art therapy with the boys

but those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint.

Isaiah 40:31 (NIV)

woke up so confused at 5 a.m.

had a mental breakdown about not going food pantry and not doing good enough for the meeting. grateful for T to help calm my spiralling thoughts.

went to mission for some art therapy. used oil pastel to recreate a paul signac painting, can't remember the name for it.

went to fedex to pickup the laptop and the area was so sketchy. broken trailers and RVs parked on the road. factories and train tracks and graffiti everywhere. i was walking at my fastest speed. so many irrational fears popped up. maybe the shady guy in the hoodie across the street will run towards me. maybe someone in a car will just drive up to me and rob my laptop. the guy chilling by the wall will jump me. so many possible worst-case scenarios.

read how to live by sarah bakewell on the train and i kept falling asleep. i've never felt so tired. i could not keep my eyes open.

montaigne was the first to write about himself extensively. he created a mirror in which other people recognize their own humanity. everyone who reads his writing finds themselves written in it. he wrote a total of 107 essays that captured whatever was going on through his head. he used these experiences as the basis to answer the biggest question of all: "how to live?" he wasn't interested in how one should live, but how to live a good life – an honorable life, a fully human, satisfying, flourishing one. this question drove him to write and read.

my steps are heavy this week, they lack the usual rhythm and tempo. i've been looking down a lot, i don't see faces anymore, just objects, it might be my self-esteem, my confidence shaken. it feels like i'm drifting.

next week will be a better week. life in SF is full of ups and downs. when you're at your lowest, it can only go up.

can't seem to focus in class anymore. my head just keeps echoing the worlds "i need a practicum that's at least good enough so i can get a good callback rate to get a good full time job so that paying 56k for this masters will be worth it and i can make my parents proud and i can make enough money to live comfortably in SF for the time being"

it's also finishing homeworks asap so that i don't have to spend time doing it later, and looking up at the lecture slides to see what the professor is teaching every few minutes so i'm not completely lost after.

i couldn't see a reason why i was in this program anymore after the rug pull. the practicum was the only reason i came to this school, and i was going to aim for the best. i did that, and look where that got me.

i was spiralling.

everyone else is doing fine. i felt alienated.

family is going to come visit soon for 3 weeks and i can't feel excited. i feel like i let them down and i'm stressed out.

went to nap at 7:30 pm and proceeded to sleep until dawn.

“Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.”

― Joan Didion, Blue Nights

learned some new ideas about LLM research. the idea of instruction pretraining, where you use LLMs to generate synthetic instruction data, and use it during pretraining. you can combine instruction tuning with to have LLMs reason better i.e. in solving math problems. small, high-quality datasets can outperform large ones. still unsure how this is different from fine-tuning, it's more about having LLMs follow instructions? and there's also midtraining, which is about improving the capability of LLMs, rather than usability?

not having a practicum now is coloring my every moment in sf. it's a pervasive mood, to feel like you're at the very top, and fall right to the bottom, the next second.

it's another reminder that the world doesn't revolve around you and you can't be too attached to things. when they're taken away from you, and you have to fight to create a different path, your own path.

i could almost see a path before this, now it's all blurry again. and maybe that's a good thing.

dryer was broken (taken away?) so we went to north beach, near washington square, to do our laundry. read a bi of joan didion's let me tell you what i mean. i found the foreword to be flowery and hard to understand, maybe i need to expand my vocabulary and read more.

two quotes about writing:

The peculiarity of being a writer is that the entire enterprise involves the mortal humiliation of seeing one's own words in print.

Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.

If, in our heart, we still cling to anything - anger, anxiety, possessions - we cannot be free

– Thich Naht Hanh

went to confluent ai and built re:sync, a news aggregator from reddit, arxiv, hugging face, and github repos to help companies or individuals keep up with the AI hype. it'll fetch you recommended sources that are most relevant to your current project. honestly integrating AI news by swyx would be enough, it already summarizes top ai discord, reddit, twitter.

spent 5 bucks to "claude" the entire front end. faced ./zlib_bindings issues and decided to just hard code stuff till the very last minute. demo'ed at the event, the audience was so dead. they laughed and got excited about a buggy VR demo instead, which won first prize in the end.

didn't win but some founders came to talk to us about joining their company. we need connections now more than ever now.

currently working on building knowledge graphs with gemini for the Google - Gemini Long Context kaggle comp. does it make sense to fit a million arxiv paper into gemini in batches? and have it merge knowledge graphs? what will be the killer use case of the context for knowledge graphs? can you generate better knowledge graphs with more in the context? maybe cross-domain ideas? i need to talk to more people about this project, what would be the problem to solve here? goal is to create a kaggle notebook and a youtube video. going to be fun.

feels like life just got hard reset. what was supposedly an exciting internship that will help jump start my career is now just a lie that provided all of us momentary happiness and comfort. the upside of this is i'm now more challenged, the grind doesn't stop,

i'm now more motivated than ever to learn the fundamentals in AI, and build and post in public. time to read Programming Massively Parallel Processors: A Hands-on Approach and Machine Learning Engineering Open Book and work from scratch.

For if you know what you want, and will be content with it, you can be trusted. But if you do not know, your desires are limitless and no one can tell how to deal with you. Nothing satisfies an individual incapable of enjoyment.

― Alan Wilson Watts, The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are

slept till 11 a.m., ate my usual breakfast, and felt so tired that i went back to bed. woke up at 3 something. felt so hungry and fatigued, wanted to stay home for the rest of the day and rot in bed. i've never felt so drained.

eventually had to get up to eat, didn't have lunch so i went to gourmet kitchen to get their $8 for 2 entrees + rice/noodles. felt like i was in hong kong for 30 minutes, sat in the cramped restaurant listening to the workers and customers exchanging words in cantonese. the egg noodles were dry, and fried fish was salty and oily. the long beans were crunchy though. I remembered why i hate eating out now.

things are slow now, but will start to ramp up again. it's in these moments where i have (too much) time to think about my future, about what gives me meaning and happiness, about my motivations and aspirations.

lately i've been letting my emotions take control of my thoughts when i could be doing things instead. I could call and text my family if i miss them, i could talk to friends and ask them about their day, i could go out and make new friends if i feel lonely, i could face my problems and worries directly, and actively solve them, instead of letting it consume me slowly. i've been finding myself lacking connection, when i could just put more effort into joining conversations with friends, even if it's about a topic i find uninteresting, i should just say whatever pops into my head. my tiredness can be fixed by prioritizing sleep and diet. there are solutions to everything. even if they are not clear, and not obvious, there are steps you can take. as long as you keep taking action and moving forward in a positive direction.

i'm turning 23 in a week, and it scares me. it scares me how fast time passes. how uncertain the future can feel at times. how it feels like i'm still stuck in the past, unwilling to let go and move on. it scares me that i'm in SF, a vibrant and beautiful city full of possibilities, and i'm feeling empty and depressed, lacking purpose and connection. that i have so much room to grow, in my faith as a christian, in my communication skills, in staying connected with my family and friends, in dealing with my insecurities, in my technical skills. how do i know i'm living my life right? what is right? how do i know i'm making the right decisions in life? how do i make the fullest of my time and experience being in SF in my early 20s? what mistakes am I making that I'm not even aware of? how do i minimize regret?

i have to turn emotions into action. take more risks. run more experiments. do more things that excites me. stay curious.

got up at 9 and was so tired that i didn't want to go. i told myself i didn't do much for this hackathon anyways. took 8 and then 30 bus, got there at 11 something. ate sun chips and pretzels with two cups of coffee. met up with my friends.

went for finalist judging and the judges were bombarded with too much AI. we could've strategised better for the finalist demo.

waited till 2:45 p.m. and we didn't get any emails for finalist announcements.

saw the 10 finalist demos for the hackathon, there were workout accountability with crypto, watermarking media, DeFI, swapping crypto with ai wearables, playing games with your NFTs, disaster response with blockchain, etc.

there were over 100 slides for the prize announcements.

it was crazy to see 400k dollars distributed to the winners out of 221 projects.

deeptrust.eth won two prizes:

🔒 Best Use of Compute Over Private Data (Decrypting within a Lit Action) ⸺ $3,000 by Lit Protocol

🏆 Innovative Applications of ZK in Deep Learning and the ETH Ecosystem ⸺ $2,000 by Nethermind

the biggest lessons we got out of the hackathon was we need a UI if we wanted to be finalists. and we should've just presented to more sponsors, even if we didn't use their technologies.

personally, i learned that if i took more actions or put more effort into the hackathon, things could've ended up differently. I should've played to my strengths, and focused on building a nice UI, instead of waiting to integrate with another part of the project. i had no confidence in my abilities for this project, and that impacted my contribution.

had conversations about career, relationships, friendships, parents, agency, impact on the world, malaysia, increasing surface area of luck, and also about the future of the project.

got so much swag from the hackathon, spent 30 minutes pasting stickers on my luggage while watching leah.

realized i've forgot most of the biblical stories and i find it hard to devote time to study the bible and grow in my faith. the goal is to read mere christianity before bed everyday, and take some classes from the bible project every sunday.

took photos around palace of fine arts. kept wishing i had a wider lens for larger objects like the palace. you can only do so much with a 23mm f/2 lens that can't zoom, it is still "brutally simple and highly effective" though.

got to the hackathon at 1 p.m., had fried chicken and fries for breakfast, talked a bit more about the idea

decided to go back home to hack on the idea for better internet connection.

spent most of the day learning about smart contracts, getting confused by phala docs, and figuring out how to write lit actions

dinner was roasted duck curry from Osha Thai BBQ. will attempt to cook it one day.

took in so much information today, both in the AI and in crypto world. this was the kind of idea that requires intuitive understanding of transformers, honored to be teamed with J for this hack. to think that all this won't happen if i never replied to a twitter post about a malaysian independence party. i should post more stuff on the internet. i've been getting contracts and meeting requests for my hackathon projects lately, the things we do today have returns in the future. especially the things that we do out of interest and curiosity, not by obligation or envy.

everyone was at their limits at 2 a.m., had to figure out a way to hack everything together, recorded demo at 3 a.m., ai generated documentation, submitted at 3:30, slept at 4.

5 bucks oat milk latte to keep me functioning for the day. DSA class is just 7 classes with 3 homeworks, 1 final exam, and one final project. thinking of using cuGraph by nvidia for a graph analysis project. i can also see myself learning something useful for leetcode interviews in the upcoming months. i should take notes and start creating a system for acing lc.

distributed computing was just pyspark. why not just use ray for all distributed stuff? is spark and ray essentially the same thing? one is just packaged into a product?

day 1 of eth global sf hackathon. so new to the web3 world. talked to a bunch of companies, got swags, ideated with claude by dumping the entire list of sponsors into it, did this until 2 something, took a waymo home at 3am, slept at 4.

Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but, most of all, endurance.

– James Baldwin

felt so dead upon waking up, body was sore down to my bones, had to literally drag myself to class.

intro to ml class is the entire section. i was looking over the entire class, thinking about how, in a year, everyone in this room will be at different companies, different states, maybe even countries, we might pass by on the streets, but i'll probably never see them again in my life. the friend circle was already been solidified, everyone else will just be acquaintances, the type of friends where you have small talk in the elevator about classes and exams, but nothing further.

been trying to work on my rag project over my blogs. decided on qdrant as vector db and cohere r for chat, embedding, and ranking. the hard part will be integrating with next.js and hosting the backend somewhere. but the QnA should be straightforward. getting blocked by tiredness and context switching between different possible solutions. the hardest part of starting a project is defining the MVP. what is the simplest solution that works, and using what? stop trying to use the "best" thing, just go with what works best for a proof of concept, then optimize after.

went to jtown with S to buy stuff from daiso, and also a gift for H. there's so many little trinkets here, got distracted by minor life improving items, like a protector for my iphone camera and a hook to put my bag instead of putting it on the floor on the living room, and 2.25 bold unsweetened green tea by ito en just to taste the boldness.

ended up at the Kimochi shop and bought a tiny oil painting by a local sf artist, internally debated with myself whether it was a good deal. never bought art before in real life, so was very unsure of myself. i have a major case of scarcity mindset and i'm allergic to spending money for anything other than necessities and food.

recommended by the japanese lady to buy iichiko shochu. today i learned about shochu, which is distilled instead of fermented like sake, and has higher alcohol content, and can be made from from not just rice, but also barley and sweet potato.

bund shanghai restaurant had really good food. xiaolongbao, pan fried buns, 东坡肉, rice cakes, shansi leng mian (eel cold noodles), crab roe tofu, and other dishes i can't remember the names

came home and started feeling intense confusion, missed home and people, had out of body experiences, loss of identity and meaning and purpose, spiralling, afraid, frustrated, lost, uncontrollably crying, sentimental, melancholic, all emotions jumbled up together that i couldn't snap out of. watching howls' moving castle helped bring me back.

talked to mom and it's the same topics about my sister and her faith, about life and relationships, about church. i should be more attentive to her, i wish my family could be in one place. i hope all of us can be in sf soon.

felt very unaccomplished and procrastinated sleep until 3 a.m. probably going to regret it tomorrow.