ZAYN: Stairway To The Sky Tour
The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things. — Rainer Maria Rilke
got to visit google sf offices today thanks to H. the free food and game room and facilities and comfort was so attractive. i'm going to start leetcoding tomorrow. i'm ready to sell my soul. once you get integrated into the google culture and system, it's so hard to convert back. you're joining a ecosystem, subscribing to a lifestyle. went back to campus in one of the rooms to fix the vpn and write the nvidia article. ucsf IT support has an app that could control my computer, that was cool, i need that for my parents.
thought i could finish writing in under 2 hours but realized there's always rabbit holes you can dive deeper, and it always ends up taking more time. the nv-embed paper has a lot of interesting tricks that i can apply to my research, the latent attention layer could be useful, and instead of doing masked next token, they do a two-stage process, contrastive instruction-tuning on retrieval and non-retrieval data on pairs (without in-batch negatives) and a belnd of other embedding tasks into instruction-tuning. they also had a hard-negative mining trick using the E5-mistral-7b-instruct as a teacher retrieval model to identify the optimal hardnegative passages relevant to the query. it's amazing how just 3 weeks of intense research allowed me to narrow my focus and be able to appreciate the concepts in the paper.
took the N train with H went to brenda's near tenderloin for dinner with intern friends. got pulled pork sandwich. zayn tickets dropped to 35 and decided to go watch him. thank you Lelia for selling me the tickets. my last concert was charlie puth and i've been itching to go to a concert since. back to bill graham again since november 2023 for the rave. i remember feeling so excited being in sf, now everything is normalized. hearing its you live was heavenly. his vocals are angelic. my next bucket list concerts are harry styles, wave to earth, and lizzy mcalpine, and hans zimmer and hisaishi if they still do live concerts.
today was a special day. one of the nights that i'll remember for 2025.