Buckets

“Reality is stranger than fiction.” — Rohan Kishibe

Broken Blog

So, I think there was some kind of SSL error with my blog and I had to ask ChatGPT and Github Copilot a lot of questions because I have no idea what’s going on with these processes.

Fragrant Port

I went to Hongkong over the Sep 4-7 weekend, rode some boats, saw some friends, and ate some egg tarts. I know it’s strange to include in this post instead of the previous one, but “Neon” is such a long post already.

HKU

I went to a business course lecture with my friend C and the lecturer said there were 300 students and 5 subclasses with 60 students each. Standard referencing rubric rather than curve grading. 6 or 7 students per group in a project where they try to make a business plan proposal.

Prof drew a distinction between app/product and business, because the product does not guarantee profitability long term. He discussed how HK PCCW tried streaming movies at home long before Netflix and he was one of the first trial users but it was way too slow.

Reality

HK is kind of like the Chinatown of China, because walking around you could kind of sense how similar Chinatown in Manhattan is to HK.

There are quite a few smokers in HK, and many are women, which I found quite interesting. However, a lot of the cigarettes in HK smell kind of like candy, which was quite strange, not sure what they put in there.

Seaside

I went to Tai O, a seaside village where the houses were on stilts. It felt like there weren’t many locals, but I did see like 10 kids playing around who seemed to be from the area.

Since it was low tide, I went out onto the rocks and my shoes got quite dirty from stepping into the soft mud when I thought it would be more solid.

I was wondering how kids here go to school, and I watched a movie on the plane called 《多幸运遇见你》 about how kids in a fishing village in China cannot get a good education because teachers don’t want to teach there. However, in Tai O, there seems to be sufficient schools and the kids just take the bus.

Must have been the wind

There are quite a few reviews on Chinese forums harshly criticizing the movie, but it wasn’t as bad as they say because it was a chance to get perspective on how uneducated parents view education.

For one of the students, his dad doesn’t want him to go to school anymore because it makes more sense to teach the kid how to fish, where one net cast could be worth thousands of dollars. However, the family gets scammed out of tens of thousands of dollars and the dad decides to send the kid to school because he needs to know math to not repeat that.

Public transportation

The train and bus system in HK is pretty good, but I don’t like how there aren’t any downward escalators in even some of the biggest stations in HK. I don’t like it because I’m lazy, but it’s quite inconvenient for the elderly, who have to squeeze on the elevator with the baby strollers and regular lazy people.

Things should work out since there are less babies and more elderly these days.

Scientific Ethics

Ethics in science is quite complicated because most of the problems in ethics involve things which do not even exist yet. It is not the nature of the scientific procedure, but rather the act of the study itself.

For example, while I was watching an Instagram reel about how beekeepers squash new queen larvae to prevent a bee civil war, I wondered about the ethics of even conducting an experiment based on this phenomenon.

If anyone wished to study bee civil wars, they would be responsible for the deaths of thousands of bees because they would need to manufacture this in a controlled environment repeatedly, which seems pretty messed up.

Coursework

• ACM 104: Applied Linear Algebra
• ACM 116: Probability Models
• BEM 109: Finance of China
• BEM 131: International Trade
• CS 164: Compilers

I was thinking about taking Ph/CS 219: Quantum Computing this spring with John Preskill. According to M, there’s no need to take quantum mechanics before quantum computing, so I’ll just do it since I took too many of the spring term ML courses already.

Also, one of my friends T is interested in the content of 219 since she’s in quantum computing at a different school, so it would be interesting to see if there are any differences.

DJ School

T, one of my good friends and amazing DJ, was giving a mini-class on how to DJ.

Essentially, DJs are trying to combine two songs in a nice way and transition between them until the event is over.

Me, A, V and some of the underclassmen were learning and at the end we tried to do our own transitions which went quite poorly, but then T showed us how it’s actually done, which was very impressive.

Round and Round

Before that, there was rotation, which was a lot of fun this year and I helped organize some of the events for Avery House.

At karaoke, I was running the table and was completely overwhelmed and had a terrible time. I believe the word is “crashout.”

Normally, T would be there to help run it, but I was operating the table basically by myself and had to do three things simultaneously:

1. Turn off the mics of the screamers, which requires quite a bit of testing
2. Control the volume of the music and mics
3. Take song requests and queue new songs

This doesn’t sound too complicated, but trying to do it yourself for the first time is a very stressful process.

Reflection

When I was taking a shower that night, I thought about why I was feeling like shit, and realized that it was basically just in my head.

Instead of being angry at the people screaming into the mics, I should just relax and have fun instead. It’s all about attitude, just like fishing.

Laggy

When I came back to campus, my sleep was only about 7 hours per night, but I felt amazing waking up every single day.

In fact, I was extremely upbeat to a strange degree the morning after the shower. I was talking very fast and making a lot of jokes.

I’m not sure what happened, but by week 3 of class, that attitude was completely gone. I now need to sleep 9 hours like I did before and I always feel some kind of pressure.

In some ways, that felt like I was burning away my lifeforce in exchange for that kind of attitude. It felt inorganic, like the positivity was just swelling out of me.

Deserved

I don’t think it’s sustainable to feel that enlightened state forever. But I think it’s possible to move in that direction slowly over time.