Nineteen’s Summer
“Because I choose to.” — Thomas A. Anderson
“Don’t you lecture me with your $30 haircut.” — Dragon Ball Z
Deciduous Californian
Ever since I’ve come back to New England, I’ve been falling asleep at 3 PM every day and waking up at 5 PM for dinner. I believe it’s because there is a severe lack of sunlight due to the permanently overcast skies.
After soaking sunlight for all of autumn, I suppose my body has become more like that of a deciduous tree; I lose my leaves (get a haircut) and go into hibernation.
I solved this problem by drinking a cup of coffee in the morning a few days ago so that I wouldn’t fall asleep at 3 PM.
Haircut
I got a bad haircut a few days before I flew here. It cost over $30.
ChatGPTeacher
ChatGPT is not great at many things, like combinatorics problems and citing sources, but it is extremely good at answering things that may appear a lot but not necessarily in the same place.
I was researching teacher salaries and how they work, eventually finding a salary schedule table which shows the annual salary during each year of employment in my public school system.
There were four columns which had levels which meant level of education. There was one phrase, MA +30, which was quite confusing and had no explanation. So, I pulled up ChatGPT and immediately it told me that it meant someone with a master’s degree and 30 credit hours of graduate-level courses.
Web Programming
In my opinion, web programming seems like 75% knowledge, 25% logic. The reliance on numerous yet poorly documented examples means that ChatGPT will be very good at it.
While I was adding the post view counter to this blog, I had some trouble writing the conditional statement to make it so that it only shows up in the header of each article.
So, I asked ChatGPT and it was able to figure it out after two questions. It turns out that the format of my blog template uses Liquid in order to do JavaScript inside of .html files.
Anyway, for things that require a lot of knowledge, it is probably easier to ask ChatGPT than to find out yourself.
Conversational
Learning to speak Japanese is not the hardest thing ever. Consuming media is the easiest way to internalize many practical phrases. My current goal is to get good enough to not need to speak English at Matsuri or Takuya.
The Freeskatin’ Tom Zhang 1
Ultimately, freeskating is not a practical way to go places. If you don’t go downhill it’s extremely tiring, and if you go downhill it’s way too hard to slow down.
You can’t put the skates in your backpack without a plastic bag holding it to avoid getting dirt all over the inside, and they are way too heavy for something that small.
It’s also super bumpy even on brick roads, and any dip can cause you to fall off.
Overall, just get a skateboard.
Dr. Zhang 2
For some reason, my dad brought me to his friend’s house to give their family some advice about parenting and college admissions. In a Chinese family, there sadly isn’t much of a difference.
Upper-middle-class parents tend to sign their kids up for a lot of activities when they are very young. Although it can appear forceful, I can understand the desire of parents to give their children as many opportunities to succeed as possible.
They had two sons. One was older than the other.
Their eldest son
showed me his Kaggle notebook for a stock price prediction competition. It was actually very impressive, maybe the same quality as what me and my classmates would make.
As for other activities, he is/was signed up for tennis, flag football, swimming, and piano. Also, he started scrolling Reddit while I was there and has multiple accounts.
He is 11 years old.
One-Trick Sellout
Apparently, he learned how to do ML-based stock price prediction from his dad. I asked him if anyone else in his grade codes or does the same thing. He responded that around ten kids know how to code, and his friend actually also does stock price prediction (and learned from dad, of course).
It’s kind of insane that 5th graders are doing stock price prediction with Python, not just because it is impressive, but because they have already begun career training while other kids are jumping on trampolines and shooting each other with Nerf guns3.
Their second son
is nine years old and doesn’t do as much stuff as his brother. However, I noticed that both of them are very bad at paying attention to what people say; I have to repeat every question at least three times before they actually hear it.
I’m not sure why they would have such short attention spans because they don’t have phones and they only get a little bit of internet time every day.
Applied Gaming Psychology
I achieved my childhood dream of coaching the next generation in gaming. They aren’t exactly gaming prodigies, but there were some things I observed about their in-game behavior that reveal a lot about them.
The older brother O was much better at playing games, not necessarily because he is smarter, but because he understands the objective and how to get past obstacles. In contrast, the younger brother Y didn’t really understand what the game is trying to make the player optimize.
While they were playing Factory Idle, a game in which the player constructs a factory which tries to make profit with limited resources, O understood that the production line must be as dense as possible, while Y was just throwing parts down and hoping that it works.
Implications
Based on O’s proficiency in Factory Idle and other games, he should be able to improve at most things because he is able to identify the path to the objective in simple tasks.
So, I would prescribe doing more stuff rather than just focusing on quantitative finance4. If he only learns how to do one thing, it would be a waste of all that potential.
Also, colleges don’t even like students who focus on quant, there is no idealism. High school coders should just do projects for social good instead of trying to make money if they want to get into college.
Of course, if your dream is to make money, then the journey doesn’t really matter, you just need to do some Leetcode and internships.
For Y, I think that it would be better to learn one thing to just figure out how to improve at it, whether it’s with a teacher or alone. His mom rebutted that he is just a nine year old who is probably just messing around in the game for fun.
In that case, why are your kids doing college app prep in elementary school?
19
Getting older is really strange. When I went to visit my teachers, I noticed all of the students looked way too young. It’s obviously because I’ve been surrounded by adults during college, but it’s the kind of gradual change you don’t see until it’s over.
Year In Review
This year has been the best, so I’m not expecting much for the next one5. However, this year has also been the worst, so I have high hopes. Some things have not gone well for me, but at least I learned a lot about life.
As for achievements, I hit diamond last split, as I mentioned long ago, but am going to end emerald this split. I have a paper in JCP and have a bioinformatics paper coming along. I also learned how to play and sing a lot of songs on guitar, exploring a lot of new C-Pop artists.
Maturity?
I learned that instead of focusing on capturing every opportunity, it’s more important to consider the ways to better enjoy and hold onto what you already have.
If you want to see the beauty of our seasons, instead of waiting for autumn’s red carpet, you should consider sending smooth stones fluttering on sandy shores. Would you?
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