"Pay attention. It’s all about paying attention. It’s all about taking in as much of what’s out there as you can, and not letting the excuses and the dreariness of some of the obligations you’ll soon be incurring narrow your lives. Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager."

– Susan Sontag

my ucsf work continues to have disappointing results. it's hitting diminishing returns. i don't want to be a prompt engineer. long context models are just terrible at text classification. but i mustn't give up, every failure is a signal, a step towards the right solution. i have to stop expecting it's easy. i'm only 1.5 months into this. i need to make sure i'm understanding everything deeply, learn the details, pick up intuition, or else it'll all be for nothing, even if i do get results, what use will it be if i learn nothing deeply in the end? there's so many things to dive deep into. mixture of experts, attention fusion, multimodal, text encoders, vllm, etc.

walking to blue bottle coffee was considerably difficult. i almost gave up halfway because of the sudden pain. brought the ice pack with me, so i managed to awkwardly walk to meet with A. read in praise of shadows in the cafe. i like it so far, it's making me think about the importance and light and shadow to create meaningful architecture. i was surprised to read his description of the japanese treating toilets as "the place of spiritual repose", a "physiological delight"

“The sun never knew how wonderful it was,” the architect Louis Kahn said, “until it fell on the wall of a building,”

― Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows

went to J's office/house for movies. it's such a nice place. it pays to be intelligent and lucky in sf. if you're doing what you truly love, and work feels like play, and you know the right people, sf will treat you well.

watched memento for the first time (i loved it), at kfry chicken from aria, planned chinatown hackathon. got home around 1am in a waymo. slept around 3am.

it was a good day. a late christmas celebration with friends.