“The surest sign of wisdom is a constant cheerfulness,” - Michel de Montaigne

exam was quite short. 10 minutes as all it took. 6 to finish, 4 to check it 5 times. i probably made a mistake somewhere, but it's not important.

haven't been in campus for a while, it's nice to talk to friends. helps put things into perspective, about what you're doing, how you're feeling, and also reminds you to show curiosity and empathy for others.

doordash promo 5 bucks off for nick the greek is so value. beef/lamb gyro again. no yoghurt no cheese.

back to the gym with A. i find it effective to channel anger and fear by creating dramatic events in your head to gain more strength.

dinner with fam, meal courtesy of W. one of the last few nights i have with family in my house.

rearranged my bedroom again, stored more stuff in my luggages, gave a few hackathon and event freebies to fam. i don't want it to go back to before. wouldn't it be nice to have them be in california? to be able to walk my dad to the gym, and have my mom beside me while she asks me to eat before my food gets cold.

growing up is hard at times. i have to cherish the time and physical presence that i have with them the next few days. nothing else can matter more.

Everyone discusses my art and pretends to understand, as if it were necessary to understand, when it is simply necessary to love. ― Claude Monet

woke up feeling like a completely different person. maybe it has something do what with my thoughts the night before. if they're left unresolved, the fears and the anxieties, they dig their way into my subconscious as i'm asleep, without me knowing. i wake up feeling off, like the world is upside down. i wanted to pray before i slept, but i ended up just passing out before i had the chance to quell the emotions. felt so sick and tired after waking up and having breakfast i had to go back to sleep. and i experienced sleep inertia as i woke up. it was very disorientating.

the day fuzzily passed by. all i remember now was eating a lot of chicken and kimchi for late lunch, trying to study for my distributed quiz, attending a few meetings, and bringing my dad to the ymca pool, taking some pictures, and eating steak and salmon with my family.

ended the day with more studying and good conversations.

“May what I do flow from me like a river, no forcing and no holding back, the way it is with children.” ― Rainer Maria Rilke

conversations with strangers are like a reset button. when you hang out with the same people and live a routine life, you don't step back and think about your journey, about who you are, about your goals and dreams. it's good to think about these things once in a while, not all the time because it's almost impossible to plan the future. but you can actively make the right choices, instill good habits, that can bring you to where you want to be.

dove deep into a paper on integrating bio-clinical features like demographics and genetic markers with 3dSwinUNET for personalized planning in glioblastoma. glioblastoma (GBM) is the most aggressive form of brain tumor, the medial survival is only 15-20 months, and even with a generous 2cm isotropic expansion around the gross tumor volume (GTV) for radiation therapy (RT) planning, up to 47% of patients experience tumor progression beyond the clinical target volume (CTV). the idea is that by leveraging multimodal bio-clinical-imaging features, we can capture unique biological behaviours of GBM that is undetectable on imaging, enabling more precise and patient-specific treatment volumes.

chatted with claude for an hour helped a lot. it's so great at answering questions it truly is a jetpack for your thoughts.

a few videos i plan to digest during my time during this practicum, before i graduate.

Karpathy's video on building GPT

and these three videos by Umar

• transformers from scratch (explanation)
• vision LM from scratch
• llama 2 from scratch (explanation)

and wrapping it up with distributed pytorch training

got so anxious before my meeting, i knew i wasn't fully prepared and had not completed the literature review, so I only had questions, no good ideas. i need to go through the papers more effectively, it's breadth first instead of depth first now. i need to prompt myself to only extract what i need from papers. i make the mistake of trying to understand everything. i need a summary template prompt for myself to fill in.

i find it incredibly hard to focus on classes now or other side hustles now. i have this work that i can devote 100% of my attention to. i tend to go all-in on something. i found my new obsession. the permission to dive into rabbit holes. i need to start writing code.

Perhaps it never did snow that August in Vermont; perhaps there never were flurries in the night wind, and maybe no one else felt the ground hardening and summer already dead even as we pretended to bask in it, but that was how it felt to me, and it might as well have snowed, could have snowed, did snow.

— Joan Didion, On Keeping A Notebook

forgot to normalize before doing regularized ridge regression. mistakes like this i will remember for a while. making mistakes is better than getting everything right in this sense.

costco run with family. 5 dollar roast chicken is so value.

walked around with W for his bday. bought a spathiphyllum plant for the house from ikea.

dinner at chef hungs, salty fried pork chop is good. i realize i still don't participate in conversations. i just nod and listen. i'm always staring into the distance. i wonder where my mind goes. i can't remember.

hung all the art i have in my room. stuck all the post cards i have. it feels cozier. for some reason i only feel home is more like home once my family came to visit. i never bothered to put up my art and my table was becoming a mess, now it feels cozy. and it will be empty again in 8 months.

The older I get, the more I find that you can only live with beings who liberate you, and who love you with an affection that is as light to bear as it is strong to feel… This is how I am your friend, I love your happiness, your freedom, your adventure…and I would like to be for you the companion you are sure of, always.

– Albert Camus (to René Char)

spent the day studying BERT and attention. Umar and 3b1b was very helpful to visualize everything.

i'm thinking of an app that can let me select the photos i've taken for the day, and it takes the image and metadata, and helps summarizes what i did for the day. helps me with my journal reflection, and also incentivize me to take more photos.

giving is always better than receiving, gift giving is an art, and the quality of your gift is a direct result of how attentive you are to your curiosity, to the bids for connections, the little things, and the inside jokes.

it is more blessed to give than to receive" – Acts 20:35

got up early to get pictures at fort point with family, we haven't taken a picture with the golden gate yet. the car is due at 10:30 so we were on a time crunch.

lots of people running here, most of them bring their dogs. it's windy here. the waves were crashing on the rocks, and spill over the pavements.

printed more llm for medical papers at the marriot when we returned the car. i get so excited over free printing. Lots of interesting ideas and results in these papers, but which one are relevant and practical? tomorrow is first day. i want the fast track onboarding where i'm already committing on the first day. i want to implement ideas, run experiments, report results, iterate, and publish. i can see myself being obsessed with problems and stressed out about not getting the results i expect. and overworking myself. but it's for a good cause.

lunch was at ma's dimsum. the wait is pretty long. prices are good, mostly <15 bucks. frog texture is interesting, the burnt rice was satisfying. not so much the crunch, but the taste of charcoal and fire.

napped for way too long, from 3 to 5 p.m. i was supposed to study. i hope i can catch up tomorrow. the first test is always more anxiety-inducing. i don't know what to expect.

family came around 7. finally decided to clean up my table. sundays are for cleaning. gave a lot of free merch to sister. i like how excited she gets.

dinner with family again at home, sent a lot of photos i've been taking to each of them. i like my camera a lot. it struggles with in darker and sunny conditions, but the color and quality is great. apartment is going to feel so empty again after this. it's been nice having family around. it feels more homey. before this it just felt like a temporary and expensive shelter for sleep and food that gets cold at night, and it'll go back to that after this.

doing homework questions and exercises always gives me so much intuition. i always find it hard to learn concepts formula first, i need to learn things problem-based first, and then gain understanding for the whys and hows.

today was a roadtrip on state route 1. i've always wanted to drive along this highway. i had high expectations.

rental car delay at hertz marriot, family arrived my home around noon. already a late start to the day.

stopped by super duper burgers for lunch, the one beside sephora studio and bryan's grocery on california st. it's more affluent and clean here. the demographic is different here. stopped by trader joe's for snacks and food while i ate my $20 8 oz. burger. the burgers were salty and dry.

first stop was pacifica state beach. i surfed here 2 years ago. i remember how cold the water was. my ears and head hurt from the cold winds. it was summer then. it's november and it's hotter now. it should be the opposite. couldn't find parking so i waited in the car for family to snap pictures.

the rest of the trip was driven by my sister while i worked on my homework. i had no internet access initially and i realized how dependent i am on the internet, i couldn't get anything done. i remember this challenge where someone could recreate an entire dashboard made by v0 with html and css. i probably will never reach that skill level, but that's okay.

the plan was to drive through 17 mile but it was already 16:50 by the time we reached monterey. the backup plan was to watch the sunset hidden behind the clouds at asilomar state beach. it was cold. people were surrounding small fires. i saw a woman just staring at the ocean. i wonder what she was thinking. lots of kids playing around. how are they not cold?

went to carmel by the sea, but it was already dark. lots of art galleries around. bought a pretzel sprinkled with a generous amount of salt for 3 bucks. went to a gift shop and i think i saw my professor with her sisters (i assume). what are the odds? this particular gift shop, at this minute, on this day? when the only reason i came here was because A told me to come here the day before in class. i find it hard not to act on a coincidence like that, i spent 20 minutes internally fighting with myself, whether i should say hi. i ended up deciding she wouldn't remember me anyways, and i wasn't sure if it was her. now i'll always wonder. it's haunting.

had korean food in monterey, found myself liking ramyeon. reminded me of this restaurant in malaysia where i had spicy ramyeon with cheese with my mom in a corner restaurant in a shopping mall. i have a lot of memories being with my mom in shopping malls eating food. i learned recently that if i'm an adult, i've spent 95% of my time with my parents. i need that statistics on a wall.

the drive home involved a lot of napping and generating notes from class lectures because i failed to pay attention in class. and talking to family. reached home at 11 p.m. slept at 1:30 a.m.

For so many people, vulnerability is inseparable from fear. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I understood that fear of my mom not picking me up from piano practice was the same fear that flashed through me when a friend or partner answered my text late. This sense of: what in the world am I going to do if you abandon me?

It’s true that life is a series of abandonments. Also true is the Saul Bellow line that life is a series of “unexpected intrusions of beauty."

I believe that complicated arrangements can work for a long period of time. When people talk about how communes, book clubs, platonic life partnerships don’t work, I’m always more focused on the ones that do. I’m always thinking: isn’t there a way we could keep going?

– ava

DSA class was MST. flashbacks to the algorithm design class at ISU. that class was pretty interesting, although it's alarming how little i can recall from it. even though i got an A.

free ferry ride to richmond, SF and the two bridges: oakland and golden gate in sight as the skyline slowly reduces to just an outline. the sky purple and pink, the sun turning into a warm fuzzy orange ball. i'm grateful my family is here with me.

went to chinatown night market with family. got hunan food

goofy effects on photobooth app with family.

booked another car for tomorrow

continued working on my paper summary app. it's like i'm possessed when i work on a new project. an idea in my head that won't die until i see it come to life. i love building apps. i should start utilizing claude and cursor to make ios apps

bridgit mendler is such an inspiration. a perfect example of how you can do just do things (given the opportunity and capability), do more side quests, work on interesting and useful problems, do great work.

migraine in class again.

worked on my research paper summarizing app so i can digest papers quicker and more efficiently

anthropic's prompt caching and pdf beta features are super useful. dumping their docs into cursor is also helpful for iterating and refining the prompt strategy

published my app, planning to do a twitter post. i have to utilize my anthropic credits somehow. might as well build more and ship in public.

cooked mille-feuille nabe, i like the mushroom cutting technique that makes it look extra fancy. mistake was not drying the beef slices with paper towels, using chicken, and adding too much water. it also lacked flavor. the broth matters a lot.

the agenda with family today:

• breakfast at gourmet kitchen
  • the pork buns with vege are really good
  • new golden daisy has good roast pork
  • good mong kok has good sesame balls
• whole foods at los gatos for lunch
• los gatos downtown
• henry cowell redwoods
  • tip: you can go into fremont tree, it's a huge hole in the trunk that can fit ~10 people
• h mart san jose de anza
• DH noodles & grill 敦煌兰州牛肉拉面

drove a tesla model 3 for the first time, the pedal regenerative braking is convenient, i don't have to switch my foot between pedals. takes some time to get the timing right, if you release too early you stop too early. accelerating is so fun, it feels like you're zooming on the road.

read how word2vec works, jay's post was very helpful in visualizing everything. i need more posts like that, bu for every topic tha ti want to learn. an LLM that can effectively explain topics with from first principles with background context and with clear visuals. a highly specialized personal tutor in your pocket.