. they had really good singers, like hillsong level singers. the pastor was young, in his 30s, and had the humor that would get the whole place laughing. his charisma was maxed out. his sermon was short and sweet though. it touched on one chapter, and he kept things light, but he lit a flame in you without condemning you. he also kept it relatable and brought things down to level with you.

for lunch we went to buffet palace. it was 20 dollars for an unlimited buffet of sushi, crawfish, korean kalbi short ribs, crab legs, and more. my parents were excited about the crawfish. we spent 2 hours there before we went to regal westgate to watch we bury the dead. it was honestly not bad. i expected a zombie movie but it was more of a movie about accepting grief and loss. the ending wasn't great but it was a fun watch. i liked the scene where the dad zombie dug his own grave for his family.

then we went to central Market which was nearby and got a few things. my parents loved the store, and were surprised at seeing so many kinds of potatoes and apples and lemons.

mood: 5/5

wake: 09:05
sleep: 01:30

meals:

• breakfast: noodles chicken spinach
• lunch: chinese buffet
• dinner: leftover beef ribs pho

til:

• central market austin was h-e-b's answer to whole foods (which started in austin in 1980).

grateful for: movie theaters and grocery stores

brought my parents around ut austin. started at the harry ransom center to see the gutenberg bible, then took some pictures around the tower, walked by littlefield fountain which naturally led us to the blanton museum of art. wanted to check out the "austin" building by ellsworth kelly but you had to buy a ticket to get in.

after that took them to guadalupe x W 29th street - a cluster of thrift stores. hit alienated majesty books, lofi vintage, pavement, leopard lounge. dinner at sip pho. this place was surprisingly good.

mood: 4/5

wake: 10:00
sleep: 01:50

meals:

• breakfast: mediterranean leftover bread, mashed avocado, smoked salmon, matcha
• lunch: udon noodle chicken tofu spinach
• dinner: chicken pho

til:

• ut austin has one of only 5 complete copies of the gutenberg bible in the us. printed in germany in the 1450s by gutenberg. it's the first book made with movable type. only about 150 were originally printed, and only 20 complete copies survive worldwide.
  • sources say it was purchased for $2.4m in 1978 (about $11.5m today)
• niépce heliograph is the world's oldest surviving photograph, and austin is the only place that has it. made in 1826 or 1827 by french inventor joseph nicéphore niépce. it's a view from his window - took 8 hours of exposure on a pewter plate.
• battle hall, designed in 1911 by cass gilbert (same guy who designed the woolworth building and the supreme court building). it was ut's first library and the first building on campus with the spanish-mediterranean style - red tile roof, cream limestone, arched windows.

grateful for: parents presence

watched wallace and gromit over lunch with my parents – a grand day out and the wrong trousers. i can't believe it's been more than 30 years. it oozes charm and is a spark of creativity.

walked from home to the pfluger pedestrian bridge. twenty-five minutes felt like an hour. walking in austin is less enjoyable than sf. sf has tight grids, each block the same size, buildings line the street without gaps. austin's downtown is cut in half by highway 35, the streets are wide and built for cars going 70 mph. walking feels hostile even when there's a sidewalk.

on the bridge i got an error on slack, and i sat on a chair, connected to my mobile hotspot and started writing a fix. after that we went to trader joes to stock up.

mood: 4/5

wake: 11:30
sleep: 02:30

meals:

• breakfast: -
• lunch: chicken and beans
• dinner: Dimassi's Mediterranean Buffet chicken

grateful for: trader joe's

two quotes to anchor the year

“Blind as we are, we hinder God, and stop the current of His graces. The Practice of the Presence of God

“We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom.” E.O. Wilson

i have a habit of setting ambitious goals and accomplishing only a few of them. this time, instead of resolutions, here's a wish list—things i hope to do.

create

• raspberry pi + eink display project
• one photo each day for my blog
• (revive) a monthly newsletter with W on substack
• an app on the App Store
• research paper for ucsf
• ghibli sketch book with fineliner pen
• sketch with color pencils
• photography website for photos i took in SF
• song for T
• short story in mandarin
• matcha bowl and cup in pottery class

consume

• read 10 books
• no doomscrolling in bed (morning/night)

health

• not be in the ER
• ~60 kg
• gym >5x a week
• sleep latest by 1 am
• try therapy for anxiety

faith

• serve in church
• 1x a week bible study with T
• read ~50% of the bible, first thing in the morning/before bed

relationship

• call friends once a week
• pay full attention in calls with family and T
• make a new friend

work

• sacred time of rest on Sunday (morning to evening)
• reach 300 PRs merged (80 as of time of writing)
• get better at thinking through problems like an engineer (design, tradeoffs, proposing solutions that actually make sense)
• learn how to give fun presentations
• make people laugh/get to know colleagues more
• get O1

learn

• 100 anki spanish daily phrases
• 500 anki mandarin flashcards
• one piano song i can play when asked
• mahjong

travel

• vancouver
• new york

fun

• snorkeling in key biscayne
• skiing

financial

• have $150k
• invest $50k

we visited the capitol building, which is the largest in the US. then had lunch at 1618 restaurant, which my parents said had better food and service than mansion and 5x cheaper. then dropped sis at the south terminal, got some stuff at walmart, and returned rental car. my dad and i got on lime scooters and rode back home in the cold. at 12:02 i woke my parents up to see fireworks at skyview 7th floor. that marked the end of 2025.

a short reflection on the year

places

i visited more places in the US this year than any other year. a few snippets of memories and emotions tied to each place

SF (jan-jul)

i moved to SF in july 2024 and landed in chinatown with W, my best friend from malaysia. we never planned to live there – it just happened to be available on craigslist and wasn't a scam. for $2300 a month, the 2b1b apartment sandwiched between ccsf and other apartments, was dark gray and minimal like an ikea showroom. not much light could get into the apartment. it did come furnished with an ikea desk and chairs, and two airbeds, left by a startup founder who left the country for reasons we were not aware of.

we slowly built a small personal map of chinatown, pinning down spots like grocery stores with the lowest price for a certain ingredient – Hua Xing sold bitter melon and vegetables the cheapest, Dong Hing, right next door, had the lowest prices for tofu, Sheng Hing is where i bought cherries, one time for just $1.29 a pound. Wo Chong, for homemade soy milk. inside these stores, you would see old aunties and uncles, wrapped in thick jackets, pulling large trollies, pushing and squirming to pay. the cashiers would be hostile, and if you're too slow, they'd have an exasperated look on their faces, telling you to hurry up. sometimes the best thing you can do is just to hand them your cash and coins, and they would count it for you, and it would be time for you to scurry off.

mona lisa salon, where the lady there would roast your hair style and deliberately ignore your instructions and cut your hair the way she thinks is good for you. Yee's where you would get free soup and amazing stewed beef, Capitol with the best fried chicken wings in the bay, Gourmet Kitchen which sells a rice with two dishes meal for only $8 dollars, Hon's wun-tun with killer pan-fried pork buns and ginger and clam soup, and Ma's dimsum & cafe that only accepts cash, gives you a taste of real claypot rice that you get in hong kong.

chinese united methodist church where i had the pleasure and privilege of serving there with the worship team, in cantonese and in english, i didn't get as involved with the young adults as much as i wanted, but every now and then when i go back to sf, i would attend church, and their face would light up when they see me. every week i would go to their mandarin service, a way to practice my mandarin, and a chance to write out the language on my remarkable tablet. although it was hard to follow since the pastor often spoke in idioms.

outside from chinatown, i loved going to the ferry building to write this blog or read, i finished reading mere christianity in the common area in between the bookstore and a restaurant. i loved walking through the little stores on each side, selling expensive olive oil and chocolates and empanadas oozing rich smell of butter, therapeutic window shopping.

i would also frequent japantown. forest books which smells like a buddhist temple, kinokuniya where you have a big collection of art and design books, the stationary store, the tea store, and marufuku ramen. nijiya market where i would get a big bottle of oolong tea by itoen, and miso paste and wakame and japanese curry roux. the social study cafe where i would hang out with friends, and hotel kabuki where we would cowork at their lounge below the ground floor, one time being asked whether we stay at the hotel, probably because we looked too student like.

by the time after we graduated after a year, and me and W were looking for a new place to live – he searched in mission while i searched in presidio – i was ready to move on from chinatown. i miss a lot of things, one thing i did not miss was old couple below us that would harass us by dropping weights on our rooftop, one time at 1 am for an hour. we had a brief stunt of buying a camera and placing it on the roof, hoping we would catch the man red handed. we never did. i have ptsd whenever i hear sounds on the roof.

taiwan (jun)

the loudness of the streets and the motorcycles after living in sf for a few months. the humidity. the 7 eleven and family mart at every corner. taiwanese mandarin accents. the hospitality. NTU ER. the narrow streets. old worn out buildings. the efficient train system.

i was in taiwan for a couple days to meet with T and had lunch with her parents. the lunch didn't go so well, and i also ended up at the ER because of my throat and could barely speak. but it was nice to experience taiwan together, this time as a couple. my fondest memory was getting a film camera, and only having 27 shots, and we would take turns, taking photos around zhongshan, in thrift stores and bookstores, and feeling the weight of time on us, and the magic of every moment, as we counted down to my eventual departure.

washington, dc (jul)

i had the opportunity to visit DC for the AAPM conference. i was eager to go back to washington, chinatown in particular. i remember visiting back when i was 15. i remember the street crosswalk had the chinese zodiac patterns, and when i got there i kept trying to look for it, but never saw it, i later found out it was just worn out, and it's part of a larger issue of chinatown dying in washington. i remember how humid washington was, it was basically like KL. i saw the nicest apple store ever. went to the national art gallery and the smithsonian's national air and space museum. i had the most fun on the first night, where i went to play ping pong and just had a blast.

austin (aug - ?)

the river. the people. the anxiety of an interview in person with strangers. the price of the food. fusion restaurants. the odd weather patterns.

the humidity was the first thing that hit me. then it was south congress E 7th street, walking down the street close to midnight to the cvs was terrifying, i did not feel safe. then it was the lack of asians everywhere, the only asian that was in my sight was at whole foods. i said to myself that i was never going to move here and it was unlivable for me. but i was overreacting. it was tough not seeing the familiarities of my culture and roots around me anymore since moving to austin, maybe deep down i was worried that meant i would lose my sense of self and identity even more. i quickly got over it once i start work and spending almost all of my waking hours to work helps distract me from that fact.

i did see some nice sides of austin like botanical garden and parks when T and my parents came over on separate occasions. i find it hard to have a reason to go out on my own. i would rather devote my full attention and focus on doing a good job at oe.

austin chinese church was a place that felt the most like home, but it being so far, and not having a car was a big blocker for me. i wish i could've gone to that church more and made some friends there.

most days in austin were home -> office -> home. and i would get the view of the bridge, watching over it from the firmspace office like a lifeguard, people watching, pickleball court on top of a parking lot, and people lining up on the bridge to see the bats, and people rowing their kayak and boats.

cambridge (sep)

a colorful coworking space. an actual office. a nice window view on the top floor of boston marriot. it was my first time meeting people from work. i wasn't sure how to act, when you're new you don't know where you fit, and people don't know where to fit you as well. i volunteered for a project while at cambridge and stayed up till 6am to finish it. oddly serene, working in my hotel room with the faint desk lamp, with the sun coming up, and me going to bed. it was also my first time trying out Dig Inn.

seattle (oct)

rain and wind. the first night i landed i was welcomed with the wind so strong i could feel it piercing into my soul. i did not have any thick jackets, and i've never felt more cold. food wise, terrible malaysian food, some good korean and japanese restaurant like Seoul Tofu & Jjim and Kobuta & Ookami Katsu and sake house. Avoid Asean Streat Food hall at all costs. i had trouble walking with my injury, and that affected my overall mood, not to mention the work, but the fiery colors on the maples and ash trees made up for it.

miami (nov & dec)

i visited miami twice. the first time living in East Miami in key biscane, the second time in midblock. miami feels like a different country. you hear spanish everywhere, the cashier at Trader Joe says "hola" to you, instead of "how's it going". it's tropical, vibrant, and artsy. especially in wynwood, where graffiti is on every single wall, everywhere. design district, once a pineapple farm, now an 18-block packed with luxury stores and art galleries. now that i'm moving here, i feel like i'm pulled even further away from my roots, from chinatown, to austin, and now to miami. i'm not sure where this leads me, my life is becoming more uncertain than ever, nothing in my life since graduating has been planned, and maybe that's not so bad after all. who wants to have their future planned out.

santa fe (dec)

i went on a roadtrip with my family to santa fe, where most of the drive involved getting out of Texas, it's nice there. i like the pueblo revival architecture, the earthy tones and flat roofs and exposed beams make the entire city feel like it's a fictional place, and you time travelled back into history, it also feels more peaceful. a treasure trove of art and culture.

work

the idea of my first job was always daunting to me. i kept telling my friends and family that i had to get the best thing. because the first job is what determines everything else, where you land, who you meet, and what you learn. it defines you. now it doesn't mean that if you somehow get a subpar job, then your life is ruined, but i always had this high bar to work at someplace great.

i never knew what that was exactly. i kept bouncing around different fields, from climate, to big tech FAANG, to AI labs, after my research with UCSF, i had a strong desire to work in the intersection of healthcare x AI. i started going down the rabbit hole of ai healthcare companies like abridge, ambience healthcare, charta, hippocratic AI, etc. nothing panned out, and i was supposed to be the first engineer at an early-stage pre-seed startup in presidio, but a twitter DM turned into an intro call, and a coding test turned into an in-person interview in austin. somehow by God's grace, i was given the opportunity to join as their 17th engineer.

working at OE felt like a dream, it checked all the boxes, and more, and it felt like my life was set. but soon came the insecurities and the responsibilities, and the overwhelming pressure to achieve their high bar of quality and quantity of work. where working every day, from morning to night, became the norm even though it wasn't on paper. and it happens naturally if you're driven and wired in a way to do things. this was my first time working in a real job, my tesla internships didn't really count since it wasn't very structured and ucsf research was just meetings with my professor.

i made a few silly mistakes in the past months, and had a supply chain attack happen where i was right at the center of it all, and i still feel like i don't know how to fit in with the people here, but i'm growing and i'm constantly learning. and that's all that matters. everything else is an added benefit.

the worst thing in life is to stay stagnant, whether that's in work or in relationships, if you're not being challenged, if you don't feel like pulling your hair out, or get so overwhelmed you feel like you're going to explode, then you're not becoming the best version of yourself. of course feeling that way all the time is unsustainable and you should probably seek professional help for your mental health. the key is to balance between speed and quality. that's the push and pull at the center of all the work i'm doing.

one fun thing about working at an AI for doctors company is i get exposed to a ton of medical information and literature, not all of it sticks, but i've been exposed to more clinical content than ever, and i know acronyms and terms that i never would've thought i needed to know. and i've stared at more cancer guidelines than any other content i have in my life. and i still have no idea what most of it means.

this slows down my rate of progress since i require doctors and MDs to work with me to eval everything i do to achieve the level of excellence, because chatgpt and claude can only bring you so far, so a lot of my time is spent on evaluating llms, both in the code it writes for me with cc, and in the responses and answers.

fundamentally, i'm picking up the skill that you really only learn when working at a fast-paced and small team of talented engineers, where given the constraints of time, where you're already juggling multiple tasks, sort them in your head by level of importance, and figure out the best solution for it with a level of taste that is acquired from intuition and heuristics. and another thing is to anticipate things so that you solve the problems even before they happen, and once you reach this level, you're capable of a lot of things.

i'm still learning how to be willing to look dumb, and to not let your insecurities stop you from doing excellent work, how to cope with stressful situations. communication is hard on many levels, i didn't grow up in the US, and a lot of the culture and language was picked up only a few years ago, and since i don't interact with people that much in my day to day, i lag a lot and overthink about what is "right" to say and what isn't. almost as if i have to process a translator engine on top of my existing one, so i'm able to be understood better. and that's tiring. it's one of the challenges of being an immigrant. that shows up in the way i present in demos, i'm more safe, and the fear of making a bad joke or come off the wrong way outweighs my willingness to also partake in the art of making fun presentations.

writing good code became less about knowing the right patterns, but more about codebase understanding. your level of code is capped by your ability to know what are good patterns that exist, and the right people to reach out for advice and code reviews.

some lessons and takeaways from my patterns at work

1. not let work take over my entire life, not feel a jolt of anxiety at every slack notification, carve out sacred hours on Sundays for God, and for hobbies.
2. not let fear be the driving force for my work, but do things from the perspective fun and play. the work is important and crucial, but don't forget to enjoy the process, and not focus only on the destination
3. stay curious all the time. applies to fixing bugs, to building features, to talking to people. don't just end at the first obvious conclusion or answer, there's always something deeper. keep pulling on the thread. do not delegate understanding to AI. people also like you more if you ask them questions.
4. stop overthinking, instead of letting your insecurities stop you, just say what you think, be true to yourself. or you'll regret it later and replay back conversations in the shower.
5. if you're tired and context-switching, it's your body telling you to take a break. no you won't be more productive by trying to squeeze out more lines of code or more PRs, the quality of your work is correlated with your health, physically and mentally. go take a walk.
6. try to relax, when you're given constructive feedback or asked for an explanation, or a highly unrealistic deadline. you're not being condemned. it's not a courtroom where you're under oath. sound confident, even when you're not. but don't over do it.
7. spend more time designing the system. i jumped into a lot of tasks without putting much thought into the best way to do things. if i just spent 15 mins chatting with someone, or drew the thing out, it would save me a lot of pain in the future. i find myself redoing a lot of my past work.

i'll end with a few quotes from Tim Keller's sermon on The Search for Achievement

On the brutality of work (Ecclesiastes 2:22-23):

"What does a man get for all the toil and anxious striving with which he labors under the sun? All his days work is pain and grief and even at night his mind does not rest."

Studs Terkel (from his 1972 book Working):

"This book being about work is by its very nature therefore about violence. Violence to the spirit as well as to the body. It's about ulcers as well as accidents. It's about nervous breakdowns as well as kicking the dog around. It is above all about daily humiliations. To survive the day is triumph enough for the walking wounded among the great many of us."

On work failing to deliver what it promises:

"Success fails on its own terms... We expect work to bring us satisfaction to give us recognition and to make a contribution... And what he shows us basically... they fail on all three counts."

On the identity vacuum driving work:

"The thing you're actually manufacturing is not a product. You're manufacturing a self. You don't know who you are. You are trying to prove yourself. And your work is never about you. It's never about others and it's never about the work. It's always about you."

On the need for rest in work:

"You need a rest from your work in your work. Do you hear that? You need a rest from your work in your work."

On the solution:

"Better is one handful of tranquility and a handful of work. That's the balanced life."

And whatsoever ye do, do it heartily, as to the Lord, and not unto men; Knowing that of the Lord ye shall receive the reward of the inheritance: for ye serve the Lord Christ.

— Colossians 3:23-24

on our way to round rock outlet, i realized most antique shops would be closed, so we stopped at village mall antiques in salado. at the outlet, i went straight to starbucks. i wanted to finish reading breakneck. and that i did. i finished the last pages of breakneck with a watery sweet matcha.

what a book. this might be the best nonfiction book i’ve read so far, which probably doesn’t say much given my shameful goodreads counts and reading track record. still, it really shone a light on what china is like for me, both as a technological powerhouse and as a place full of surprises.

i learned about chongqing as a cyberpunk-like city, where a train runs through an apartment building complex. people eat hotpot in old air raid tunnels. guizhou has incredible

bridges. yunnan is beautiful and full of mushrooms. shanghai has a french town. shenzhen is a manufacturing hub.

as a chinese who grew up in malaysia, i mostly heard from my parents that china just copies from the us. the us felt like the natural place to gravitate toward. it’s the forefront of innovation, and that’s still true today in ai. i was fortunate enough to live in sf. but visiting shenzhen last year, the differences in engineering and the level of industrialization were stark.

the idea of a lawyerly society versus an engineering state will stay in my noggin from now on. another thing i really appreciated was dan’s writing style, interjecting personal experiences into a hefty book about china and the us. i love his letters as well. i want to keep improving my writing until i can write at his level.

a few quotes that captures the essense of the book

On lawerly society

“It’s not just the government. America’s problem is the lawyerly society. The United States is unusual among Western countries for having so many lawyers: four hundred lawyers per hundred thousand people, which is three times higher than the average in European countries. Since lawyers are everywhere, proceduralism has reached everywhere, including universities and corporations. Anyone working in these today has seen how procedures become an end in themselves, such that people grow obsessed with their logic and forget about the outcome.”

on the engineering state

“The fundamental tenet of the engineering state is to look at people as aggregates, not individuals. The Communist Party envisions itself as a grand master, coordinating unified actions across state and society, able to launch strategic maneuvers beyond the comprehension of its citizens. Its philosophy is to maximize the discretion of the state and minimize the rights of individuals. Engineers often treat social issues as math exercises.”

On viewing technology as people and process

“Silvia Lindtner, a professor at the University of Michigan and my wife, has spent more than a decade studying Shenzhen’s technology ecosystems. In 2015, the Austrian government asked her how to create a Shenzhen in the Alps; in 2016, the White House invited her to present on how the United States might learn from the success of Shenzhen. She has felt, as I do, that these agencies misunderstood the point of Shenzhen. They were still more interested in individual inventors rather than understanding it as a community of engineering practice. The obsession with invention has clouded Silicon Valley’s ability to appreciate China’s actual strength. Rather than seeing tools and blueprints as the ultimate ends of technological progress, I believe we should view them as milestones in the training of better scientists and manufacturers. Viewing technology as people and process knowledge isn’t only more accurate; it also empowers our sense of agency to control the technologies we are producing.”

On if Iphones were built in the US

“If the iPhone were built in the United States rather than Shenzhen, then an American city—say, Detroit, Cleveland, or Pittsburgh—might be hailed as the hardware capital of the world. The follow-on innovations in consumer drones, hoverboards, electric vehicle batteries, and virtual reality headsets could have sprung from American firms. Engineers wouldn’t have to fly from Cupertino across the Pacific to reach their giant factories. They could iterate on product improvements closer to home…The United States must regain, at a minimum, the manufacturing capacity o scale up production that emerges from its own industrial labs. If it does not, continuing to value scientific breakthroughs rather than mass manufacturing, then it might lose whole industries once more—as it did by inventing the solar photovoltaic panel but relying on China to produce them. The United States likes to celebrate the light-bulb moment of genius innovators. But there is, I submit, more glory in having big firms making a product rather than a science lab claiming its invention. Otherwise, US scientists would once again build a ladder toward technological leadership only to have Chinese firms climb it.”

we browsed through the bookstore. i would’ve expected more c.s. lewis books here. i only found two. after that, we went back to deep ellum. i wanted to try hawkers asian street food. i had high expectations coming in. it started strong. the roti was great, crispy, and the fried shrimp coconut was delicious.

but what came after was a disaster. my sister’s laksa had no taste, and the noodles were overcooked and mushy. my char kuey teow had hard noodles and did not taste anything like it at all. i was so disappointed. i learned not to order anything called malaysian food outside of new york and sf. seattle and texas have let me down.

after that, we went to 2nd street. i found an excursionist flex green jacket from peter millar. the retail price was $895, which is insane, and it was listed for $100. maybe it was anchor effect, but the design and quality were good, so i copped it.

then we went into deep vellum bookstore & publishing co. and ended up just sitting there, planning the rest of the night.

we had dinner early, at 6 pm, at terry black’s. i got one beef rib, half a pound of sliced brisket, a quarter pound of pork ribs, a quarter pound of turkey, and some sides. we took the beef rib to go. it was too much even for four people.

we stopped by whole foods, then headed to hillsboro and stayed at a la quinta inn for the night.

we went to first baptist church dallas. it was the largest church i've ever been to in my life. we arrived late, and the first thing we experienced was a grand worship with a choir and an orchestra. it's what i imagine heaven to feel and sound like.

after church, we visited thanksgiving square and saw the chapel inside. the spiral design was beautiful. we had lunch at the Exchange food hall, then went to Otto's hotel for matcha.

after that we went to the big eye ball, and right across the street was the Joule hotel, which houses the taschen library. i love taschen books. if i could, i'd own the nasa archives, the hiroshige and hokusai collections, monet, their industrial design book, and the world's most beautiful libraries by listri, and many more that i have yet to discover.

next was the dallas museum of art. they have a nice collection. although i was in a wheelchair controlled by my sister, so not a lot of autonomy to explore. i felt a lot of eyes on me, they must be wondering why i was in a wheelchair for someone my age.

before dinner, we drove to east dallas to check out a vintage store. i found two great books: bertrand russell's a history of western philosophy and a 60s new yorker collection. then we went to deep ellum and browsed through thrifted threads and poet's books, which was a nice spot. i spotted a nice lamp at the bookstore.

dinner was at the rosewood mansion on turtle creek. this was my first time fine dining like this. we ordered bread, steak tartare, caesar salad, hamachi crudo, lobster lumpia, truffle gnudi, market fish, rack of lamb, king salmon, sweet potato, broccolini, and a glass of malbec for dad.

the whole meal, i couldn't stop googling ingredients on my phone. how are truffles collected? what is filipino asín tibuók salt? what makes parmigiano-reggiano expensive? what are the health benefits of shiso? what is gribiche? what exactly is gnudi? every dish had something i'd never heard of before, and i wanted to understand what i was eating.

the bill came to $550. honestly, the service wasn't great, which was disappointing given the price. but what mattered was i wanted my parents to experience it.

at night i watched terminator 2: judgement day, which objectively is the best terminator movie.

after a long drive, we rewarded ourselves with good korean food. i found a seolleongtang place in carrollton. we were the only people there when we arrived, and stayed till it closed. seolleongtang is a milky beef bone broth soup—it's intentionally bland and requires you to season it with salt and pepper yourself. my parents kept saying it had no taste, which was funny.

we went back to the apartment and i watched coraline. there's so much i don't remember about the movie. this might be my first time watching it in full.

today we explored santa fe. halfway down from the cabin, we found a stream and i went down to wash some rocks i picked up and wanted to bring home. i found an area where there was a thick layer of frozen ice, and i kept throwing huge rocks at it to try to crack it. i had so much fun doing that, even though my si joint was getting inflamed. it was worth it to feel like a child again.

getting down, the first stop was collected works bookstore and coffeehouse. got a matcha latte and hot cocoa for mom, and an americano for dad. i browsed around and saw "waiting for god" by simone weil.

then we went to the cathedral basilica of st. francis of assisi since it was closing at 4pm. after appreciating it briefly and taking some photos, we continued exploring the town.

i like the architecture, each building having the warm, earthy orange-brown color. i learned it's made from adobe, sun-dried clay, sand, and straw. the thick walls, rounded corners, and flat roofs. since 1957, santa fe required all buildings in the historic district to follow this pueblo revival style, which makes it cohesive. this city has its very own design system. the earth tones range from light-tan to deep reddish-brown, depending on where the clay was sourced.

we went to the street market nearby. i wanted a poncho but it was 80 dollars, which seemed too expensive. i saw labubus in the market too.

we also went into a few gift shops, and i saw the iconic steer skull, which is bleached white cow skulls with long horns, a classic southwestern symbol of rugged wilde west and cowboy culture, made famous by georgia o'keeffe in the 30s in her paintings of the desert.

i also spotted a lot of turquoise, which is deeply rooted in native american traditions, a deep cultural language of life protection, health, prosperity, and connection to sky water.

as the sun was going down, we went to la plazuela at la fonda hotel. i wanted to try the restaurant there, but the prefix menu that day was 200 dollars per person.

we walked to dumpling tea for dinner. i thought getting it to go would be faster, but we ended up waiting more than an hour while other people who sat down to eat left sooner. it wasn't a pleasant experience. at least the baos were good.

we got to amarillo as a midpoint for the night before we headed to dallas tomorrow.

it's christmas! we tried to find food before we headed up to terrero to stay in a cabin. we found a mexican supermarket. i'd never stepped foot in one before. there were piñatas hanging from the ceiling, statues of catholic jesus, 7 different salsa and tortilla brands, and food like fried pork skin, mexican food to order, and chilis. we were the only chinese people in that supermarket. luckily we had the help of one cashier who could speak english, otherwise we wouldn't have been able to order food.

we drove up to pecos, staying in terrero. the host was kind, taught us how to start a fire. first you have a lighting stick, a lighter, and lighter fluid. you find pine needles, pinecones, and twigs and put them in a triangular position standing up, and start burning, then put the firewood on. once we started the fire, his two big white fluffy dogs (bigger than me fyi) came over as if to greet us and to get warm. one of them would ask for belly rubs, and if you stopped he would look at you like you'd committed a grave sin. i swear at one point he was trying to communicate something with me. he looked right into my eyes.

it was freezing for me. i lived in iowa and now i can barely handle the cold after living in sf and texas. i'm losing my cold tolerance and going back to my malaysian warmth-adapted self.

we made sure to arrive on time, as 1:15 was our reserved entry time (you pay 1 dollar per person for the reservation) and the last entry to the cave was 2:30. you first go into an elevator, which goes down about 750 feet, and you enter what seems like a minecraft cave turned real. my fujifilm camera suffered in the low lighting, but it was so cool. the air was misty and cool, not stuffy, almost like a forest. there are so many unique shapes. God is an artist. it would also be the perfect place to film a horror movie. some parts go so deep down that it's pitch black.

there were two routes. one where you hike down through the natural entrance all the way to the big room, or you can take the elevator straight down to the big room loop, which takes about an hour and a half. after we got out we took pictures and appreciated the sunset.

we had to get to santa fe tonight, we had dinner at a hibachi restaurant called Tokyo. there are so many hibachi restaurants in the middle of nowhere, seems to be good business. we settled down for the night at a horse ranch airbnb in santa fe.

first day of the road trip to new mexico.

first stop was buc-ee's. tried their burger. the brisket and shredded pork were not bad. i dislike the sweet sauce and white bread but purely for health reasons. they taste pretty darn good.

we first visited the alamo. the inside was smaller than i thought. in my head i'd figured the alamo would be a bigger church. we did one of the mini tours where a guy explained the history in a theatrical manner, then watched a short clip with sound effects of the battle. we stood in the same room where women and children hid during the battle.

after that we walked to the riverwalk. it's very unique. i wondered whether a flood would affect it, there has to be a good flood control system in place. i took a ton of photos. i'm so glad i have my fujifilm x100s. it takes great photos, although not as sharp as a full frame camera or the x100vi, the colors are beautiful.

before continuing the trip, we stopped at whole foods for snacks and supplies and stayed at holiday inn in ozona for the night.

took my parents to the south austin campus of ACC but it ended up having a combined service, so on the spur of the moment i brought them to the botanical garden.

it ended up being a solid experience. there's a nice view of zilker park and the austin skyline, and going deeper into the garden, past the japanese garden, there's a section with dinosaur fossils and ginkgo trees, which i learned date back to before dinosaurs and co-existed with them. for lunch i ordered lee's kitchen again, so far the best asian food in austin i could find.

i was curious why this area became such an asian commercial hub, so i dug a bit into the history. the gist is rent was cheaper in this area, whereas south lamar was more expensive and for the wealthy. it also ties in with immigrant settlement patterns in the 2000s as people moved for tech jobs.

there was a christmas party for the apartment. i got to meet with R and L and had a quick chat with them. after that we went to TJ for a haul. i discovered papadums snack, which is made of lentils and chickpeas, and it's made in malaysia. they brought me back to mamak restaurants in malaysia.

i had the highest expectations for this restaurant. it felt very japanese. all the servers were japanese, and they hit the gong when we entered and the waiters and workers all murmured irasshaimase, which means welcome.

we browsed around forest books, kinokuniya, and got matcha at matcha cafe maiko.

we went to delta air gates, a new area of sf terminal i had never entered before. i bought a tuna sandwich and T got a wrap. we said goodbye once more. i watched up on the plane. austin was foggy this time. and this time i'm not returning home to an empty house. my parents are there. i'm glad they're there.

after the meeting, i went for my braces appointment near clement. the dentist wasn't confident about my lower teeth, so whether i can finish my treatment now is uncertain. since i'm moving to miami, things are more complicated. do i take the braces off and go for invisalign?

the plus side is they didn't do anything extra so i could still eat. we went to thai time restaurant and the food was so authentic. the pad thai and pad see ew were great, and the red thai tea too. pad thai was sweet and pad see ew was savory. that's the conclusion.

after that we went to pixlcat coffee to get some work done, mostly me organizing my thoughts on how to improve the system. then we went to green apple books, spent about an hour there before we went to valencia street. we went into open editions and paxton gate. then had dinner at echigo with the mafia. it's nice to meet everyone again, especially W, given he was just discharged from the hospital. i wonder when the next time we can all be together again.

it was also when i heard news about W. i felt worried for him. the mafia had a call together and we caught up on what was going on. i never imagined him getting sick like this. we planned to pay him a visit when i reached sf. upon landing, we waited a bit to meet up with my parents. we checked into the westin hotel and wanted to visit W downtown but visiting hours were over. i thought of contacting the pastor from the indonesian church we went to, to ask him to support W.

we all got hungry, and i ordered food from the night market which was amazing. the hainanese chicken was authentic. we stayed at the hotel together and called W and A. W updated us on his situation. T is meeting my parents and my friends. i'm unlocking new experiences for her.

after some time, we left and T and i checked into the majestic hotel. the hotel had lavish christmas decor in the lobby, and the room had downtown abbey vibes.

we arrived at crandon beach around 2 pm. we saw a lot of peacocks in the parking lot. i was surprised they just roamed around like that. in my head i always thought peacocks were rare creatures. i put on my photographer's hat and started snapping away. it was nice to be at the beach, the feeling of your bare feet on sand, the weather was perfect. we sat down and had some snacks and crackers and talked. it made me like miami a lot more.

i wanted to go to the lighthouse but it was closed, so our lyft driver brought us on a detour to a port where there was a bar called the cleat mia instead. there was a nice view of the sea and the skyline. we watched the sun go down and black outlines of boats and ships floating on the sea.

we went to CMX brickell to watch hamnet. we had burgers and fries again, and T said the one in austin was better. hamnet was a raw experience. i felt grateful for the medical breakthroughs and technology we have today to be able to cure sickness and diseases, because it's so scary to die while suffering without any access to doctors.

i was also reminded of the power of storytelling. at the stage area, people from all ranks, peasants and royalty, came to watch his hamlet play and it reminded me of the power of acting, not just gratuitous enjoyment, but it can communicate very raw experiences and emotions that help a mother move on and heal from her grief as well.

fun fact: this place started as a pineapple farm in the 1920s called buena vista. T.V. moore, the "pineapple king," built the moore building in 1921 for his furniture business. the area became a furniture and design center through the mid-20th century but fell into disrepair by the 80s. then in the late 90s, developer craig robins bought up abandoned buildings and transformed it into what it is today, spanning 18 blocks with over 200 luxury brands, michelin-starred restaurants, and public art installations. retail rent is $500 per square foot, making it the 5th priciest US retail destination.

at night i brought T to brickell, and we tried thai food at Bonding. it was the only affordable asian food near brickell and it was a letdown. the pad thai tasted like ketchup and i ordered the wrong fried fish. but we still had a good time.

after what felt like the longest day at the office, it was time for the holiday party. i went back to the apartment to meet with T, put on a jacket, and we went to four seasons at the surf club. i was not aware how far this place was, and we were the last to arrive and everyone was in their circles by then. slowly some people scattered to get food and conversations came trickling in. everyone was friendly and courteous, especially the ones who initiated conversations.

i observed a pattern of the newer people staying further away from the gravitational core, which was D. the only time i went close to it was to get drinks. most of the time, in fact, we were at the very edge, just the two of us, feeling out of place, yet enjoying each other's company.

it was nice to experience this. around 9 pm most people had left and we took a walk out to the gate. i kept telling T about how i should've said hi to D, but then also saying how i had nothing good to say, and justifying that i made the right decision to avoid awkwardness.

i've been this overthinking machine, unable to just act, and having to analyze my every move.

but this was the first time T and I went to a party together, the first of many, as we go through more life experiences together.

it was a self-guided tour, which meant i had to download two mobile apps, check in with the person at the desk, and the app would tell me which apartment units i had access to. getting in the elevator and opening the doors just meant i had to hold my phone close to the receiver. it took a while to process but overall it was cool.

the apartment was okay, definitely not worth the price. it had weird layouts like huge bathrooms, and the view wasn't great.

after that i went to the office and had lunch with T at icon mediterranean. i love their falafels.

this was the day i also got my first email about clinical trials. it was just a doctor seeing it in the app store, but nonetheless, an email is an email.

for dinner we ordered cote from doordash. i was just looking for korean food, little did i know this was america's first and only michelin-starred korean steakhouse. i got kimchi jjigae and soybean stew. the soybean stew was too spicy for my GERD stomach to handle. i had to eat gimbap. we watched

the announcement was scheduled to go out tomorrow. i put all my effort into getting it ready. i reached out to the respective people, i made sure the wording was right. a curveball was thrown and it turned out my feature still had bugs i had to fix. it's not perfect yet. but i was adamant, i worked on trying to fix it by turning some knobs.

we ended up having dinner with the team together. i got to speak more with L and T got to speak with J. it was a nice time. T told me that i'm timid and i don't voice my thoughts with confidence, so that's something i have to work on. i'm embarrassingly shy when speaking with my "bosses." i think it's an asian thing.

i had a meeting today with the two big Cs and other sales people discussing the feature i built and how to price it. it's cool to be part of these meetings. i get to learn how D thinks, and he's very sharp-minded about things. it's intimidating always sitting in those meetings. i never have the courage to speak up about stuff because i just see myself as a kid who's doing all the grunt work. but i did my research as well. i looked into clinical trials in the US, especially this paper: The Case for Clinical Trial Abundance. i do think i need more time digesting the ideas there before i can speak of them.

after the meeting i left immediately to meet up with T. i'd set her location to arrive at the office, and we went back home together.

after that we had a TJ haul. we got berries, baking soda, oat milk vanilla, almond powder, non dairy yogurt, almond butter, a dozen eggs, vanilla extract, okra snack, crackers, and cinnamon powder. most of them for T to make the banana cake she likes to make for me. full of excitement for the week ahead together.

i had to catch a flight, so i went to a nearer church today. i'd always wanted to visit central christian church for the architecture, so i got on a waymo and went.

diving into the rabbithole briefly, the church was designed by robert leon white and samuel charles phelps vosper, two architects who were influential in the architectural fabric of texas from the 20s to 50s. the style is romanesque revival, which draws from medieval european romanesque architecture (11th-12th centuries). key features are rounded arches over windows and doors, basilica plans (long nave, aisles). it is reminiscent of old european churches. i found out stanford campus is also romanesque.

after that i boarded the 737 heading to miami. i was on the same flight as R, and we had a short chat before we went our separate ways. i chatted with my uber driver, and he recommended some places i should live in miami and kept repeating that miami is a great place, even though there's no good asian food there.

i started to have second thoughts about living here long term, but i strive to run towards discomfort instead of shying away. life is too short to stay comfortable, especially not when i'm in my 20s.

i planned to return them and then get an x-ray done. i'd been holding it off for so long, but google maps had the wrong info. so when i got there, it was closed. i'm wondering how that information even got there in the first place. maybe i should call next time.

i wish a lot of these details in my life could be handled by an AI assistant. it takes so much effort to think about the appointments i have, the places i have to call for PT, for braces, for sports medicine, and it gets messier with moving. i should build out a system to do all this for me.

MEGA_BRANCH  ← where all the work is
   │
   ├─ cherry-pick → PR A
   ├─ cherry-pick → PR B
   └─ cherry-pick → PR C

claude code is useful for that. while the three other PRs are reviewed, you might need to make some changes. you can opt to merge them back into the main PR, or you continuously iterate in that one split PR. be sure when you split them they are self-contained, so if you're iterating on the backend, it works independently.

i'm still learning efficient ways to operate. this was literally the first time i worked on a shared codebase that requires good coding practices, outside of a hackathon which has no bar at all.

i ordered it from lee's kitchen, making sure to have zero expectations at all, and it was surprisingly good. they had the ginger scallion sauce, but the chili wasn't the right one. i take back what i said about austin. i think i just never got the chance to explore the city at all.

this was my top song for 2025. i'm not sure how, maybe i had it on loop one day, or multiple days. it's only 1 minute and 18 seconds, and it's the second to last song of the wind rises soundtrack. it conjures bittersweet emotions, and it ends on an unfinished note, which i interpret as although this chapter ended, the best is yet to come and the story is not over yet. even though that's not the case in the anime, it gives me hope. the entire album is amazing, as is the case for most ghibli soundtracks.

we're back to being long distance. and even though it sucks being apart, it does help us go further in our relationship in the long term. long distance helps mold us into strong individuals who are self-sustaining, and makes us stronger when we are together. we cope by making stickers and enjoying each other's virtual presence.

before picking it up i got a bowl at whole foods, kimchi, salmon, and beans. the rest of the day was setting up everything again. this time, although still with some hiccups, was more straightforward. it feels like day 1 again, a clean slate, taking the lessons from all my past mistakes and blunders, and continuing to do my best work here.

to ease the pain i fiddle with porta pro limited edition rhythm beige on ear headphones, apply the yaxi earpads from amazon and also unwrap war and peace that just came in the mail, which was about 3x the thickness of the breakneck book. when will i find the time to read it? i don't know, maybe 5 minutes a day, maybe in one short sprint during the holiday season, or when i'm older and not working at a startup where i'm devoting 90% of my waking hours to work.

Colossians 4:2-6 NIV

2 Devote yourselves to prayer, being watchful and thankful. 3 And pray for us, too, that God may open a door for our message, so that we may proclaim the mystery of Christ, for which I am in chains. 4 Pray that I may proclaim it clearly, as I should. 5 Be wise in the way you act toward outsiders; make the most of every opportunity. 6 Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.

we went to the chinese service. they were warm. we introduced ourselves during the newcomer session, and a guy came over and asked if i was interested in their fellowship. after that we went to flower child for lunch, and walked around the domain a bit, and did work at houndstooth coffee.

i read breakneck and tried to sketch her. sketching is so hard. she taught me how to sketch a nose and lips. then we went to nordstrom rack to find a winter jacket for her. i said columbia on amazon is better. these no name brands wouldn't last. it's always better to spend more on items like this.

we ended the day with whole foods, bought some crackers. milton's crackers are the best.

i learned about yunnan, and the poisonous mushrooms, and the beautiful snowcapped mountains.

i continued to read breakneck and found out that the one child policy was advocated by a rocket scientist named song jian. he studied cybernetics in moscow, then in 1978 encountered population control theories from the club of rome. he took those mathematical models, the same kind used for calculating missile trajectories, and applied them to china's population. china being a country with barely any human rights, they engineered the entire country based on these extrapolations. it made me realize i do not want to live in china.

later that night we cut each other's hair. it was a new experience.

we also finished the psalms book sketch. it was the first art we finished together.

we went to the alamo drafthouse to watch a movie. it was my first time going. when you enter, you see props and visuals from the shining. even the blood spilling onto the floor, effects done with lights. it was cool.

i was excited for this movie. i'd had a phase of binging aliens, and predator is a cool creature. they have an intense focus on just one goal, to become The Ultimate Predator and their technology is fascinating. predator badlands didn't disappoint. i munched on their burger and fries. no sauce, no cheese. it was dry and i knew it wasn't good for my health, but i ate it all anyway, and enjoyed the beautiful design of the world and characters. i was fully immersed.

after the movie we made cantonese steamed fish with ginger and shallots. it's such a simple yet perfect way to cook fish.

it was also the day the new laptop arrived. i started transferring the data from my old laptop into the new m4 air silver. i was happy for her to have it. i hope it makes her more productive and helps her become the great designer she can be.

then we did some more work and went to play ping pong. it was so cold. i didn't enjoy it, but i bore it to play with her, so she could have a good time.

tonight we made hotpot. i tried getting ingredients from 99 ranch, but two door dashers cancelled on me after picking up some ingredients. i got frustrated.

we still went through with it, but we just didn't have sesame paste. we tried getting creative, used sesame seeds and ground them with my blender, added sesame oil and soy sauce. it just wasn't the same. but we had the mushroom soup paste and sliced beef from weee to make up for it.

we had a movie night and watched about time. i love watching a movie in bed with a projector with her. it's one of the best feelings ever.

our day out today started with mozart's coffee roaster. the cafe was festive, decorations were everywhere. i got matcha and she got chai. the matcha was watery. i read breakneck and she did some work.

after that we rushed to mayfield park as the sun was going down. i was looking forward to seeing peacocks. there were none. we walked the trail and saw a small lake halfway through, then a lakehouse. it reminded me of thrillers.

after that we went to livra books, a nice bookstore with secondhand books and vintage rare finds. any bookstore like that is always a good time.

then we went to central market. it was one of the nicest grocery stores i've been to. the fruits and vegetable section was amazing. there were in-house grown mushrooms, a whole section just for chilis. i got organic banana milk and we got some veges to roast. i was so hungry that i ate their roast chicken right outside the store. T laughed at that.

the anxiety stayed with me for the rest of the day because i didn't get a response back. it felt so big and overwhelming, like the space was closing in on me and i couldn't breathe. the incident from the day before was stacking on top of everything i felt today.

i shipped the laptop, got flowers from tj, wrapped them, and went to the airport. also started sketching the psalms book. going out and doing those things helped me remember that the world outside was real, and the problem probably wasn't a big deal at all and it wouldn't eat me up. seeing T again helped take my mind off it. we went to kura revolving sushi bar. i discovered i like yellowtail sushi, and soy wrap too.

i learned a lot that day about how easily something can be taken away. i lost access to everything. i learned how to handle a crisis like this. i felt embarrassed and guilty and like a victim at the same time.

this was the day i was told my feature was too slow, so i had to switch it off and implement an improvement. luckily it wasn't a big change. it's something i should've anticipated while building out the feature, but it's good to make mistakes. i'm glad the feedback loop is tight at this company and that quality and excellence aren't nice-to-haves but necessary to keep this product the best app for doctors.

lately i've been binging the show fallout. it gets a bit gory in some scenes, but the story is interesting. i can definitely foresee a future where the rich are living underground, hiding in their safe houses while the poor are forced to stay above and descend into chaos.

i was asked to debug some failure modes and figure out why the answers were bad. i did my best, but my conclusions weren't solid. my codebase understanding was another limiting factor, too. i knew these were the issues but wasn't sure what knobs to turn or what was considered a good solution. i lacked the intuition that someone who built the system from scratch would have.

it made me realize i'm still very replaceable since an AI can probably do what i do right now. i need to be better at asking questions and picking up all the tacit knowledge at this company.

today was the day i released clinical trial matching on ios and android. my first feature ever built and released into the world.

today was also the heaviest rain i've seen in austin so far. i always experience rain on days that are big and important, like big exams or big moments. today was one of them.

i felt weight off my shoulders.

ingredients

• firm tofu
• spinach
• salmon rub powder
• sesame seeds
• smoked salmon
• turmeric powder

steps

1. cut and pat dry tofu
2. cut into large thin pieces
3. pan fry until golden
4. start mincing it with a spatula
5. stir fry the pieces
6. once they're little pieces, add spinach
7. add salmon rub powder, sesame seeds, and turmeric powder
8. top with smoked salmon

woke up too late and missed my PT appointment. turns out i missed 3 appointments, even though i explicitly mentioned to a trainer there that i wouldn't be able to make it since i'm in a different state. nonetheless the person said they forgot about it and all my appointments were deleted. i'll just do the exercises at home at this point. the appointments were mostly for motivation to get out of the house and actually set time to do those exercises.

also did some cleanup and organization. my chinese evergreen (aglaonema) has been infected by mealy bugs. every time i come home from a trip i would see those little white devils huddling together on my plant, and i would wipe them off each time. i got sick of it and decided it was time for it to go. i wrapped it up with tape, and disposed of it in the trash. probably not the best way for it to go. but i couldn't think of any other options living in an apartment complex.

ingredients

main

• 2.5 oz white fish (sole, grouper, cod, halibut, or tilapia)
• 0.13 lb rice (about 1/4 cup)
• 1.5 cups water
• 0.25 oz ginger
• 0.5 stalk green onion
• pinch of cilantro
• 1 egg white

fish marinade

• 0.25 tbsp cornstarch
• 0.13 tsp salt
• pinch white pepper
• 0.25 tbsp water
• 0.25 tbsp oil

seasoning

• 0.25 tbsp oil
• 0.25 tsp salt
• 0.25 tsp fish sauce (or soy sauce)
• pinch white pepper

steps

prep aromatics

1. dice green parts of green onion (save white parts for another recipe)
2. cut ginger into thin slices, then julienne into thin strips
3. roughly chop cilantro
4. set aside for garnish

prep fish

1. squeeze out excess water from fish
2. slice fish at an angle into 1/4 to 1/2 inch pieces
3. mix marinade: cornstarch, salt, white pepper, water
4. gently mix marinade with fish using chopsticks
5. add egg white and mix gently
6. add oil and mix

cook congee

1. wash rice 3 times until water runs clear
2. boil 1.5 cups water in pot
3. add rice and stir well
4. when it boils again, stop stirring (prevents burning)
5. add oil, turn to low heat, cover
6. cook 25 minutes
7. uncover and whisk quickly for 1-2 minutes (creates thick texture)
8. add more water if too thick

finish

1. add fish slowly, spread them out
2. lower heat, mix fish around
3. add ginger strips and white pepper
4. season with salt and fish sauce
5. turn off heat, transfer to bowl
6. garnish with green onions and cilantro

notes

• use white fish for less fishy oil
• don't stir after rice comes to boil
• whisking at the end creates the thick texture
• fish cooks fast because it's thinly sliced

then i took a short visit to city lights bookstore, my favorite bookstore. a few books caught my attention: amazing grace: a cultural history of the beloved hymn, maker of patterns by freeman dyson, and the shakespeare and company book of interviews.

i picked up fish porridge for lunch and decided to have it at W's house before leaving for the airport. this time i made sure to arrive earlier since i was checking in a bag. i packed everything back this time, my last few items that i left at his house. it feels like i've finally moved to austin for real. my belongings have left sf too. feels like there's no part of me left in sf.

the flight experience upon arriving in austin was not great. i waited 45 min in taxiing and another 30 min more for baggage. it was already 12:30 a.m. i was exhausted. i was thinking about how there were so few chairs in this airport, and why it was so cramped. why is austin's airport is so small and so badly designed, whereas other airports like changi airport are just excellent.

i started the day at the farmers market at the ferry building, then went to chinatown. i met V at rice roll express, one of the best cheap cantonese meal spots. it reminds me a lot of taiwan and HK, except it's 6x the price. W came later to meet up with us, and we decided to do something fun. i wanted to go to the coast, but W had a better idea to go golfing. i was hesitant at first, but optimizing for fun is always a good idea to minimize regrets. we arrived at presidio golf course, and the driving range was 100 balls for $16 and $10 for rental clubs. that was not bad for SF. i expected the price to be exaggerated given we're in presidio.

at night W and i had dinner at Cha-ya, a vegan restaurant. because of my braces treatment, i had to ask the waitress to give me scissors, and i think they just grabbed one that was used to cut vegetables, which was funny.

we went to best buy to get a ps5 controller to play cyberpunk on my hp laptop that's been sitting at his apartment for months. we also called A and V to catch up.

also my first time working with teslio to get my code tested, with a deep fear that something is horribly wrong and they'll point it out and i'll be embarrassed, a stain on my track record.

A walked me through the architecture of the backend and how configs are rolled out. God bless him. i admire his work style and his sense of focus as someone who probably receives dozens of requests a day.

dinner was rooh sf again, and i'm safely in the corner again, but this time with more amiable people. couldn't eat much of the food because of my dietary restrictions.

after dinner, i shook his hand again. i think he knows me? or maybe it's just common courtesy. i want to talk to him more, but i need to grow. i need better ideas. don't go to someone like him empty minded. sure you have ideas but are they fleshed out? will it sound intelligent? or is it just a dumb shower thought? maybe i'm overthinking things.

stayed up till 3am that night to roll out my feature. each button i click i worry i will completely break the entire product.

dinner was slightly better than the last. this time i chose to be in the corner again. i again did not know how to initiate conversations and only answered when spoken to. most of the night was spent thinking to myself, observing, analyzing, and enjoying the chicken thighs.

today was another prod review. this time i presented CT again and the mobile design. my presentation had no memes or jokes. i didn't have anything witty to add. i just went through the slides and said what i needed to say. from an asian culture perspective, i did a good job, but from an american culture perspective, i was cut and dry and people would probably forget i presented at all. to make my presentation memorable, or to present myself as someone interesting or cool, i needed to risk it a little. inject some jokes. make my presentation a bit more interesting. make it unexpected. i'm usually not against taking risks, but i always let my visa status and the fact that i don't truly belong in this country hold me back. i always tread lightly. i remain invisible and in the background, where i feel safe.

there is a clear separation between the great and okay presentations. the great ones often receive validation from the big C, and many comments in the chat, or audible laughs from the whole group. i find them enjoyable as well. it feels so natural and not forced, like it's just in their nature to do it that way. you can tell they put effort into it, but it wasn't engineered or cold-blooded effort. it came from a heart of play, a pure form of fun, distilled into 5 minutes. turning boring facts into interesting stories.

i wonder if they picked it up from someone. if they also presented in a plain vanilla format before. and if it was the very moment they were exposed to this alternative that unlocked something in them.

that night i had dinner with B at my favorite restaurant in SF, echigo home cook. we talked about the culture at our companies and what life is like working at a startup, and bonded over the similarities and differences. it's always nice to meet up with a friend again, where conversations immediately start flowing, as if we just saw each other the day before.

dinners with colleagues are tough for me. i don't really know when to interject opinions and i just smile and respond concisely. i freeze when i'm given attention, and i crave the opportunity to participate in conversations. i'm in the corner, which feels nice, but i wish i was more confident and more interesting. isn't the worry itself making me less interesting? being interesting means being interested, but it also means being able to tell good stories. every time in situations like this, i feel like i have no stories to tell. i have nothing in common. nothing comes to mind. what made me this way? why do i act the way i do? how would my friends act in my shoes? why do i see myself as a lesser human being if i can't talk well at dinners?

after a slight hesitation, and mountains of pressure, i answered wednesday, which was 2 days. don't get me wrong, i like setting ambitious goals for myself, and no deadline at this company is ever realistic, but this was the most intense deadline ever. i do like deadlines though, it gives me clarity. i become hyperfocused on getting this specific task done within an amount of time. i evaluate all the trade-offs and keep only what is necessary.

dinner with E, S and R at Pazzia Ristorante Italiano. conversations don't flow smoothly and there are awkward pauses, but i got to know them a little bit better.

flight got delayed because of a government shutdown. the airport was packed. on the plane i did a bit of work, sitting in the emergency exit row this time. after about 3 hours i arrived in sf, took an uber, and checked into the hyatt regency. i passed by this hotel so many times on my way to class, and now being a guest here felt surreal. my room had a view of pier 1, and the layout was unusual. slanted corners and walls that didn't meet at right angles, almost triangular. as if the building settled into an odd shape over time after natural disasters. for dinner i ordered from korean moonbowl. coming back to my room from picking up the takeout food, i stared down at the lobby from the elevators, the atrium stretching below, i get mesmerized by the architecture.

i'm also glad to be able to work with designers. my initial version of the app was terrible. i had a hunch it wasn't great, but i didn't know how to fix it. the designer immediately knew how. he had a different way of thinking than me. i initially had everything squeezed into the mobile view, cramming the map into a box. a better design would have been to rethink the form factor—let the map fill the entire screen and have a list of the trails pop up from a bottom drawer. that one shift completely changed how the app feels.

having an actual designer work with me and provide mocks is incredibly high value—it saves time from further iteration. it's like someone who's ascended to a higher level, and you get to skip the time-wasting unnecessary hurdles and be upgraded instantly. a true life hack. working with people from different disciplines expands your mind, it happens whenever you collaborate across fields.

ut health is a clean and modern building. i went to the top floor to get checked in, then went a floor below to see the sports medicine doctor. he was one of the best doctors i've met. he was attentive, curious, and asked good questions. he was also guiding a new resident so he explained everything very clearly as he was doing the checks, which was good for me to hear his thought process out loud.

after the checkup i went to pho thaison to get pho. i asked for the combo and wanted a smaller size, but they only had one size. the bowl was huge, but i somehow managed to finish it. it was mostly soup, i guess—just a visual play.

went to medici roasting to get some work done. ordered matcha. wifi was not working so i was on my data the entire time.

walked around ut austin and took some photos before i went home on a waymo.

on my way to the office on the waymo, i saw a Jaguar XK8 convertible on the street. convertibles are so cool.

it reminded me of the second generation (NB) Mazda Miata MX-5, where Miata derives from Old High German for "reward". it was produced at Mazda's hiroshima plant, and created under design credo Jinba ittai, meaning "unity of horse and rider". the lotus cars served as a design benchmark, and they're described as a successor to the 50s and 60s italian and british roadsters.

went to local foods beside the office. got a matcha latte (hot, sub oat milk, add vital proteins (1 scoop), add ashwagandha (1 scoop)) and a tuna bowl (SOS, add rice/quinoa blend) to work.

came across a figure by swyx, which states "your coding ability is constrained by your codebase understanding"

i had this idea, where, as i find articles online, it will intelligently extract vocabulary that are out of my scope, and store it in anki for me to review.

as it feeds more from my interest and context about my life, it would be useful if the tool could find similar blogs/books/movies that use actual slang that taiwanese people use. that way it maximizes my ability to apply the words in day to day conversations.

is this the best way to learn? i do believe immersion and using the language is the fastest way, and i'm lucky to have T to practice with.

here's an attempt with Claude's help

A GPU does one simple math problem, and does that problem thousands of times at once

Your screen is made of dots. Each dot has a color. To show a picture, the computer has to figure out what color each dot should be.

A normal computer figures out one dot, then the next dot, then the next.

A GPU figures out thousands of dots at the same time.

a few examples

• LLMs: billions of matrix multiplication
• ray tracing: vector math (dot products)
• video encoding: discrete cosine transform
• bitcoin mining: hash functions (bitwise ops and adds)

more resources

• https://cs184.eecs.berkeley.edu/sp19/lecture/23/how-gpus-work
• https://research.nvidia.com/sites/default/files/pubs/2007-02_How-GPUs-Work/04085637.pdf
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9Z4oGN89MU
  • "you need a graphics card that can perform 36 trillion calculations a second to run Cyberpunk 2077"

i gave the spiel about my condition, and got a referral to a sports medicine doctor at UT Austin Health. i'm so grateful to have health insurance. if i was still stuck in iowa under a student's insurance, i would be handed tylenol and pray for it to go away.

today was our last day together in seattle. both of us were moody. we woke up later than expected, and couldn't make it to church. we watched the live stream of the sermon at the hotel lobby, and we were both dozing off. i wasn't feeling my best.

we went to have lunch at U:Don Fresh Japanese Noodle Station. udon with tempura is probably my #2 favorite japanese food after katsu curry. we went to magus bookstore, the same one i stepped foot into in december 2023, except this time i have T by my side. we bought two c.s. lewis books. one for her one for me.

after that we went to the henry gallery, it was a free entry, and the ghost art gallery was spooky. we left soon after to get our stuff from the hotel and went to the airport.

i stood outside the security checkpoint with her, not wanting to leave. my life feels like a movie, and every day with her feels like a dream.

after lunch we walked to Ada's Technical Books and Cafe along E Harrison St and saw beautiful fiery maple trees.

we couldn't find any seats in the book store, so we went next door to Victrola Coffee Roasters instead. we got our usual orders, matcha for me and chai for her.

for dinner, on a whim i searched for japanese restaurants, and found Kobuta & Ookami Katsu and sake house. dare i say the best katsu i've had.

at night we watched dead poets society. it was a beautiful movie. one that comes to mind from time to time when i stop to think about whether i'm truly living, or just existing.

"Carpe diem. Seize the day, boys. Make your lives extraordinary."

"We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion... Poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for."

"The powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?"

"You must strive to find your own voice. Because the longer you wait to begin, the less likely you are to find it at all."

i was craving for hainan chicken and found Asean Streat Food Hall on google maps. i had my hopes up high because this was seattle and not iowa, surely they can't mess it up too badly, right? boy was i wrong. everything about the dish was terrible, from the rice to the sauce and down to the chicken itself. i was so disappointed, it was a complete failure and dishonor of my country's food and culture that i felt i needed to burn the entire place down. metaphorically. even T's char kuey teoh was visually close, but incredibly salty. i wish this place never existed

we spent most of our time at pier 91, which houses the Brim Coffee Shop at the Edgewater Hotel. we went there thinking it was a cafe, but it turned out to be more of a lounge/restaurant?

a man who works there said we could enter, so we did, and sat our bags down and started working away. then evening came and the sun went down. and the atmosphere changed into a fancy restaurant. we both felt underdressed and wanted to leave as more people came in looking like actual adults. we gave off strong college student vibes.

the waitress came and asked if we wanted anything, i took a look at the menu and i saw the words "miso glazed black cod". i got so intrigued by this from the moment i learned about nobu, a popular restaurant from the chef Nobu Matsuhisa. and also from the yt video of him saying this is Robert De Niro's favorite dish. i decided to go for it, even though it was 60 dollars, possibly the most expensive meal i've ever had, and T went for grilled salmon.

i liked it in the beginning, it reminded me of fois gras. but it very quickly gave me issues and i liked it no more. it was too oily for my liking. maybe i got too excited and consumed it too quickly.

i was in the zone, blasting the steve aoki remix of Thriller by MJ. the halloween vibes were strong. we've been seeing students in costumes on the streets, marching on to somewhere, like gravity, they're all getting sucked to their respective destinations.

i doordashed curry katsu w udon from a japanese restaurant and nobody was picking up my order for almost two hours. it wasn't until one dude miraculously accepted it, i was so grateful i tipped the man 5 bucks right after prying it from his hands. he shouted back "thanks my man" before entering his car.

the katsu wasn't as warm anymore, but my stomach was no longer screaming for carbohydrates. i continued working till T met up with me again and we took a lyft home.

we went on a side quest to design our own t-shirt. we each had 5 moves to make, alternating as we added our own unique stroke onto the canvas on the ipad. the final result was cute.

we went to olympia coffee, tucked in the lobby of U.S. Bank Center, which, despite the dull name, is an indoor-street style public space with large cylindrical columns and wooden flooring, high ceilings and glass windows that let the light flood in, evoking the feel of a Scandanavian train station. we got matcha and black sesame latte, it exceeded my expectations. turns out this lobby was designed by SkB architects, people who are obsessed with designing third places. if only good design like this was the norm.

for dinner we decided on Din Tai Fung. it was underwhelming and the food was not great. but the good company made up for it.

we went to get sushi for dinner and i sent a picture of the menu to claude to get recommendations. i tweaked it a bit but had full faith in claude's taste. i liked the sea bream and the bass, i did not like the shrimp.

at night i was surprised with a cake that T made herself, sugar and dairy free, the best combination of words for me.

we kept working for the rest of the night.

i don't have a 24 things i learned at 24 this time, but only one reflection, which is there's no greater blessing than to have someone to share your life with, and to have the opportunity to work on something impactful and get paid for it. it is a rare combination that i somehow stumbled upon seemingly by accident, but looking back, it was a collection of decisions and experiences that got me to where i am today. and i only look forward, continuously seeking to live with more courage and with more passion for the things i believe in and to give attention to the people i care about.

• breakfast: dumplings from kbop
• lunch: chicken, carrots, edamame, garbanzo beans, grains, pumpkin seed, soy ginger sauce from mad greens
• dinner: hotpot

i woke up worried my leg would scream at me, but it was better. i cautiously did some clamshells and bridges, worried one wrong position and i'll regress back into an old man

i took my esomeprazole and went to work on my pipeline. after some dumplings i kept working until 12 and my heart jumped when i saw i had only 40 mins to board and i had not packed yet. i rushed to my closet, dumped some clothes, and all my medications, and ordered a priority pickup lyft.

the ride was predicted to be 18 minutes, and my flight was boarding in 20 minutes, at 12:51 pm. i was anxious but i told myself everything will be fine. i got there with 3 minutes to board, and thankfully the security check was swift. i started out on gate 5 and i had to walk all the way to gate 32, and get lunch in the middle. i got to my gate at 13:06, and they just finished boarding my group.

i really cut it close this time. i got on the plane, and realized i forgot the one medicine that would help me the most, which was my steroids.

but no worries, i should be able to survive. in the plane i worked.

post arrival at the airport, the seattle airport

the rest of the night was the windiest and coldest i've ever experienced in a long time, the last time was winter in iowa. seattle gave me a warm welcome.

we had hotpot with T's friends. it was nice to spend time around people that are not in tech, it's refreshing to step outside of the bubble.

• oatmeal drink (2pm)
• korean beef soup (4pm)
• korean beef soup (8pm)

woke up at 1:36 pm and my meeting was fortunately pushed back by 30 minutes.

had a discussion, got my action items and things are clearer.

worked mostly the rest of the day till 7pm until i was forced to leave for cvs to get my medication.

my Rx:

• cyclobenzaprine 10mg (muscle relaxant)
• methylprednisolone 4mg (roids)
• tylenol (pain)
• esomeprazole (stomach)

feeling better with that steroid injection, thank God for health insurance.

i arrived just before standup and after that, continued working.

i went downstairs to flowerchild to get my lunch.

my leg is flaring slightly again, i try to stretch out the pain and brush it off.

after more hours of working, i went to the gym, and did a bunch of exercises, one of them was hanging on the bar, and doing some pullups. i could hear my back crack. it felt satisfying.

my leg starts to feel weird, slowly, then suddenly.

it was still bearable, so i iced it constantly, and when it got too painful, i took a meloxicam, and hoped that would be the cure.

i had some food with it, so i won't be able to sleep for a few hours, so i kept working.

sitting on my desk, it felt better. i thought it was just like last time. one meloxicam and i'm good to go.

but when i went to bed around 3, the pain started to come back. and when i twist to get on, i felt like i was stabbed, the inflammation was at its peak. it was so bad i could barely walk or bend down. i sat on my sofa bed thinking about my action plan.

it is 3:30 a.m. what can i do. i can't sleep, the pain is unbearable, and i'm also dead exhausted.

thinking about my seattle trip, i caved. after some openevidence queries and chatgpt questions for cost to go to ER with my insurance doc attached, i decided a 500 copay was not too bad.

i first tried for an uber assist vehicle, but they rejected me for not having a wheelchair. next i got a lady, and i didn't want that awkward interaction. so i had no choice but to get a waymo. what usually takes 2 minutes for me to rush down, took me 10x longer. i had to take minutely small baby steps. with every step, my hip was screaming, the pain was visceral. T was on the phone with me and she accompanied me the entire time, which helped calm me down.

i got to within the vicinity of the waymo, and while i was so close to salvation, my hip called it quits. i stood frozen, i called the waymo support to help move it closer to the junction. the lady who got on the line said she has no remote control access. bummer. i picked up what was left of my strength to get closer to the waymo, inch by inch, literally. she starts saying that she can see me through the camera, and felt sorry for me. i thought it was a funny interaction.

the ER was only 5 minutes away, which was convenient. i got there, filled up some forms, and faced two nurses, one who took my vitals, and another male who was the meanest and coldest nurse i've met in my life. i don't know what he was going through in his life, but if he's like that on a normal day, he does not deserve to be a nurse. a person with his attitude should not work in the service industry. i felt so invalidated and uncared for. he was worse than an ai. because of that interaction with him, i would rather choose to talk to an AI, if all he wants to do is document things.

the doctor was a different breed, a complete opposite person. he was attentive, showed empathy and care, and did all the right things. he eased my heart.

i got a steroid injection, a muscle relaxant, and some prescriptions and a $350 bill. could've been worse.

i got on another waymo home, and on the way thought about how i'm lucky to have the ability to seek healthcare within a matter of minutes.

i got home, took another shower, and slept at 6 a.m.

i have since learned to NEVER do any leg workouts until i get through all my pt sessions. my glutes need strengthening, and i do not want another experience like this again.

i've been staying at the office late into the evenings, and around 6 pm you can see the city morph into a golden landscape. with the curtain wall glass windows you can see the full view of the Ann W. Richards Congress Avenue Bat Bridge, where a crowd will gather to see the bats.

at the right moment, the 700 river apartment will light up, like the Eye of Sauron, monitoring me closely as i do my work. later in the day, the bright flame shifts to the 100 Congress building. i wonder which buildings light up for the people there, and if they're also noticing how the sunlight plays on concrete and glass.

• breakfast: acai bowl from grain and berry
• lunch: flower child mother earth bowl
• dinner: flower child mother earth bowl and protein shake

learned about some popular ETFs:

1. VOO - vanguard s&p 500 etf

• holds the 500 biggest US companies (apple, microsoft, amazon, etc.)
• "VOO = vanguard + 500"
• the core of the US stock market
• fee: 0.03%

2. VTI - vanguard total stock market etf

• holds all publicly traded US stocks (large, mid, small)
• "T = total" - the entire US market
• slightly more diversified than VOO
• fee: 0.03%

3. VXUS - vanguard total international stock etf

• stocks outside the US (europe, asia, emerging markets)
• "X = eX-US"
• reduces single-country risk
• fee: 0.05%

4. VUG - vanguard growth etf

• US growth stocks, tech-heavy (apple, nvidia, google)
• "G = growth" - companies growing fast
• higher potential, higher volatility
• fee: 0.04%

5. QQQM - invesco nasdaq-100 etf

• the 100 biggest tech-oriented US companies
• "QQQM = mini QQQ" (cheaper version of famous QQQ)
• no banks, pure innovation/tech
• fee: 0.15%

6. BND - vanguard total bond market etf

• government + corporate bonds
• "B = bonds"
• safer, lower return, steady income
• fee: 0.03%

mental model:

• VOO/VTI = engine → consistent growth
• VXUS = diversifier → reduces single-country risk
• VUG/QQQM = booster → adds excitement and higher potential
• BND = shock absorber → cushions crashes

you can't create meaning for yourself.

viktor frankl, the jewish psychologist who was put into death camps during wwii, noticed something. some prisoners who lost everything became bad—they started to steal from other prisoners. others became zombies, they just curled up and died. but there were other prisoners who stayed strong, who stayed courageous.

why? why do some people lose themselves and some remain themselves?

it depended on what they made their meaning in life. if you make your meaning of life something that death camps can take away, then you got no self left.

so what can it take away? anything under the sun. if you live for status, career, family, money, sex, whatever under the sun—anything, it can be taken away.

the only people who stayed strong were people who lived for something that wasn't under the sun. something like God, something like faith.

the lesson: you can't create meaning for yourself. you have to discover meaning in some reality higher than yourself.

what it means to serve God

what does it mean to live for God vs living for pleasure? it is possible to obey God not for God's sake but for your own sake. you may think you're very religious, but if you live for God just to get things—to get blessings, health, success—then you're just as unstable as everyone else. and you will get that spiritual nausea.

you should serve and obey God just to give him pleasure.

what is real love?

real love is not just emotional. it's not just "i want a relationship with you because i'm attracted to you," desiring them because you feel happy. it's also not mainly volitional, like "i'm doing my duty."

you know you love somebody when you put your happiness into their happiness. so your greatest happiness in love is just to see them happy. you don't make them happy to feel good about yourself—their joy is your joy, their delight is your delight. there's nothing beyond it.

the only way to get a meaningful life is not just obeying God in some dutiful way. you need to obey God because you love God.

– sickness unto death, tim keller

i added a few things to my blog

• a heatmap like the github commits graph, but of my posts, and the shades represent length of my posts.
• a spotify listening activity, showing current, and recent 3 songs
• and a umap plot of posts embeddings
• backfilled tags by asking claude code to read all my posts

claude code is amazing. what can it NOT do?

does more data always = better model?

research shows it's a power law, not linear:

100 samples → loss = 10
1,000 samples (10x more) → loss = 5 (not 1)
10,000 samples (10x more) → loss = 2.5 (not 0.5)

it has diminishing returns that holds across seven orders of magnitude.

what about finetuning? since the base model already knows a lot, you're just teaching it something specific, does the same rule apply?

yes but you might only need 20-50% of your data to get 95% performance. so which 20-50%?

j morris showed that models have a capacity limit. GPT-style models memorize ~3.6 bits per parameter.

this means a 1B parameter model can only memorize ~450MB of information. that's your budget.

training on more data doesn't increase budget. just spreads it thinner.

when you exceed capacity, model is forced to generalize instead of memorize. this explains grokking - that moment when performance suddenly jumps.

so the question becomes: which data fills the budget?

if you have lots of data, keep hard examples. easy ones are redundant.

if you have little data, keep easy examples. hard ones might just be noise.

someone showed you can discard 20% of ImageNet without hurting performance. potentially breaking power law scaling.

how do you actually do this though?

there's information bottleneck theory - find maximally compressed mapping that preserves info about output. keep only data that tells you something useful.

practical methods exist:

• coreset selection - finds small weighted subset that approximates full dataset
• geometry-based pruning - preserve feature space structure
• uncertainty-based - keep what model is uncertain about
• error-based - keep high-loss examples

problem: most don't scale well. best ones are expensive to compute.

there's also this idea of four scaling regimes. basically asking two questions:

1. is the bottleneck your data or your model?
2. is the problem noise or lack of detail?

two limitations:

• variance-limited: error from noise in limited samples (like photos in a dark room)
• resolution-limited: can't capture fine-grained patterns (like a pixelated image)

knowing which regime you're in tells you if more data helps or if you need something else.

j morris continues to show embeddings from different models converge to similar representation geometries.

if there's a universal geometry, maybe there's an optimal compression of training data that fills that structure efficiently.

there's also a ton of research on synthetic data that can fit into the equation as well. a rabbit hole that i would love to dive into some other time.

you have a vector db of disease terms mapping to information you want, say journal_id, and given a user query, you want to find all the journal_ids for that disease term.

say the disease term is "autoimmune polyendocrine syndrome type 1"

and you use using text-embedding-ada-002 and got this back:

0.6462 │ Type 1 Diabetes Mellitus          │ ID_001, ID_003 (+92 more)
0.6452 │ Type 1 Diabetes                   │ ID_002, ID_004 (+95 more)  
0.6443 │ Autoimmune Polyendocrinopathy...  │ ID_099

my first thought, being medically illiterate like me, is oh the model saw Type 1 in both terms, so it latched on to that heavily. these general embeddings are bad at medical concepts. but it understood it more than i give it credit for.

here's the gist:

type 1 diabetes is actually a component diseases of APS-1. APS-1 (aka APECED) is caused by mutation in the AIRE gene.

The AIRE protein normally teaches your immune system not to attack your own organs, but when its broken, it goes rogue and attacks multiple organs.

diagnosis requires at least 2 out of 3 classicial triad symptoms:

• chronic candidiasis (yeast infections)
• hypoparathyroidism (low calcium)
• addison's disease (adrenal failure)

but only 45-67% of patients actually develop all three, many patients develop other autoimmune conditions or in addition, including: type 1 diabetes (18% of APS-1 patients), autoimmune hepatitis, vitiligo (skin), alopecia (hair loss), thyroid problems

so APS-1 is a syndrome that can include T1D as one of the many possible manifestation, and the embedding model picked up on this relationship

APS-1 (the syndrome - broken AIRE gene)
├── Chronic candidiasis (73-100%)
├── Hypoparathyroidism (76-93%)
├── Addison's disease (72-100%)
├── Type 1 diabetes (~18%)
├── Alopecia (29-40%)
└── Other manifestations

so searching for APS-1 and getting a T1D is like seraching heart attack and getting "chest pain" back. yes chest pain is a symptom of heart attack, but if someone needs info on heart attacks, giving them chest pain resources misses the point. they want the specific condition, not one of its symptoms.

the solution?

medical specific embeddings, a two stage retrieval (common in industry), contrastive finetuning w triplet loss where positive pairs are synonyms and exact matches, and hard negatives are manifestations and siblings.

• show they are excited and proud about the thing more than anyone else
• are brief on the technical details
• present a scenario and gives you a problem
• jump right into a demo
• explain what problem it solves
  • presents clear metrics, instead of 10 hours, it's now 10 minutes
• talk about what can be better, and how it's going to be used today, how it will evolve

most people are so skillful at presenting that i can't help but admire them, and want to learn how to present like them as well.

after the presentations and news, i felt immensely grateful for being at this company. and i was filled with even more excitement and hope for the upcoming months, as i continue to work on interesting projects that have a huge impact on health in the US.

my japanese food craving was still ongoing, and i got una-gyu don for lunch. after that i went out for a walk around valencia street. i went to dog-eared books and spent about 17 minutes in there perusing, before i left to stroll around and observe the fall leaves on display, and halloween decorations around the street. it soon started to drizzle, and i went to stonemill matcha to get an early dinner before i go to the airport. i order 30 min before they close, and finished my matcha while i waited. the rain grew heavier by the second. by the time my order was done, i had to brave it by sheltering under store fronts, protecting my hot and crusty pork katsu curry. i waited the longest i ever had for my waymo, taking up to 20 minutes. as i rushed home, i moved all the bags out of W's house and was ready to say goodbye once again. i then proceeded to make the dumbest move by leaving my food behind the locked door. once again, my lack of planning and memory backfires. i leave the curry for W as a parting gift i suppose.

i decide to have chicken pho at the airport, it was saltier than i imagined, and made me queesy. i also got the coconut tofu curry from proper food which i am obsessed with. for the flight home i watched office spaces, a classic movie as i've heard, and after watching, i fully agree and understand. and amazed how it's still so relevant today. like the sillicon valley show.

i had a lovely conversation with my driver, who came to austin 15 years ago. must've been a huge change for her. coming home i decided to unpack everything, and ended up sleeping at 4am.

after fulfilling my duties, i went to the library to Get Work Done. and then ordered from Hon's Wun-Tun house, clams with sake and dumplings. i took the food to the transamerica park, it was incredble. though the alcohol content the clams gave me a headache. i walked pass my old apartment, an entire years worth of memories flooded back. i was stuck in that cold damp hole for an entire year. i felt lucky being moved to austin. my QoL definitely improved. although the money probably played a factor in it.

i was supposed to catch my flight with my 50 lbs luggage, but turns out, you can't check your bag 45 mins before a flight. lesson learned. i now know that you have to check in at least an hour and 15 mins before, minimum if you want to check a bag and fly. my flight was moved by a day, and i went back to W's apartment feeling like a failure. maybe i was just sour that things didn't go my way and it was all my fault.

• breakfast: grains drink
• lunch: udon mugizo - tonkatsu deluxe w shrimp tempura
• dinner: echigo home cook - pork katsu curry

stared out of the window in a waymo just appreciating how unique the SF buildings are. taking deep breaths. i felt like i was on a race track the past few weeks, and now i get to take a pit stop. went to japantown to get udon because i craved it. then walked around filmore st, saw some cute kittens for adoption, then got matcha at peets coffee and the plan was to get some work done, but the wifi was bad. so we took the bus home, a decision forced by W. the rest of the evening was filled up with packing my leftover stuff from our apartment. i got a cheap luggage from amazon just for this. and i found it was still not enough space to bring everything back. i have a surprising amount of stuff. stuff that i don't really need. dinner was j food again, because i can't get enough of it.

the problem we solve: even with async, you're bottlenecked by

• python's GIL (no true parallelism)
• no smart batching
• no request hedging (p99 latency kills you)

what is request hedging?

imagine you send a request, and 99% of it come back in 100ms, but 1% takes 5s due to network or slow replica

request hedging is : after Xms, send a duplicate request, whichever finishes first wins, slow one gets cancelled

it's like calling an uber, a waymo, and a lyft, and whichever arrives first, you get on, the rest you cancel. (wouldn't that be a great app)

the catch: it costs extra requests. you can cap this at a budget with b10

from baseten_performance_client import PerformanceClient

client = PerformanceClient(
    base_url="https://api.openai.com",
    api_key="your-key"
)

texts = ["doc " + str(i) for i in range(100000)]

response = client.embed(
    input=texts,
    model="text-embedding-3-small",
    batch_size=128,              # pack by count
    max_chars_per_request=50000, # or by chars (hits limit first)
    max_concurrent_requests=256,
    hedge_delay=0.5              # send duplicate after 0.5s
)

went to the ferry building and tried lunette, the cambodian restaurant. the pork noodle soup was decent, esp for the $28 price tag, i had high expectations after watching that yt video, but i cannot trust youtubers. went to the main library and picked up two books from the bookstore. then worked out of there for a few hours. walked to ikea to get some meatballs. then worked out of saluhall, a modern food hall with tasteful decor and lights. i sat there getting more work done before i rushed to pickup the chicken rice i ordered from Gai and Rice and to catch my waymo home.

the basic idea

partial "freezes" args in a fn so you don't have to pass them every time

from functools import partial

def add(a, b, c):
    return a + b + c

add_5_and_10 = partial(add, 5, 10)
add_5_and_10(3)  # returns 18 (same as add(5, 10, 3))

the problem: fetching from multiple APIs

imagine you need to fetch user data from 3 different API endpoints at the same time

here's the messy way:

import asyncio
from functools import partial
from concurrent.futures import ThreadPoolExecutor

def fetch_data(user_id, api_endpoint, timeout=30, retry=3, api_key="secret"):
    return f"Data from {api_endpoint} for user {user_id}"

async def get_user_data_messy(user_id):
    executor = ThreadPoolExecutor()
    loop = asyncio.get_event_loop()
    
    # repetition
    future1 = loop.run_in_executor(
        executor,
        lambda: fetch_data(user_id, "profile", 30, 3, "secret")
    )
    future2 = loop.run_in_executor(
        executor,
        lambda: fetch_data(user_id, "orders", 30, 3, "secret")
    )
    future3 = loop.run_in_executor(
        executor,
        lambda: fetch_data(user_id, "reviews", 30, 3, "secret")
    )
    
    results = await asyncio.gather(future1, future2, future3)
    return results

the clean way with partial:

async def get_user_data_clean(user_id):
    executor = ThreadPoolExecutor()
    loop = asyncio.get_event_loop()
    
    # common way
    fetcher = partial(
        fetch_data,
        user_id=user_id,
        timeout=30,
        retry=3,
        api_key="secret"
    )
    
    endpoints = ["profile", "orders", "reviews"]
    
    futures = [
        loop.run_in_executor(executor, partial(fetcher, api_endpoint=ep))
        for ep in endpoints
    ]
    
    results = await asyncio.gather(*futures)
    return results

why the double partial

loop.run_in_executor(executor, partial(fetcher, api_endpoint=ep))

here's what's actually happening:

# first partial: lock in the common stuff
fetcher = partial(fetch_data, user_id=user_id, timeout=30, retry=3, api_key="secret")

# second partial: add the specific endpoint
profile_fetcher = partial(fetcher, api_endpoint="profile")

# now profile_fetcher() is a zero-argument callable
# calling it is the same as: fetch_data(user_id, "profile", 30, 3, "secret")

seeing it run

import time

def fetch_data(user_id, api_endpoint, timeout=30, retry=3, api_key="secret"):
    time.sleep(1)  # pretend this is an API call
    return f"Data from {api_endpoint} for user {user_id}"

async def main():
    start = time.time()
    results = await get_user_data_clean(12345)
    print(f"completed in {time.time() - start:.2f}s")
    print(results)
    # completed in 1.01s  (all 3 APIs ran at the same time)
    # ['Data from profile for user 12345', 
    #  'Data from orders for user 12345',
    #  'Data from reviews for user 12345']

asyncio.run(main())

had a chat with e about the plan and updates. the goal was to speed up and try to fit 70b in one h100 instead of two. tried out online dynamic quantization with vllm (fp8). it was actually slower than before and also still required the same amount of memory. pointless.

next explored qlora training with bitsandbytes. kept facing 0.0 grad_norm issues and tried to debug the entire day and couldn't figure out why. a problem for another day to solve.

at night all of us went to the rooftop and everyone shared about their past failures and projects and i felt lucky to be here at a stage where things are more stable and where growth is skyrocketing, but also wished i was part of the early experience and just building fun experimental features and making mistakes. i'm at a point where i feel like i'm the new guy that doesn't fit in anywhere, and it's hard to bond when i have little in common with everyone. but i'm sure i will find my place eventually. insecurity and overthinking stems from thinking too much about myself. i just need to relax and by myself.

me and R got to east miami and we went for sushi soon after. it was at a mall beside our hotel. the food was food truck quality, but it was a nice hangout with him. the hotel is nice. it has a balcony where you can oversee other fancy high rise apartments with a large balcony as well. miami reminds me of malaysia a lot.

also set up poetry development environment with pyenv, and direnv for auto-activation. python env is still a headache. i now just use uv. i believe uv solves everything

went to pickup the pottery we made at mud studio. they actually turned out so well. i would love to do it again with T

with claude code, making plots and performance reports is so easy. adhoc scripts are all one shotted.

i'm actually doing finetuning rather than just writing prompts now. it's really fun.

also looked into guided decoding which is how u can guarantee llms output valid structured data

traditional decoding samples from full vocab:

p(token_t | context) -> softmax over entire vocab

this means the model can generate anything, sometimes you get valid json, sometimes not

the solution: guided decoding masks invalid tokens at each

p(token_t | context, constraints) -> softmax over valid_tokens

how it works: finite state automaton (FSA)- basically a lookup table that says, in state x, these are the valid tokens.

1. compile constraints -> FSA (one time, cached). your json schema becomes a state machine
2. during generation:
   • checks current FSA state
   • lookup which tokens are valid
   • mask everything else
   • sample from valid tokens only
3. after each token:
   • update fsa state
   • repeat

vLLM supports three backends for this

• outlines: good for regex
• lm-format-enforcer: character level
• xgrammar: optimized for nested structures

the con? overhead is a 5-15% slower generation

from peft import LoraConfig, get_peft_model

peft_config = LoraConfig(
    r=8,
    lora_alpha=16,
    target_modules="all-linear",
    target_parameters=[
        "7.mlp.experts.gate_up_proj",
        "7.mlp.experts.down_proj",
        "15.mlp.experts.gate_up_proj",
        "15.mlp.experts.down_proj",
        "23.mlp.experts.gate_up_proj",
        "23.mlp.experts.down_proj",
    ],
)
peft_model = get_peft_model(model, peft_config)
peft_model.print_trainable_parameters()

i still have issues trying to finetune this model, and it's not clear to me that i'm doing things right. but i am having fun. i just wish this was a month long research project rather than a one week speedrun to get my project done.

memory oom issues with batch=4 (103gb) vs batch=1 (64gb). attention computation needed ~30gb per forward pass.

one important rule in finetuning any model, the distribution of your labels have to be equal, especially for LoRA training.

Life is trade-offs and timing – yj

meals:

• breakfast: teriyaki chicken
• lunch: cava falafel and saffron basmati rice
• dinner: shake, salmon, basmati rice, arugula, kimchi

notes:

• notes to my younger self
  • people who love their work are faster, spot patterns, and build reputations that last
  • ASK WHY, dig beneath solutions to root causes. timebox curiosity, give yourself permission to explore within boundaries. build mental models of how things actually work
  • relationships exist when you're helpful, interesting, or both. be useful without being needy
  • bring joy to work. create fun, don't force funny. the teams who ship the best products are the ones enjoying building it the most
  • COMMUNICATE. (1) actually listen, and (2) explain w precision.
    • you have seconds to make your point, unnecessary details dilute, context before complexity, high level -> technical depth
  • brag document: record what you shipped, problems you solved, people you helped, skills you're building, recognition received
  • what would make it a 10? act immediately on feedback, process it and implement and circle back
  • boss > title. who will you become after working for this person?
• commit story
  • 300 lines per PR is best. >500 is unreviewable territory
  • write commits that tell a story: present change incrementally and logically so reviewers follow your thought process. overall diffs don't tell that.

reflection:

• lifting weights makes me more hungry, which makes me eat more, which helps me gain weight, which helps me lift more weights, which ...

slept: 2:00 a.m.

discovered using rich package for terminal table outputs which looks incredibly sick.

discussions with mds about labeling

chat with e about future projects.

getting doctors to label data is cool.

root cause is asyncio.run() being called inside threadpoolexecutor threads

building better interfaces for exporting questions, when getting help on labeling, it's important to make it easy for others who are incredibly busy.

also found out i have consumed 1,768,965,424 input tokens and 7 million output tokens just in september alone.

also started to get dizzy and sick around this time. i discovered the condition was TMJ, but i had little control over curing it.

the problem: leaflet requires window object and can't run during SSR

solution: use Next.js dynamic with {ssr : false} for components that imports the map

only use in next.js pages that can be server-rendered

not needed in client components that has 'use client'

also learned to name variables safely because all data can be seen by users here, so naming something like <third_party_client>_score can expose what tech you're using under the hood.

also broke the production deploy because a month or so ago i was using claude code to learn django migrations, and i had prod creds, and i did a migrate command directly on prod. which is embarrassing. i have learned to never commit that egregious sin again.

also had issues with django where i kept hitting an issue with an old migration file. turns out it was a red herring and i just had different fields from my migration file. i really need to check the details more before jumping to conclusions. it's also so hard to get people to help you review stuff, and having the anxiety of not knowing when they can get around to your stuff, with people towering over you telling you to get things done quickly.

also bought the apple airpods max and iphone 17. both blue.

also learned how to split mixed branches using cherry-picking. i'm still slowly learning the git language.

we had chilantro for lunch, and t tried out weight lifting. i ordered out of ramen tatsu-ya for dinner.

halfway in warren i got boomed about getting things done asap, and i was flooded with anxiety.

went to buy flowers at tj for t, i have never made a bouquet before and i had to do it in the uber. i eventually put it together but i could've done a better job. i saw her come through the exit and i had a burst of joy and peace. i felt like everything was good, and my life was complete. it has been 3 months since i last seen her. had dinner with colleagues at loro and then we went to amc barton creek to watch jaws. this was our first ever time interacting with other people as a couple, and it will the first of many more to come.

what are side effects?

side effects = hidden changes that happen inside a function (modifying global state, mutating objects, writing to files without returning the result)

bad - with side effects:

def process_chunks(file_path):
    chunks = chunk_file(file_path)

    for chunk in chunks:
        embedding = generate_embedding(chunk)
        db.insert(chunk, embedding)  # ← side effect: writes to DB immediately

    return len(chunks)

# if this crashes halfway, you get:
# - duplicate entries on retry
# - partial data in database
# - no way to know what succeeded

good - no side effects:

def process_chunks(file_path):
    chunks = chunk_file(file_path)

    results = []
    for chunk in chunks:
        embedding = generate_embedding(chunk)
        results.append({"chunk": chunk, "embedding": embedding})

    return results  # ← caller decides what to do with results

# if this crashes, just retry - no corruption
# can batch insert all at once
# easy to validate before committing to DB

why this matters for pipelines:

• can retry any step without corrupting state
• can run steps in parallel safely
• can resume from crashes without side effects piling up
• testing is simple: input → output, no setup needed

also learned about the benefits of asyncio over threadpool in python. essentially it uses a lot less memory because there's only one thread managing the event loop, versus threadpool which spawns multiple threads.

                    ASYNCIO (Single Thread)

                      [Event Loop]
                           │
         ┌─────────────────┼─────────────────┐
         ▼                 ▼                 ▼
    ┌─────────┐       ┌─────────┐       ┌─────────┐
    │  Task 1 │       │  Task 2 │       │  Task 3 │
    │  [API1] │       │  [API2] │       │  [API3] │  ← all tasks
    │ waiting │       │ waiting │       │ waiting │    started
    └─────────┘       └─────────┘       └─────────┘    instantly

    Memory: ~1 thread, minimal overhead

              THREADPOOL (Multiple Threads)

    ┌──────────┬──────────┬──────────┬──────────┐
    │ Thread 1 │ Thread 2 │ Thread 3 │ Thread 4 │
    ├──────────┼──────────┼──────────┼──────────┤
    │  [API1]  │  [API2]  │  [API3]  │  [API4]  │ ← 4 tasks
    │  waiting │  waiting │  waiting │  waiting │   running
    │          │          │          │          │
    │  [API5]  │  [API6]  │   idle   │   idle   │ ← tasks 5-6
    │  waiting │  waiting │          │          │   must wait
    └──────────┴──────────┴──────────┴──────────┘

    Memory: ~4 threads, higher overhead per thread

rebasing confuses me still, git intimidates me, i'm worried one wrong command and i lose all my work or the very least, embarrassing myself with a silly mistake. which is a fear i have to overcome if i want to learn and operate fast.

i volunteered for a project that came from the big Cs, and the rest of the night (and morning) felt like an intense solo hackathon, where completion mattered more than winning. the stakes felt high at the time. as the hours passed from 1 to 2am, then 3, and suddenly 6 am, i retired to bed, greeted by amber sunrise.

in most domains, the most talented performers have some edge that allows them to level up faster than the average person, and daviespite hng this edge, they still chose to put in much more time than the average person.

they spend most of their waking hours pushing the bouulder even though it's way beyond what people consider the finish line. for this kind of person, there is no concept of a finish line.

the talent domain is a component of their identity, not just a skill equip.

– justin skycak

i flew to boston with R and E on the same flight w delta. i saw an old woman paint on the plane wiht water colors. when the plane was landing she held hands with her husband sitting across the aisle. i felt a rush of warmth and longing, a glimpse of a future i aspire to have with T. we arrived at the marriot late evening. my room had a beautiful corner window view of boston.

all work is imperfect becuase humans are inherently flawed – john piper

meals:

• breakfast: oats + bananas
• lunch: flower child mother earth + sweet potato fries
• dinner: chicken soup + beef dumplings + rice

notes:

7 lessons for productivity

everything we have is a gift and we must use it to help others

1. have a clear vision for your purpose
2. we are makers, all our actions involve making something different that it was, doing is making
3. sloth vs rest, know the difference between laziness and rest
4. all human work is imperfect, we must make peace with imperfection and finitude
5. act on insights immediately, capture semindal ideas when your mind is ripe with insights
6. work steadily and consistently, a thousand small faithful chops brings down great trees
7. always look forward, never be more satisfied with past achievements than excited about future ones.

slept at 3am the past 3 days

tomorrow: flight

slept: 3:50 a.m.

• breakfast: oats + banana
• lunch: tumeric chicken + rice + salad
• dinner: tumeric chicken + rice + salad

notes:

• ikea sent replacement, spent an hour setting it up again and another hour dealing with the old broken model
• went to the loren hotel coffee shop
• learned more about the history of malaysia from this instagram channel. didn't know that by the end of 19th century, malaysia exported 50,000 tons of tin annually, which made up more than half of the world's global tin output. and the reason why we had tin is because of heavy rainfall and rivers.

reflection:

• lately for work i've been claude coding too much, and instead of taking 30 minutes ot think throught eh problem myself firs,t end up spending 2 hours debugging and fixing ai errors. i'm in a very bad cyclethat i have to escape. i need to just spent time thinking

tomorrow: ask more questions

slept: 3 a.m.

“I like being in the shade of a tree very much, both because of not being so warm, but also because I’m reminded that, um, there’s something much bigger than me. Like literally something over me. I look up and I feel the immensity of the tree, and then I also see all the little weird polygons that the interlocking branches make and how they kind of split up the sky into all these weird polygons. And I find that really just astonishing and wonderful—like the branches make shapes out of the sky. That only I can see in this moment from only this particular angle. And like, uh, just being reminded of that makes me happy and makes me feel a little bit, um, yeah, like I’m not doom‑scrolling.

“We only have a certain number of times left to stare at a tree… it’s extremely fin`ite. What do I have left—maybe 12,000 times? To stare at a tree, like that feels totally insufficient.”

– john green last meal

meals:

• breakfast: oats + bananas
• lunch: dumplings, shake
• dinner: chicken soup + rice

notes:

• had to deal with vacuuming the futon mattress and fit it into a box, returned 4 other amazon items to UPS. there should be a service i can pay for to just return amazon things for me
• procrastinated alot today, watched weapons while working, gymed at 7 pm, cooked chicken soup with tumeric, bay leaves, star anise, mushroom powder
• listned to linus lee talk about building tools for thought in dialectic

reflection:

i have to stop staying up late finishing work its going to have so much ddamage on my mental heallth, and also watching media as a way to destress, i need better self control, i'm losing sense of myself

tomorrow: sleep earlier

slept: 3 a.m.

the world is a museum of passion projects

– john collison

meals:

• breakfast: oats
• lunch: flower child mother earth
• dinner: uchiba

notes:

• TINA HE
  • When We Cease to Understand the World, Benjamín Labatut
  • Order without Design, How Markets Shape Cities
• bezos speech – 2010 Baccalaureate Remarks

reflection:

is there a way to avoid the iterative process of doing things, and redoing it again with new information? is that a natural part of creating something new? i wish, instead of lacking context, i could branch out topics depeer in a tree, and be able to pick the best path from there.

ive had to open chat and web based chatgpt and claude countless times today, and use cursor and claude code and code and gemini for diefferent cases at different moments. i wish there was just one big AI lab

tomorrow: improve extraction

slept: 12:35 a.m.

"Consumerism is the Perfection of Slavery"

“I buy, therefore I am.”

– Prof Jiang

meals:

• breakfast: oats
• lunch: local foods (mediterranean bowl) + matcha latte
• dinner: tumeric basmati rice + salmon + cherries

notes:

• articles on brain rot from this video
  • algorithms are killing coincidences. what does that mean for language?
  • unrot your brain - by Kylee - plum pits
  • how to pay attention again (the neuroscience of focus in the age of everything)
  • the zeitgeist is going offline - by Erifili Gounari
• some yt videos
  • This Changed My View On LOVE
  • Consumerism is the Perfection of Slavery - Prof Jiang Xueqin
  • ABOUT TIME and the Secret Formula for Happiness
  • Health CARE: Thoughts from Lima

reflection:

• have been getting into a bad pattern of going home and working while standing at kitchen island and occasionally getting distracted by movies. i cannot continue to live like this

tomorrow: sleep early

slept: 1:40 a.m.

you’re not addicted to content, you’re starving for information

– hank green

meals:

• breakfast: oats
• lunch: flowerchild mother earth
• dinner: rice + salmon + cherries

notes:

• spent the day prompt engineering for extracting data
• hank green talks about why social media is junk food

  "you will never get someone to fact check a fact that they agree with"

reflection:

• need to go to bed earlier. W trigerred me before my bedtime with the email to my boss. communication is so hard with some people.

tomorrow:

slept: 1:30 a.m.

• breakfast: oats
• lunch: flower child mother earth
• dinner: shake + oats drink

notes:

• ikea qc check on adlaven is horrible spent an hour on that
• spent another hour installing bed frame while watching fast and furious 9

these days just setting up furnitre is eating up my evenings. but its reducing the echo in my apartment, and making it more like a home.

slept: 1:30 a.m.

• breakfast: rice + salad + avocado
• lunch: torchys chicken bowl
• dinner: salmon + rice + salad

worked at the office, been eating a heavier breakfast in the morning so i can withstand a later lunch with the team. working at the office is nice. i need to get better at joining in conversations though. i'm the kind of person that says things when prompted or when necessary. unless i'm feeling drunky tired or with close friends who won't jduge me.

tomorrow: standup DEMO

slept: 12 a.m.

• breakfast: oats
• lunch: hopdoddys (bufallo bill)
• shake: berries + pea protein + unsweteened soy milk
• dinner: salmon + salad + rice (9pm)

links:

• how to do stuff - by vincent huang - a slice of my mind
• 42 notes on AI & work - by Jasmine Sun - @jasmine
• Writing More Often - ordep.dev
• Why I Want to Write (Again) - ordep.dev
• Confidence Comes from Taking Care of Yourself

tomorrow: FINISH MATCHING ALGO

slept: 1:30 a.m.

What does good system design look like? I’ve written before that it looks underwhelming. In practice, it looks like nothing going wrong for a long time. You can tell that you’re in the presence of good design if you have thoughts like “huh, this ended up being easier than I expected”, or “I never have to think about this part of the system, it’s fine”. Paradoxically, good design is self-effacing: bad design is often more impressive than good. I’m always suspicious of impressive-looking systems

– sean goedecke

meals:

• breakfast: oatmeal (11am)
• lunch: cava (3:30 pm)
• dinner: shake + leftover cava

notes:

• blogs
  • Evaluating Long-Context Question & Answer Systems
  • Everything I know about good system design
  • Building a web search engine from scratch in two months with 3 billion neural embeddings
• woke up at 10:40 something, ate oatmeal, felt naseous, setup amazon chair, went to cava, asked about cap one checking, went back to cava to work till 6:30 pm, went back home to unbox a few packages, went to gym, joined T's church livestream, chatted, bought books from world of books, donated to gospel in life

reflection:

i keep eating lunch at 4pm lately, and i keep sleeping past 2 a.m. seems like i'm still living on SF time. took the time to sketch out the db design, and the columns and tables i need. i don't like how messy 6th and congress ave is.

tomorrow: FINISH MY RESEARCH PAPER

slept: 2:30 a.m.

I am as human as anyone. I love, I-I get scared. I wake up every morning, and despite not knowing what to do, I put one foot in front of the other, and I try to make the best choices that I can. I screw up all the time, but that is being human, and that's my greatest strength. And someday, I hope, for the sake of the world, you understand that it's yours too. – superman '25

meals:

• breakfast: rice w chicken
• lunch: shake (12pm), flower child avo, chicken, tofu (5pm)
• dinner: popcorn

notes:

• last day at the wework, it's been nice working in person, i enjoyed having discussions with E. i should reach out to people more and have conversations or i will never grow.
• james gunn's version is more sci-fi, colorful, comedic, and has better character development
• ate so much popcorn my stomach hurts

reflection:

for work: i really like sketching things out on excalidraw. it takes time and it feels like i'm slowing down my project completion time, but it pays off in the long run. with ai coding i constantly feel like i can get things done 20x faster, but having to fix and debug and clean up code later it. the past two weeks have been hitting enter and typing phrases like "Please fix", "why doesn't this work", and "ULTRATHINK". i cannot avoid db design in any fully stack project, i can't believe i didn't start with drawing a db model and just claude code my way through things. but i suppose for a 2 week speed run for demo, it was necessary, albeit i could've saved a lot of headaches and time by talking to more people first.

for life: today was my payday and i felt i had the opportunity to take a break. amidst the chaos of moving and settling in and buying things to make the apartment feel like a home, i had work to distract me, and T's presence to keep me company. i thought watching superman would be a good way to take my mind off of work, but all it did was make me more emotional. it made me realize how moving here i'm thousands of miles away from my family, and how i might only see them a few times a year as they're getting older. i felt more alone than ever walking out of the movie theatre. it also made me question what love is, and where T and I are at. and whether i've begun taking her for granted. i've been working too much lately and we don't have meaningful conversations like we used to. and it's making me resent taking this job. even though i'm excited about the work that i don't even classify it as work, i do have a problem with setting boundaries. and i need to start implementing some or i'll be completely subsumed by it.

tomorrow: balance it out

slept: 2 a.m.

Lust exists, it is powerful, and we must respect its power. The Bible rejoices in sex and sexual desire, but lust is an impersonal, inordinate desire and an idolatrous search for meaning. Lust can be overcome if you esteem Jesus as your bridegroom and the lover of your soul –

– tim keller

meals:

• breakfast: mushy basmati + chicken
• lunch: flower child chicken + sweet potato + arugula + mushroom + quinoa
• dinner: protein shake + oats drink

notes:

• tim keller podcast on lust

  27 "You have heard that it was said, 'You shall not commit adultery.' 28 But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart. 29 If your right eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. 30 And if your right hand causes you to stumble, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to go into hell.

• sketching out on excalidraw helping me discover holes in my code, and feels good overall to take time to think and sketch, and not just prompt claude and gpt to code for me
• got paystubs but they did not exempt me from fica and missed 2 pay days, $1.7k deficit
• saw a tweet about these 99.9% blue light blocking glasses and bought it while brushing my teeth. they cost 38 dollars. i didn't even take a second to think.
• finally bought a sofa bed and rug on ikea. deciding that took a week. total comes up to ~620 after a 15% student discount. bought 19 items in total.

reflection:

• be a better communicator. learn to be mature. still trying to understand myself and why i am the person i am.

tomorrow: complete sketch + get data ready for matching

slept: 1:55 a.m.

"We have a deficit of wonder ... When I ask people questions now, they get on their computer: 'Gimme a few minutes and l’ll let you know.' And I’m, like, 'Nooooo!' I want them to wonder about it, man! I don’t want to know the answer. I just want them to wonder about it."

– Tom Waits

meals:

• breakfast: oatmeal
• lunch: pork+shrimp dumpling (1pm), shake (4pm)
• dinner: basmati+chicken

notes:

• [2408.10234] The Unbearable Slowness of Being: Why do we live at 10 bits/s?
• i presented to the whole company today and people like how it looks
• returned spectrum router to save $10 per month, and went back to walmart 8 days later to get the plates i left at the self checkout
• grateful for being at OE
• bought boring mattress + flexispot en1 + chair

reflection:

• breeath in and out before you talk
• talk about context before you start, don't jump right in
• tell people why it matters
• relax, you’re not going to be fired, you're only 2 weeks in and you're doing a great job
• be confident in what you say, SOUND LIKE YOU OWN IT
• most people aren’t paying attention anyways, pretend you’re talking to just one person

tomorrow: understanding and moving slower

slept: 2:20 am

I believe that today more than ever a book should be sought after even if it has only one great page in it. We must search for fragments, splinters, toenails, anything that has ore in it, anything that is capable of resuscitating the body and the soul.

– Henry Miller

meals:

• breakfast: salmon+rice+spinach (10am)
• lunch: chicken teriyaki (4pm)
• dinner: chicken+dumplings (10pm)

notes:

• spent the day vibecoding, finally get to work on the front end
• claude opus 4.1 great at front end, and gpt 5 is great at backend
• demo at all hands tomorrow feeling excited and anxious

reflection:

• can't seem to stop working the entire week, it's affecting my sleep quality, i can't shut my brain off
• am i even learning anything that is transferrable? i should spent more time talking to people than just trying to build something, because what will last longer is the relationships i build here, and not some feature i got to perfect and launch, which will ultimately be deprecated and replaced in a few months.

tomorrow: demo time

slept: 1:10 a.m.

everything creative, from writing to architecture, comes back to bravery

But I see so clearly right now that...past the bravery to begin creating, is architecture, which requires still more bravery. So it turns out “be brave” WAS the core thing after all, in more ways than I was appreciating. It’s fractal and recursive, it’s necessary at every stage of the process

Ava on Dialectic, My Best Picture Prediction, and "Stupid Bravery"

meals:

• breakfast: oatmeal
• lunch: rice,salmon,spinach
• dinner: rice,salmon,spinach

notes:

• E recommended Pro Git which will come in super handy
• asking for help is hard sometimes, i remember anxiously sweating because i was too afraid to ask a dumb question and bother someone
• bought everything too large, 12 packs of tissue, 120 trash bags
• realized i spent $1k on amazon in <10 days and i haven't even bought any furniture yet, it's all been cooking and cleaning materials air fryer, instant pot, blender, kettle, vacuum, etc. i need my relocation bonus asap.

reflection:

i need to be better at going downstairs and stopping work. i really have trouble stopping work lately ever since i started. i can just start debugging something, and lose myself in the process trying to get it to work. this is why i've been sleeping at 2-2:30 a.m. the past week. i need to get more sleep. but ive never felt more excited about work than ever. im working on a cool project, and more to come. i need to voice out more in the standups, i'm still feeling incapable because of my lack of delivery. but once i'm more integrated and i've proven that i can achieve, i will have more confidence. confidence is the memory of success.

tomorrow: DEMO BUILDING SPEEDRUN

slept: 2:35 a.m.

What do you consider to be more or less basic factors making for happiness in the human mind?

1. Good physical and mental health.
2. Good personal and intimate relations, such as those of marriage, the family, and friendships.
3. The faculty for perceiving beauty in art and nature.
4. Reasonable standards of living and satisfactory work.
5. A philosophic or religious point of view capable of coping successfully with the vicissitudes of life.

meals:

• breakfast: oats
• lunch: beef pho (1 pm)
• dinner: salmon+rice (8 pm)

notes:

• a lot of chinese and asian at ACC
• to never trust claude code, have to write things from scratch
• the opportunity to be working on this
• to grow and learn from my lack of coding skills

tomorrow: make pr better

slept: 12:10 a.m.

To be an artist, you don’t have to compose music or paint or be in the movies or write books. It’s just a way of living. It has to do with paying attention, remembering, filtering what you see and answering back, participating in life – Viggo Mortensen

meals:

• breakfast: chips and two avocados
• lunch: rice, salmon, spinach (4pm)
• dinner: basmati rice, salmon, spinach (10pm)

notes:

• Shark light away upright vacuum
• chefman air fryer is so quiet
• instant pot 7 in 1 Duo pot
• killed an american cockroach in bathroom at 12 am

reflection:

working at the lounge made me more productive, but i've been unable to work out, i just keep getting too engrossed in work.

tomorrow: God

slept: 2:05 a.m.

• breakfast: kbop beef bulgogi
• lunch: flower child corn + salmon + brownrice
• dinner: ramen tetsuya chasu bowl

notes:

• waymo can't stop in front of my apartment
• NEVER use claude code to deal with database django stuff
• working in a small team of 3 is nice

tomorrow: SHIP SHIP SHIP

slept: 2:05 a.m.

we live exclusively in the present because it is always eternally today and tomorrow will be a today, eternity is the state of things at this very moment.

– the hour of the star, clarice lispector

meals:

• breakfast: oatmeal
• lunch: kbop bibimbap
• dinner: kbop korean bulgugi

notes:

• maintenance came to fix toilet leak, vinyl floor swelling, paint chipping, and screen holes, took 2 hours
• finally escaped django ingestion purgatory and left the house to bike on peloton 5km in switzerland, did some weight lifting
• got my osprey nebula bag, enamled cast iron, and kleenex tissues
• ordered chicken and salmon and other groceries $180
  • is walmart good? the prices are not great compared to costco

reflection:

got to stop claude coding so much and architect and plan and think more. have more taste. dont be code monkey. ask more questions. talk to more people. dont let fear or insecurities stop you from growing and gaining the trust of people in the company. i need a way to remind myself to take breaks. it is hard to furnish my apartment and focu son work.

tomorrow: GET A CHAIR SO I STOP SITTING ON MY LUGGAGE SLOUCHING ON MY MACBOOK

slept: 1:30am

"A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad." – Shigeru Miyamoto

meals:

• breakfast: oats
• lunch: banana + tacodeli (chicken mushroom taco + chips)
• dinner: kbop bulgogi beef

notes:

• toured spaces, firmspace and industrious
  • spaces charged for coffee and was claustrophobic, biggest gym
  • firmspace is very corporate and uptight, 40% lawyers,
  • industrious
• reviewed my first PR today
• learned what django models + apps and makemigrations and migrate
• always use dbeaver first
• CHECK staging and PROD HOSTs
• grateful for friends and living close to them.
• excited about getting this project out for demo

reflection:

• its hard to dive into a new framework and codebase, its super helpful to have R guide me through it
• i've been getting home and going in a cycle of shopping while working till past midnight. on one hand i'm obsessed with buiding this because i enjoy learning and working on something meaningful, but i can't stop
• i should pay more attention to taking breaks
• i need to be GRATEFUL for having the opportunity to join an AMAZING startup with COOL and EXCITING work to do every day. and living in a nice apartment and having the chance to design and decorate it. STOP the mindset of "i have to" and switch it to "i get to".

tomorrow: getting query to work + continue to design my apartment

slept: 1:35 a.m.

• breakfast: 9am thai fried rice w chicken
• lunch: 3pm thai fried rice w chicken
• dinner: 10pm thai fried rice w chicken

notes:

• spectrum internet is so bad
• walmart bowls and plates
• starting job + moving is the most stressful thing ever
• not having internet is killing my productivity
  • had to deal with spectrum fiasco
• just pay for things for convenience

reflection:

• dont ever forget checkout items again
• stop thinking so much about saving money
• worried about not shipping fast enough

tomorrow: prioritize WORK > setting up apartment

slept: 1:30 a.m.

• breakfast: biscuits
• lunch: bibimbap 12pm
• dinner: pho 10pm

notes:

• played ping pong with tour person
• toured and paid on the same day, moving in tomorrow.
• had good conversations about diet

reflection:

• buying things online drains me

tomorrow: ingestion and moving in and amazon stuff

slept: 2 a.m.

from tamara on dialectic:

• writing helps you become more tuned to present moment if you're prone to daydreaming
• it helps you look for things to be grateful for

best writing has a few traits:

• clear
• has natural questions about the world
• does not overexplain or spell out the argument

the past 3 days of starting at OE has been nerve racking yet incredibly exciting. im constantly oscillating between feeling out of place and insufficient, yet feeling hopeful and grateful for the the opportunity to grow. i feel afraid that i wont be able to meet expectations, yet i know i will always get things done in the end. i got my first project on my first day, and theres a clock ticking down at the back of my mind when i shower and eat. like a bomb i should be diffusing or the world ends.

achievements and "success" often comes with sacrifices. it could be health or relationships or your own identity and values. so my priority in life now is to learn how to balance. im someone who gets obsessed with things, either its work, research, a new side project, books, art, people. relationships, either its God, T, my family, or friends, is the one thing i must never sacrifice. if there's anything ive learned in the past few years, its that i cant do any of this alone. and im lucky enough to not have to. and that ive been the happiest when i do things not for myself, but for the people i care about.

after watching a beautiful mind on the plane, i learned that love can save us from our lowest points, and to never give up on hope. and sometimes our greatest works and achievements arent the things we plan for, but the things we do along the way, with the people we love.

moved like 10 bags of things (incl luggages) in a lyft XL

so drained

bought cherries from a cheap grocery store in mission

dinner @ uchigo home cook

ordered beef curry again and egg plant and takoyaki

passed out for 2 hours at 10:30

met with H, shared abou the org and his experience and helped guide me through a few things.

i went to donate some clothes at out of the closet

took the bus home

rest of the night was packing and figuring out how to move the next day

i can't focus on work.

then went back for check out and took a lime scooter to go to the national gallery of art. i was sweating profusely. the weather is like a blanket of hot air wrapped around your body.

i loved the french and dutch art and christianity art. i saw monet and van gogh and leonardo da vinci. i realized i do not like portraits that much. i took pictures of everything that piqued my interest, and they will serve as my macbook wallpaper.

after that i "limed" to the rice korean bibimbap restaurant. i like the concept of choosing ingredients for your bibimbap. i couldn't finish my meal. i didn't feel hungry for some reason. i rushed to the airspace museum. and i only had time to make a dog tag for me and T and two postcards at the gift shop. soon after i booked a ride to the airport.

on the plane i cought up on my blogs. and settled with some immigration docs for starting work tomorrow.

listened to the Tamara Winter podcast on dialectic. it made me want a zine of You and Your Research by richard hamming.

for lunch i got chiken teriyaki ($15) from momiji, which in japanese means maple leaves or autumn foliage, also the act of viewing autumn leaves.

then went to aapm and watched a talk on AI in radiology talk.

then went to the MLK library to get more research work done.

then it was time for the award ceremony. i met up with my professor again and she thinks i have a good chance. i choose to have no expectations whatsoever to avoid disappointments

the award ceremony was a solid 2 hours. halfway i was deciding if i should put on my tie, because i didn't know if i'll be going up on stage until the very last minute. when they announced the third place, and said my name. i thought i was dreaming. i felt like a little kid going up to shake the aapm president's hand.i was too nervous to look into the crowd. i was probably slouching too. i have bad posture. the rest of the award cereony i was texting M and my friends. most of them are in different parts of the world, but i'm glad to have them close by with the internet and my iphone.

after the ceremony i took pictures with my professor and B, and we all left for our own events. i wanted to get dinner asap and just relax and decompress with T and a movie. i finished watching fast and furious 4. then feeling like i wanted more i went on amazon prime and spedrun lolita, in secret, martha mary may marlene because i was on a movie addiction. all of these movies were gratuitous. they add no value to my life, and i'm not sure if i enjoyed spending them that way, but it brought me entertainment at the time. and it served its purpose to help me destress.

i then watched a few youtube videos by bibile project on what it means to love God with

• "all your heart": "lev" in hebrew: not just organ but the center of a person's being
• "all your soul": "nephesh" in hebrew: does not mean an immortal essence but refers to a living, breathing, physical being
• "all your strength": "mode" : "very" or "much" use every opportunity and capacity to honor him

you upload slides by going into a presentation room, and there are stations for you to upload slides.

B's talk went smooth, i noticed a few things i would adjust personally, given my OCD tendencies.

we went to have lunch at shouk ($15), i had hummus and falafels. my brussel sprouts were spoiled and sour. we talked about his research work at tiktok. every minute i felt anxious about not being prepared enough. my stomach did not hold lunch well.

after the detox, we went into ballroom c. it was freezing, felt my heart pounding with anxiety while waiting for my turn. i was speaker #8. there were 9 in total.

my professor was happy with my presentation. her friends even said i would be in the top 3. i found it hard to believe.i wasn't sure how well i actually did.

i went to the apple store to buy a usbc cable to work on the research work. i started making the graphics for one of the training process.

we dinner at china chilcano, peruvian + japanese + chinese combo.

the rest of the night i had trouble figuring out when to book my flight out to austin. i was stressing out about where to stay and for how long. and finding apartments that do not have horrible reviews on management. i might be in over my head about starting so soon and relocating.

backfilled my blog on my taiwan trip on the plane to DC. the plane ride is 5 and a half hours this time.

watched love hurts. it wasn't bad. i liked the fight scenes, but didn't

ride pickups for washington is much closer, but the roads don't make sense. it was chaotic, there were police cars and two big tour bus to pickup a band. i didn't get the chance to find out which band.

talked to uber driver, she mentioned houses in DC, 800 sq ft. for 2 bedrooms costs $4k

i stayed at Motto by Hilton. i rushed to SPIN. i walked there and took photos with my fujifilm. the color was pretty with the sunset.

i looked around the ping pong bar and found the table with some pros. i was so excited to play. i joined soon after and started just going crazy on the top spins. i was so alive. i was also sweating like crazy. i didn't even feel any pain in my leg anymore. it's also such a good way to make friends. i'm forever grateful for uncle V for teaching me ping pong back when i was 10.

went home with two washu students on the way back. picked up pho for dinner. worked on the slides till 1:30 am. felt anxious about my slides not being good enough.

sold my protein powder for $30

helped W sell his bed frame

the mattress guy flaked on me

messaged another guy, he came within 20 min

watched tokyo drift while cleaning up

cleaning up and packing is so exhausting

here's the formula

1. call endpoint with logprobs=True, top_logprobs >= # classes, max_tokens=1, temperature=0
   1. ensure choices[0].logprobs.content[0].top_logprobs is preesent, if None, -> NaN
   2. constrain output to single token per class: prompt to return labeled option: (e.g. A: apples, B: bananas) and instruct "answer with a single capital letter"
2. extract token log probls -> class probabilities
   1. from top_logprobs of first generated token, build a map for option letters {A, B, C, D}
   2. clean tokens (strip leading space/byte-pair artifacts)
   3. if any optoin letter missing, mark sample prob as invalid
   4. convert logprobs to probabilities with softmax, (normalize to sum=1)
3. compute AUROC
   1. Binary tasks: roc_auc_score(y_true, P[:, pos_idx]) (use probability of the positive class)
   2. Multiclass: roc_auc_score(y_true, P, multi_class='ovr', average='macro')
   3. Compute on only those rows with valid probabilities

references

• using logprobs

recurse has good thoughts on using LLMs for coding.

I think a useful analogy would be to compare LLMs to e-bikes. If your goal is to get somewhere quickly, an e-bike is definitely advantageous compared to a bike with no e-assist. If your goal is to become a better / stronger cyclist, an e-bike isn’t really going to help you with that.

[It’s similar] with AI tools / LLMs. They can let you explore more at a faster pace and get you places faster. This can be really helpful for familiarizing yourself with topics or concepts or doing exploratory research. And if your goal is just to produce code, they will definitely speed that up. But if your goal is to engage with the work of programming on a deeper level, which I think is essential to become a better programmer, the more you rely on them the more you rob yourself of the benefits accrued through engaging with the process.

I doubt very much if it is possible to teach anyone to understand anything, that is to say, to see how various parts of it relate to all the other parts, to have a model of the structure in one’s mind. We can give other people names, and lists, but we cannot give them our mental structures; they must build their own. — John Holt

my biggest takeaway from this is: it's not about how much you should give, it's about how much you should keep. because all things belong to God.

this switch in mindset can make you be more generous, and go from a scarcity to an abundant mindset.

went to pickup the macbook in a waymo, and i spent more than 3 hours just glued to the macbook and setting it up.

i referenced eugene yan's blog.

also setup claude code + XCodeMCP to start building UpperRoom.

i also sold 4 items today: key chains ($5), wired apple keyboard ($5), tide pods ($15), and HP monitor ($40)

had a call with A to update him on how i'm doing. i need to do better at keeping in touch with old friends.

James 5:13-18 NIV "The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective"

web

• 𝚙𝚞𝚋𝚕𝚒𝚌 𝚙𝚊𝚛𝚔

life

• Creation becomes consumption - marc
• How to instantly be better at things - by Cate Hall
• The append-and-review note | karpathy
• Signature moves: are we losing the ability to write by hand?
• Writing is thinking | Nature Reviews Bioengineering

culture

• The Bitter Lessons Behind Kimi Researcher’s taste
• Reflections on OpenAI
  • "Good ideas can come from anywhere, and it's often not really clear which ideas will prove most fruitful ahead of time. Rather than a grand 'master plan', progress is iterative and uncovered as new research bears fruit"
  • "Teams tend to quickly form around promising ideas as they show promise. There's a strong bias to action—you can just do things."
  • "Everything runs on Slack. There is no email. If you aren't organized, you will find this incredibly distracting."
  • "OpenAI changes direction on a dime. It's much better to do the right thing as you get new information, rather than staying the course just because you had a plan."
  • best practices: "works by default", "keep main clean", "hard to misuse"
• Steve Jobs Playboy Interview

  People get stuck as they get older. Our minds are sort of electrochemical computers. Your thoughts construct patterns like scaffolding in your mind. You are really etching chemical patterns. In most cases, people get stuck in those patterns, just like grooves in a record, and they never get out of them. It’s a rare person who etches grooves that are other than a specific way of looking at things, a specific way of questioning things

AI

• Asymmetry of verification and verifier’s law — Jason Wei
• [Full Workshop] Reinforcement Learning, Kernels, Reasoning, Quantization & Agents — Daniel Han
• How to scale RL to 10^26 FLOPs - by Jack Morris
• The Big LLM Architecture Comparison

design

• How much of a manager are you?
• 𝚙𝚞𝚋𝚕𝚒𝚌 𝚙𝚊𝚛𝚔
• Design like Karpathy is watching — Zeke Sikelianos, Replicate

faith

• If God is Sovereign, Why Pray?: Prayer with R.C. Sproul
  • "God not only ordains the ends of the universe and of human history, but he also ordains the means to those ends"
  • "God works in and through the prayers of his people"
  • "the Lord knows what you need before you ask of it."
  • "what faith is in its essence is trust, and the prayer of faith is a prayer that trusts God for the outcome even if he says no."

More people should create things to proliferate an aesthetic into our future, not just to solve problems. This is the quality that every artist and engineer I respect shares most universally. Without this, you are doomed to churning out slop.

What values do you create to spread? What image do you dream about? What is the feeling of a tomorrow you want to give form to? Have a position. Stand for something. Don't just create value.

Read and consume voraciously and spend time with people who have very sharp points of view. especially read old stuff, because then the tactical things will fall away revealing the underlying principles and human motivations

linus on Twitter

met up with J for lunch at hinodeya near my apartment. we talked about his apple internship, and about the startup i might be joining. i also went to replace my apple battery. i paid 96 dollars for it in total. it took about 2 and a half hours, so in the mean time we went to macy's to walk around. there's nothing here anymore. it's boring walking around malls. union square however is a nice place, people are playing chess and ping pong here, and sit down to chat. it reminds me of europe. i went back to my place to catch my haircut appointment at 4:45 pm. i said i wanted a haircut that was nice for a presentation. she cut my hair much shorter against this time. i looked like i'm back in high school.

it's nice to catch up with people from your past. i rarely slow down and think about where i've come from. life can only be lived forward. but it's good to look back and appreciate the people that helped you along the way, and make time to thank them and reach out.

i've been feeling like i have a lot of fires to put out, with housing, with breaking the news, and a 3 hour church practice, and revising my AAPM presentation, and the HP work, and with the lease ending, and with selling my things, and the heartburn i've been feeling.

i feel out of breath. i haven't prayed in a while. i want to focus on just one thing. one pursuit. OE. and nothing else for the year. and my blog. i want to catch up with myself again. i haven't taken the time to really ask what i want. conversations with people have been helping. i just know deep down i feel excited about OE. i just hope my stomach gets better soon again.

i started researching on austin vs SF and navigated how to ask about stock options.

things i learned:

• stock options: right to buy a certain number of shares of a company's stock at a predetermined price (strike price)
  • why? as company grows, the stock options would be worth more
  • ex: strike price: $1, next year stock is worth $3. you profit $2 per share.
  • types:
    • incentive stock options (ISOs): no taxes when exercise options (unless AMT kicks in). only pay after selling shares
    • non-qualified stock options (NSO): pay tax in the year you exercise your options. then pay capitol gain tax when you sell shares.
• 409A valuation: for setting strike price for employee stock options, cannot be lower than FMV determined by 409A valuation
  • why? tax compliance with IRS regulations. if strike price < FMV -> incurs tax penality on employee and company
  • when? before issuing stock options, after raising rounds, at least every 12 months, material events

references

• what is a 409a valuation? key concepts & process
• startup stock options explained - startups 101 - youtube

i walked to japantown to visit my favorite bookstore, the forest books. i was on the hunt for cs lewis books. i eventually bought his book "christian reflections". while paying for it, i saw a collection of 17 Floating World art books printed in Japan. i spoke to the cashier and an old lady about those books, they said a few thousand and the owner would be happy to sell it to me. i wanted them. but with the move, it would be tough. i want a home full of books and arts that i can enjoy. and hopefully in it, with the people i love close to me.

Key Research Papers

• Tracing the thoughts of a large language model (Anthropic)
• On the Biology of a Large Language Model
• Zoom In: An Introduction to Circuits
• Toy Models of Superposition
• Towards Monosemanticity: Decomposing Language Models With Dictionary Learning
• Stage-Wise Model Diffing
• Mapping the Latent Space of Llama 3.3 70B
• Attribution-based parameter decomposition (LessWrong)

Blogs and Guides

• An Extremely Opinionated Annotated List of My Favourite Mechanistic Interpretability Papers (AI Alignment Forum)
• Mechanistic interpretability (Wikipedia)
• Emergent Misalignment: Narrow Finetuning can produce Broadly Misaligned LLMs
• Under the Hood of a Reasoning Model (Goodfire AI)
• Language models can explain neurons in language models (OpenAI)
• Interpreting Evo 2 (Goodfire AI)
• The Urgency of Interpretability (Dario Amodei)

Tools and Applications

• Paint with Ember
• Painting With Concepts Using Diffusion Model Latents

Additional Resources

• Sparse Autoencoder (Stanford)
• Apollo Research

bought KPH30i with Yaxi ear pads. i want headphones so bad. i have to stop wearing airpods so much and stuffing my ear. there has to be consequences to that.

on faith

“People are often worried. They are told they ought to love God. They cannot find any such feeling in themselves. What are they to do? The answer is the same as before. Act as if you did. Do not sit trying to manufacture feelings. Ask yourself, ‘If I were sure that I loved God, what would I do?’ When you have found the answer, go and do it.”

on forgiveness

“After each failure, ask forgiveness, pick yourself up, and try again. Very often what God first helps us towards is not the virtue itself but just this power of always trying again.”

on evil

“Good and evil both increase at compound interest.”

on sin

“We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it: and Christ, because he was the only man who never yielded to temptation, is also the only man who knows to the full what temptation means.”

on pride

“That raises a terrible question. How is it that people who are quite obviously eaten up with Pride can say they believe in God and appear to themselves very religious? I am afraid it means they are worshiping an imaginary God.”

“The Christians are right: it is Pride which has been the chief cause of misery in every nation and every family since the world began.”

on giving

“The only things we can keep are the things we freely give to God. What we try to keep for ourselves is just what we are sure to lose.”

on christians

“The world does not consist of 100 percent Christians and 100 percent non-Christians. There are people (a great many of them) who are slowly ceasing to be Christians but who still call themselves by that name: some of them are clergymen. There are other people who are slowly becoming Christians though they do not yet call themselves so. ”

on prayer

“If they are wrong they need your prayers all the more; and if they are your enemies, then you are under orders to pray for them. That is one of the rules common to the whole house.”

on time

“Almost certainly God is not in time. His life does not consist of moments one following another...Ten-thirty-- and every other moment from the beginning of the world--is always Present for Him. If you like to put it this way, He has all eternity in which to listen to the split second of prayer put up by a pilot as his plane crashes in flames.”

on love

“Love is the great conqueror of lust.”

1. what women want: mel gibson is very charismatic
2. cruel intentions: they're both so evil but it's so entertaining to watch

got on fb marketplace and decided to get a dell 24 inch s2417dg for $70. took the muni down to hayes valley for it. i carried it all the way from the montgomery st. and stopped by belden st for the annual bastille day. i looked like a homeless with a big blue ikea bag.

got home and started testing and playing around with it. the first immediate thing i noticed is blackness is not black enough. which really frustrated me being in dark mode 99% of the time.

on the plane, i finished reading confessions by tolstoy. i'll be reading this again sometime in the future. there are a lot of themes to explore and dive into.

a few important quotes

“I live, really live, only when I feel Him and seek Him. ... To know God and to live is one and the same thing. God is life.” 

“Faith is a knowledge of the meaning of human life in consequence of which man does not destroy himself but lives. Faith is the strength of life. If a man lives he believes in something… If he understands the illusory nature of the finite, he must believe in the infinite. Without faith he cannot live.”

“In general the relation of the experimental sciences to life’s question may be expressed thus: Question: ‘Why do I live?’ Answer: ‘In infinite space, in infinite time, infinitely small particles change their forms in infinite complexity, and when you have understood the laws of those mutations of form you will understand why you live on the earth.’” 

“‘What is the meaning of my life?’ was: ‘You are what you call your “life”; you are a transitory, casual cohesion of particles. The mutual interactions and changes of these particles produce in you what you call your “life”. That cohesion will last some time; afterwards the interaction of these particles will cease and what you call “life” will cease, and so will all your questions. You are an accidentally united little lump of something... The lump will disintegrate and there will be an end of the fermenting and of all the questions.’” 

“So I too clung to the twig of life, knowing that the dragon of death was inevitably awaiting me, ready to tear me to pieces; and I could not understand why I had fallen into such torment. The deception of the joys of life which formerly allayed my terror of the dragon now no longer deceived me.” 

“I look into the immensity of sky and try to forget about the immensity below, and I really do forget it. The immensity below repels and frightens me; the immensity above attracts and strengthens me. ... I see that I no longer hang as if about to fall, but am firmly held. ... From the pillar a loop hung very ingeniously and yet simply, and if one lay with the middle of one’s body in that loop and looked up, there could be no question of falling.” 

i setup my computer, and the first surprise is that the whole company joined my job talk portion of the interview. i talked about my research on excalidraw, and while speaking, i could feel the pressure of not saying something wrong, or my entire cover would be blown, and they would find out that i have no idea what i'm talking about, even though i did everything inmy research.

the second portion was the ml fundamentals. i was thrown a problem, and had to solve it with ml. i had issues explaining what metrics are good to optimize for, and didn't know that AUROC != performance, it's just a balance between precision and recall, and that the threshold you can select is just a number that is decided, depending on whether you want higher precision or higher recall. that was a major red flag i imposed. i kept thinking about this mistake the rest of the day.

the third portion was system design. i came prepared and i was ready. it went well overall, and i just had to explain how to invalidate the cache of the system. but the ml portion the answer was all prepared.

i called with J and A to share about how things went on the way back to the hotel. i planned to sleep and regain some energy, but ended up doing research work. and running some experiments.

the final portion was a dinner. it was at Uchiko 955. i didn't know what to expect, but it was a very casual dinner that didn't really involve me. i mostly chatted with R and E. i didn't really know how to speak up or share any stories or thoughts. but i can feel like the new kid from around the block. i felt like i couldn't fit in. even though everyone was just having fun at dinner, all i could think about was whether i can say something to impress them or make them laugh, which was very draining. i kept thinking to myself 'why am i here', 'what do i do?' and 'im so confused'. my brain can't just relax. perhaps i had a different expectation of how this dinner would go, and it made it hard to just enjoy the night.

i went home and called with mafia again. i dumped all my emotions out. i learned more about myself today, being somewhere that was unfamiliar with people i'm not close with.

i spoke with my lyft driver about my interview, and he was a student searching for a job too. i got to citizenM and realized i did not book a hotel here, but at the royal sonesta. i checked in, and then went out to get dinner. it was already 9pm. i went to cava because it was the only affordable thing around, i was excited about a malaysian restaurant nearby but it closed down. this street was very sketchy, i saw a lot of homeless around. i got my order and went back to my hotel. my second mistake today was ordering it with jalapeno sauce, which was the green sauce i innocently ordered, thinking it's just vege. it was burning in my mouth, i started getting heartburn. i had to go out to cvs to get some antacids, and this was around 11 pm. and it was the worst time to be out on these streets. i walked as fast as i could, and luckily there were people around.

i stayed up till 2:30 a.m. to finish up my prep. i went to bed eventually, still feeling unprepared for tomorrow.

If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things – praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts – not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (any microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.

– "On Living in an Atomic Age", by C.S. Lewis (1948)

i wanted to renew my cali license. i took bart all the way to DMV daly city, and walked to the dmv. and along the way took some photos with my sony. studied for OE on the train. got there, and realized that my appointment was for august. i got back in line, and used the "get in line" feature. and proceeded to make my job talk slide in excalidraw. after 2 hours of waiting, and going up to a counter, i was told i needed my EAD card which i already got, but did not bring with me. one upside is i got to focus on making the excalidraw presentation with no distractions whatsover under my hotspot and in a crammed seating area. and that if i'm relocationg to austin, there would be no need to renew my licesnse. so i head home with no losses.

• Tying yourself to the mast - by Cate Hall - Useful Fictions

  commitment is somethin you make, not something you feel

  commitment is a living system of obligations and consequences that cause you to rise above your temporary frailty

• My sentence on time management - Marginal REVOLUTION

  All people are equally good at time management, but some people are more willing than others to admit that they are doing what they want to do, while others maintain the illusion they wish they were doing something else

• Request for Curiosity
• After months of coding with LLMs, I'm going back to using my brain • albertofortin.com
  • treat AI as an assistant, not architect
  • overreliance reduces mental sharpness and ability to plan features
• Cool people
  • the 6 universal traits of cool people:
    • extroverted - comfortable in social situations, energized by interaction
    • hedonistic - driven to enjoy life and pursue pleasure
    • powerful - assertive, independent, natural authority
    • adventurous - open to risk, novelty, and uncertainty
    • open - receptive to new experiences and ideas
    • autonomous - independent, self-directed
• The Case for More Ambition - Jack Morris

  Research that stands the test of time is research that (a) is simple and (b) scales well

two good blogs on the role of chatting in AI interfaces

• Chat Interfaces & Declaring Intent
• The Receding Role of AI Chat

and watched these two videos

• Nils Reimers - Introduction to Embeddings & Retrieval
• Information Theory for Language Models: Jack Morris

W went to get an air purifier at a good value all teh way down to fremont. i wanted to stay back to study, but ultimately i should have just went. i didn't get any interview studying done at all.

i saw the fireworks play out through my window. i recall how the past two years i watched these fireworks with friends. this time i live in SF, and i'm home. maybe that's the true sign of being an SF resident, you don't go to these crowded events anymore. you'd rather just stay home.

we walked around clement street, and went to some grocery stores

few things that caught my eye at the park life gift shop

• school of life books
• secret language of flowers (jean-michel othoniel)
• the emotional support toolkit

bought roast pork from a store for 20 dollars.

went in to green apple books.

• cats and the meaning of life
• the philosophy of walking

Dr. Kelson: Spike, momento mori, what did it mean?
Spike: Remember we must die.
Dr. Kelson: And it's true. There are many kinds of death. Some are better than others. The best are peaceful where we leave each other in love. You love your mother?
Spike: I love her.
Dr. Kelson: And Isla you love Spike?
Isla: So much.
Dr. Kelson: Memento amorous. Remember you must love.

i went to tour an apartment with wei. it's in South Van Ness, and it's a new apartment, and he's the first to tour it and live in it. after his tour we went to watch 28 years later at AMC kabuki. the seats here are not as nice as the ones in ames. they don't even recline. i always thought every AMC in the entire US had reclining seats.

realize i don't look in depth enough into each configurations. and i ran everything with the purpose of completing it. i need to give more thought into my choices in my work, or it will come back biting me in the end. i can't sacrifice quality for speed.

a few kitchen wishlist that i found

• bain marie
• chef press
• kama asa cutting board

as the cost of exploring ideas approaches zero, human focus inevitably shifts to areas where raw computational power provides diminishing returns. the true bottleneck becomes judgment - when endless possibilities can be explored instantly, choosing what to build next becomes the essential skill. recognizing the difference between an output that’s merely interesting and one that’s genuinely valuable isn’t something easily automated; taste is profoundly underrated in technology.

– shyamal

had a chat with E. i felt torn between ambition and loyatly, comfort and discomfort, growth and contentment. my actions and decisions have consequences, and i have to be able to bear them for the rest of my life. i felt pulled in different directions, and unsure of whose voice is telling me where to go, mine or God.

some notes i wrote -> cleaned up by gpt 4.5

CHIL highlights

• AI regulations:
  • Pre‑2024 context; HTI‑1.
  • EO 14179 (Jan 2025).
  • OBBB (H.R. 1): House version in May 2025 proposed a 10‑year state/local AI regulation ban; provision was later removed and did not make it into the final law.

Jupyter Health

• What it is: DevOps platform for health data and analytics pipelines.
• Question to leaders: “In your role leading UCSF’s research informatics strategy, how do you evaluate tools like OpenEvidence that bridge research literature and clinical practice? What metrics or frameworks do you use to assess impact on research workflows?”
• EHR realities:
  • Database of patient info and clinical actions (procedures).
  • Also the workflow backbone for care delivery; major investment in Epic.
• SMART on FHIR:
  • Exposes EHR to external apps; enables innovation outside Epic.
• Patient‑generated data (PGD):
  • Standardization is hard (OpenHealth attempts to help).
  • Vendors like Garmin and Oura keep data in proprietary clouds; often undocumented/uncalibrated.
  • Jupyter Health → CommonHealth ingestion to standardize for model training.
• Patient‑facing tooling:
  • Columbia × Jupyter Health: reusable tools for patient outreach.
• CGM data:
  • Many clinicians aren't trained for continuous streams.
  • Partner with endocrinology on clinical markers & interpretation.
  • Build a starter library of models/algorithms for these use cases.

Panel — ethics, evaluation, and systems (moderator: Emily Alsentzer)

• Themes: publish‑or‑perish; public image of scientists; corporate control; individualist culture; capitalism sets the script.
• "New" gen‑AI ethics issues are old challenges in new clothes; disproportionate impacts on communities of color.
• AI should support clinicians; include philosophers in teams; rethink progress/efficiency; redesign systems, not just models; preserve human agency.
• Rethink paper structure (beyond IMRaD) to keep human decision‑making visible; requires political will.
• Build human‑AI systems that are humble, curious, empathetic; fix perverse incentives that remove joy from learning.
• AI literacy: nurses and patients need it; curricula should revamp yearly; emphasize critical thinking.
• Benchmarks ≠ evaluation:
  • Benchmarks drive procurement/VC, but don't equal real‑world performance.
  • Principles for eval frameworks:
    1. Hyperlocal: hospital‑ and task‑specific; organize real‑world eval where patients define what matters.
    2. Agile & reflexive: adaptable and effective over time.
    3. Continuous & community‑operated: from the ground up, not just NEURIPS/CSAIL.
  • Always ask: What is this evaluation for? Model selection ≠ clinical deployment.
• People:
  • Jenna C. Lester
  • Leo Anthony Celi
  • Pranav Rajpurkar
  • Deborah Raji

Guillermo Sapiro — wearables & biological age

• Healthspan focus: live well to the last day.
• Measuring biological age: traditional (blood/saliva, imaging) vs. PPG alone.
• PPG: green/IR light (Apple Watch, Oura); light through skin; vessel dilation shapes waveform.
• Rep‑learning setup: ~180k participants; PPG segments; encoder; participant‑level contrastive learning; each person → 512‑dim vector.
• Healthy‑age model: train on healthy subset; average reps; predict age; compare predicted vs chronological.
• Results: healthy cohort ~2.43 MAE (wearables), ~2.5 MAE (blood tests), ~7 MAE (ECG); general cohort ~3.18 MAE.
• Takeaways: heart‑rate waveform often treated as non‑identifying; biological age tracks disease/behavior; larger age gap → higher disease risk; sensitive to pregnancy; learn from healthy distribution to detect OOD.

Research papers & posts

• Audio models: CaReAQA: Cardiac & Respiratory Audio QA for Open‑Ended Diagnostic Reasoning
• VR + rehabilitation: Immersive Virtual Reality and Robotics for Upper Extremity Rehabilitation
• Multimodal genetics: Unlocking rich genetic insights through multimodal AI with M‑REGLE
• Perspective: The Bitter Lesson

Policy & regulation — fact links

• HTI‑1 Final Rule (ONC): Program page · Overview (PDF)
• Executive Order 14179 — Removing Barriers to American Leadership in AI: Presidency (UCSB) · Federal Register (publication)
• OBBB (H.R. 1) — 10‑year AI regulation moratorium (not enacted):
  • House added the 10‑year ban (May 2025)
  • Senate struck the ban (July 2025)
  • Final law did not include the ban

"I prefer my authors to have bodies, to live and walk and sweat in the world"

– jasmine

to write well you need to read good writing.

a few good books: east of eden, secret history, stoner, any book from stripe press

i toured an apartment with 188 8th avenue, it has three 8s, which is a good number in chinese culture, because the number 8 in cantonese is "baat" 八, which sounds similar to "faat" (發), meaning prosperity and wealth in cantonese.

it's also a a single unit with no one above or below, and is one block from clement st. it was the perfect place. after the tour i immediately wanted to sign the lease. but i went to get lunch first, one of teh stores had the three dish for 8 bucks deal too. i was thinking how i could come here often for food, just like back in chinatown. afer that i went to find a library to finish up the lease, i took a while, submitted it at 4 something. but someone else submitted at the same time.

then i went with wei to tour his apartment. it's somewhere in mission. we're both going to different places.

after that we went to farewell party USFCA. i talked to a few people. we talked about job hunting, and scooters and apartments and cats. i had a lot of sweet potato fries.

i finally replaced the glass screen protector on my fuji x100s. it looks like new again. to more photos on this beautiful machinery made in 2013.

walking with J i was almost convinced into 3500 dollar apartment. but after talking to A i realize it would've been a huge financial mistake.

went to jenn's place for CATAN with a few of their friends. i was so drained i fell asleep on their air mattress. i woke up with soreness in my neck and back.

for dinner i got the secret shredded chicken from HK milk tea on stockton. it came in a huge plate. i like how fragant the peanutes are. and the chicken with yellow skin (which is from the sesame oil)

was a few minutes late to practice at 7:30 p.m., and i had to practice for 2 hours which was exhausting. and i had to learn all the songs on teh spot and endure the embarassment of not playing the intros well. but all this is for God.

finally finished the contrary and went to sleep at 3 again.

i spent the rest of the night finishing up my contrary report on OE. slept 3:40 am

after dinner just the boys walked around and we saw art at the drawing room: annex.pretty art from grade 10 to 12. we stopped at jakes steaks for fries. we all felt hungry and went to echigo home cook for curry, the "fine japanese food" was truly fine.

here are my best to worst ranking:

1. Chardonnay
2. SIN Rose
3. OKD five
4. cowgirl and pilot
5. reserve cabernet Sauvignon
6. Dragon's tooth
7. HALO

on the way back we stopped by at oxbow public market. i had the $6.43 dollar california sushi roll, most fresh and best i've every had. we also stopped by at costco for gas. i slept for most of the ride, and i do not reemember much of the journey back. we got home around 7pm

the mafia ate at Yee's. we talked abou 3 things we like and dislike. A is leaving us soon. we are all shaped by each other, some parts more than others. the memories we made in SF will forever stay with us until we grow old.

for dinner we went to trader joes and each got an item to cook. i chose the salmon. i love salmon. we all cooked together, and ended up eating only at 11pm. after eating we went for the hot tub till 5am. i got to share about T and the issues with her mom. the boys helped me express and voice out the concerns in my head. we took turns asking questions with a spin the botle but in a hot tub. it didn't go very far, but we tried our best. it's one of those nights where i unlocked a new experience. and is one i never thought i would get to have. and one i hope to have more in the future.

slept at 5:30 a.m. on the couch.

watched three movies on the plane

• grand budapest hotel: visuals are A+, the story was not what i expected, it was fun and sad
• the intern: old people have the most wisdom
• dune: cinematography was A+, disliked the ending.

the plane was so comfortable. flying united back was a grave mistake. i think i even slept 8 hours, the first time ever on a plane.

i went through customs with no issues. all they wanted was my f1 and asked when i graduate. forgot how cold it is in SF.

first we arrived at her house and my mom was my translator, as we asked her questions about what she remembers about our family history, what my great grandfather did, where they came from, how life was when the japanese were here. even my mom learned a few things. i have to thank T's mom for inspiring this.

we had lunch together at a chinese restaurant with AC. i like 上汤啦啦 and 芋头扣肉. after lunch we went back to her home and continued to chat. but the house was warm and air was sticky and i fell asleep. wi also fell asleep on the drive home.

we ended the day with kbbq for fathers day. and i played played assasins creed on the hp monitor.

went to watch "how to train your dragon" with my mom. a few notable moments, the father son dynamic, toothless and hiccup flying for the first time, the village accepting toothless, and the final scene where dragons are coexisting with vikings.

shopped at isetan for some food to bring back to the US. saw a church auntie here, we took a picture together like i'm a celebrity.

bought a new frying pan and pot and knife from isetan. auntie B gave us her experience and recomendations.

we also got an antler luggage that cost RM 900.

im blessed with a family and with essentials that will help me thrive and survive in the US. i have nothing to complain about.

i saw my surgeon at 2pm. he tells me everything is fine and i don't have to worry about the wrap and i have decades. i felt skeptical. wouldn't the person who treated you want to say that for their own benefit? i asked about gym and they said i am one of the rare people who feel my surgery and thus can feel discomfort while doing workouts, but also said i can do whatever and it wouldn't affect the wrap. i brought up antidepressants and he was very willing to prescribe me some. i don't know how i feel about his assurance. i need to see a new doctor.

we went to my town shopping mall. we watched karate kid legends. i liked this movie, it portrays how it feels to move into a new place and having to adapt and find your place, and also touches on trauma and having your past creep up into the present, and having friends and family help you navigate and get through it.

we had dimsum for dinner. i learned that i love the fried taro balls.

kept thinking about building the still app, a prayer reminder app.

got home and grinded out on arabesque on the piano the rest of the day and worked out on the stationary bicycle.

watched drug development with AI video from (https://blog.google/technology/ai/google-deepmind-isomorphic-alphafold-3-ai-model/ while working out. protein structures are like 3d jigsaw puzzles, so making drugs are like making the right lego pieces that fit for molecules. but it was surprising to hear that there is a 90% failure rate for drug development, only 1 in 20 medicinal chemist have their drugs work in clinical trials.

got two polo shirts from uniqlo. got an "expensive" belt from isetan. first real belt i've ever gotten for the aapm conference.

o3 deep research is so useful. i use it for everything

an insider into how nathan lambert writes: https://www.interconnects.ai/p/how-i-write

An act of the will, accompanied by emotion, that leads to action on behalf of its object.

– Voddie Baucham

i need to get my hands on the entire cs lewis collection. and i have to finish all of them. and more so, i should put into practice the teachings in his books.

A DS question i found: Should you ask data science job candidates this tricky math question? – r y x, r

started to develop the papertrail app david wants with tauri, but i kept facing bugs. rust is difficult.

i got home and around 10pm and ate chicken porridge that my sister cooked for me. my throat was still ruined, but i felt safe being home. my parents were returning the next day.

we walked under the sun under an umbrella and went to the eslite bookstore.

we had udon noodles here, and i got to sit beside her, chatting with her. with her, doing normal and boring things like eating udon and watching people order udon was nice, i didn't need to achieve anything big or great, with her, i just had to be me. i don't feel like this often. and i wish it could be like this forever.

we bought a Fujicolor Simple Ace Disposable Camera for 990 NTD and proceeded on an adventure to take turns taking pictures. we had 27 shots.

we went to a cat cafe got 5 drinks to satisfy 280 NTD per person. the cats weren't very playful, but i felt happy seeing her play with one of them at the end.

we went to a few thrift stores and took more pictures together. i didn't buy anything, and we barely spent more than 10 minutes in each of them.

we ended the night with hotpot. we got a terrible seat, where the floor was sinking, and we were under a time crunch to get her home by 9:30. but it was nice eating with her.

even though i could barely talk the entire day, and my throat kept itching upon a single word, i still had one of the best days of my life.

i can't imagine being able to do this everyday with her. maybe we'll both get used to it, and we might even start taking each other for granted, or worse, get sick of each other. true love only grows stronger when it is challenged and tested, and this is our test.

i arrived at 10:25 for the 10:30 church service. i went to a nearby family mart to get food. when they arrived i saw her and her mom. i greeted her mom but she never greeted back, maybe i was too soft. their church is incredibly lively, almost like a cult. maybe this is what churches are supposed to be. members that are full of vigor to worship and responsive and attentive to the pastors. the sermon was a good reminder on what it means to not seek worth from achievements.

the lunch was at one of their regular spots. the restaurant was as loud as the night before the first day of chinese new year. i could barely speak that day, and in this restaurant, i might as well be mute. the dad was nice to me, but the mom was never nice to begin with. i felt like a stranger, and she was hostile. she shot at me a lot of questions that were criticisms on my behaviour and just on who i am as a person, like my background, my parents, my health issues, my future path, and also warnings on how we SHOULD behave in a relationship. after the lunch i felt like i was not worthy of her.

i went to a few places alone to take pictures. i wanted to make use of my time here. without my camera traveling would be so boring.

1. chiang kai-shek memorial hall (like the DC Abraham Lincoln but for taipei)
2. dr sun yat-sen park

the rest of the day i rested at the hotel. my dinner was from 7 eleven again.

we met at the station, and at first i was star struck. its cheesy to say but there's no other way to put it. it felt really unreal at first, like i was dreaming. being with her side by side. seeing her not through a digital screen but with my own eyes. hearing her not through my airpods, but her raw voice. i wanted to notice every part of her face, the way the light falls on it, how her hair dances in the wind. i felt so happy just walking by her side my heart could explode. we were both slightly awkward at first, and didn't know how to react or interact with each other, but soon enough we felt comfortable with each other.

our iternary of the day:

1. tofu pudding @ Shida Rd Daan, it's bitter which is interesting.
2. 日本風格的 無人古著店 (unmanned vintage shop)
3. da an park, we sat at a bench eating breakfast and saw taiwan birds there
   • i took photos of her with my camera. ive never felt more compelled to capture a human subject with this camera than ever.
4. lunch was zhongshan eslite 食習, have a SEAT, 家庭料理店
5. muji store in zhongshan
6. ER @ NTU because i was having trouble swallowing and breathing well. it cost $150 to do a covid test ,flu test, and xray for my throat
7. dinner was a porridge place

i ordered her a uber home. besides the terrible reaction of my throat and the trip to NTU, it couldn't have asked for more. i even saw how we would be in a scenario where one of us had health issues, a glimpse into a future where we would have to take care of each other.

what worried me was the lunch with her parents tomorrow. i can barely speak.

i took the bus, the one on google maps was cancelled and i had to figure out another # to take. a worker at the stop helped me communicate since the drivers only speak hokkien. the ride was an hour. i napped.

once i got off the stop, i first noticed how loud the streets are in taiwan. the motorcycles are the culprit. SF is so quiet. i walk in the streets in the morning and sometimes it's dead silent.

i reached my hotel and i always have a sense of nervousness when i have to speak chinese. i'm worried i'll get thrown a word i don't understand. but i stay confident. that's the key.

i got a gift pack from T. there were flowers and cards. i've never received flowers before in my life. i felt blessed. i don't deserve her.

the fist thing i did after was get food from 7 eleven, which was right beside the hotel. i got mushroom porridge, and a bunch of throat medication. i had to get better or this trip is ruined. i tried everything.

the room was nice. i like the japanese style. the heated toilet seat is great.

i went to bed at 11:30 to get up early to pack. but i couldn't get deep sleep till 2:30. i decided to get up at 3 and packed until 5 a.m. T was with me throughout the packing. it's peaceful in the wee hours. but i had to do it as quiet as possible. so i don't disturb the people below me.

i was mad at W. i slept at 530

i then woke up at 830. and i had breakfast with mafia at sisteria near my apartment. i had beets salad.

adrian drove me to the airport.

i flew united. the food was terrible. but i did get some sleep.

What good is it for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul? – Mark 8:36, NIV

went to cowork at clement st with A. we went to Diamond Coffee n' Pastry. i was working on homework. i can't wait for these easily ai solvable assignments to be over. my dad paid $80k for my past year in SF not for my education, but for working with UCSF. this research opened so many doors for me.

a little girl came in with his dad with glee. she was singing a tune. 5 minutes later, a homeless man came in near closing time and asked for coffee, and when denied, started to swear. and banged on the door as he left. i thought this was the nice part of SF.

i had dinner at Pasta Supply Co. they welcomed me. we talked abou the most exotic foods we've had. C drove us home and asked me about where i worked at before this. i realize i'm a one question one answer guy. i'm not usually inclined to tell people more than what's necessary. i'm not a yapper. and that is a good thing in some cases, and a weakness in others. i'm learning how to be warm and likable at the right times. i'm very selective to who i interact with, because my energy is scarce. it's a tough life being an introvert in an extroverted world.

i came here with the purpose of buying SF coffee for T's parents. i took pictures of all the coffee and chocolate and sent it to her. to make sure my gift aligns with their taste profiles.

later this day, J came with W to discuss about the offer. the negotiation happened in person. it's tough to navigate around money talk.

after that we went to dog eared books for a postcard for the parents. and j gave us a ride home. i talked about how i wanted to start as soon as possible to start getting paid. but i had a feeling i just wanted the money and assurance more than anything.

• How Does Claude 4 Think? – Sholto Douglas & Trenton Bricken
• AI for Science with Sir Paul Nurse, Demis Hassabis, Jennifer Doudna, and John Jumper
• Building Confidence In Yourself and Your Ideas
• Behind the lens: AI, creativity, and the future of filmmaking tools
• Darren Aronofsky and Demis Hassabis on storytelling in the age of AI
• Demis Hassabis and Veritasium's Derek Muller talk AI, AlphaFold and human intelligence
• Is Human Data Enough? With David Silver

“Happiness is really just about four things: perceived control, perceived progress, connectedness (number and depth of your relationships), and vision/meaning (being part of something bigger than yourself).”

– Tony Hsieh

i got an idea from YC's Startup Ideas You Can Now Build With AI video. Gary talked about a blogging platform you can vibe blog. it was inspired from this blog post by Pete Koomen, about horseless carriages.

i believe the premise is think of a blog platform where writers can "vibe" their way through writing by applying different prompts that are tuned to their writing style? it would be powerful if the reader also has their own custom promtps that are tuned to their reading preferences. a platform that adapts to whoever is laying eyes on it.

i felt down again and didn't feel like talking. we all went to play trains at J's. i got to meet miso. i did not know poodles like eating chestnuts. i'm glad to have friends who care, i always feel deep down that nobody cares, and my problems are my own to bear. but that's a failure mode, because if someone is willing to listen, don't shut them off. the world is cruel and dark, and if you have even one person to bear your burdens with with, that's one of the greatest blessings in the world, better than what the riches of the world can offer. and it's a glimmer of what jesus offered when he walked on our world.

when it was my turn i felt calm, just seconds before i went up i decided i would share my presentation was accepted into AAPM, i felt it would boost the look on MSDS and the practicum. i do believe i lucked out, or more accurately, i believe it was God's provision that i got to partner with UCSF, which led me down this potential road of PhD.

i remember minutes into my presentation, i started getting tired. i wonder how professors lecture for 2 hours, and that's just one class, how they do it the entire day i do not understand. 10 minutes in, i wanted to stop speaking, i was listening to my own voice, cringing at how it sounds and vibrates across the room, i thought about how people are getting bored, and i should wrap it up quickly. i thought about how people don't care about what i have to say at all. but stripping away all the insecurities, i felt at peace, i wasn't nervous, only careful about what i had to say. since i didn't practice the ending enough, and fumbled it, but the entire presentation went well. i was apparently one of the finalist for best presentation, and a director even reached out for an interview.

i wonder how different the AAPM one would be, would i be on stage? would i get tougher questions that i can't answer? there will be a lot of uncertainties, but one thing i can be sure is i will be well-prepared and groomed by my professor, and that i will do my best.

"Love her."
"You don't understand. the feeling of love just isn't there."
"Then love her. If the feeling isn't there, that's a good reason to love her."
"But how do you love when you don't love?"
"My friend , love is a verb. Love - the feeling - is a fruit of love, the verb. So love her. Serve her. Sacrifice. Listen to her. Empathize. Appreciate. Affirm her. Are you willing to do that?”

― Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change

i watched yes man and liar liar. both are comfort movies that brings laughter to my soul. i like the concept of yes man, that to an extent, saying yes to more things will get you out of your shell, and lead you to unexpected connections and opportunities. it's a promise to yourself to change.

i walked to ferry building to get some work done. i wrote up notes for what to say in my presentation tomorrow and caught up on my blogs. i walked around the shops, looking for things to buy for T's parents. everything is pricey here. i wish they had free wifi, ferry building would be the best (free) cowork space if so, i like watching the sea and the island and the bridge.

i watched final destination during lunch, the curiosity drove me to watch it. it's an itch that i wanted to scratch, to see how gory it can get. the mri scene will stick in mind whenever i go to the hospital. i wonder how realistic it is.

it's my last semester of the program, and my last class ever. the semester passed by quickly, most of it was stressing out about jobs. now the final summer module will be about finalizing my plans.

i started coding the tauri app for papertrail but i kept facing 500 errors.

i also couldn't sleep this night. i laid awake fearing death and not amounting to anything before i die again. i felt like i wasted the entire year accomplishing nothing. i felt like i've grown too dependent on others and that my life revolves around T and my goals are too attached to her. if she's gone from my life, what happens to me? how do i self-differentiate?

we then walked to conservatory of flowers, hoping for flowers, but it's tropical plants instead. the flowers outside were still being planted.

we took the second waymo to city hall to take some pictures. many happy couples were taking wedding photos.

we left to eat at zen yai, a thai restaurant in tenderloin. i had pineapple fried rice, reminds me of the thai food i used to have back at home.

we walked to books inc. parents were falling asleep at a bench. the shop owner held a dog in his arms. i want to own a cat bookstore / cafe.

we took our third waymo back home.

i cooked w mom and watched some of mission impossible rouge nation. we talked of watching the last ever one in the series when i go back home to malaysia.

• Solution-space Taste
• Handmade wonder • Buttondown

learn

• The Throughput of Learning
• How I think about learning - by Saurabh Shah
• Q&A with William Stout: From our Friends at the Eames Institute — William Stout Architectural Books

ai

• My path into AI - by Nathan Lambert - Interconnects
• Improving Retrieval on Ramp with Transaction Embeddings — Ramp Builders Blog
• Why We Think | Lil'Log
• A Meticulous Guide to Advances in Deep Learning Efficiency over the Years | Alex L. Zhang

i've been telling everyone i'm planning to do a PhD. and i'm starting to wonder if i truly know the weight of those words, and the responsiblity and stress that might come with actually commiting to it. i do enjoy research, and i love consuming info, and acting on it. but i'm also wondering if there are alternative options, not for comfort or sense of safety and security, but the ones that maximizes agency. how do i know if i'm on the right path unless i start on it? and when is it too late to figure it out?

made a weekly review list of 10 questions, inspired by b.k.

1. what were my top 3 accomplishments this week?
2. what did i read?
3. what distracted me?
4. how was my sleep? health?
5. what am i grateful for this week?
6. what challenge did i overcome?
7. what did i learn this week?
8. what surprised me?
9. what brought me joy?
10. am i progressing towards my long-term goals?

woke up at 10 am and everyone was blasting my phone. brian came over and took meetings at my house. my parents came in. W came in after as well.

we took the waymo to the st ignatious church. i went to pick up my regalia. it took a while to figure out how to put on the neck "scarf" thing.

it was overwhelming outside the library, there were 3 ceremonies happening on the same day

i saw my friends all in one room. everyone making sure they were well-dressed in their regalia.

we walked into the church and everyone was filming at us and celebrating.

after the long ceremony we all took photos with our loved ones.

i'm glad i met everyone here.

W's family and mine ate dinner at capitol restaurant.

we got 2 plates of fried chicken wings, bitter melon with beef, pork ribs with black bean, red braised tofu, and deep fried cat fish.

i spent 2 hours booking flights that evening, and finding accomodation. and worked on the presentation slides for my practicum the rest of the night. there has to be an agent that books flights for me, it should ideally have context about filght price dynamics, and track the specific dates for my travel, and be able to book flights with my info, and cancel if something better comes up. and also take into account the rewards of my card. i can't wait for the day we all have personal agents do tasks for us.

it's interesting to see my parents here again. grateful for them and their support for my education. i find it hard to appreciate how privileged i am for being able to live in sf and study here at a private school. did i fully make use of my time here? did i maximize agency? looking back, i was tired a lot, and my self-confidence took a hit from my interviews with FAANG. but i'm now constantly considering what i truly want. and it's hard to do so when my life is so intermixed with expectations and desires influenced by the people in my life

i looked into Open Evidence more and it's insane how they $107M funding, $75M from Sequoia in their series A. i want to work for this company. their models score >90% on USMLE. i wonder if they would release an API. i'll write about them for contrary next.