Jekyll2024-01-13T14:17:00-08:00https://jasonwei20.github.io/feed.xmlJason WeiStudent at Dartmouth College{"name"=>nil, "avatar"=>"taverna.jpeg", "bio"=>nil, "textemail"=>nil, "location"=>nil, "employer"=>nil, "googlescholar"=>nil, "personal"=>nil, "email"=>nil, "uri"=>nil, "bitbucket"=>nil, "codepen"=>nil, "dribbble"=>nil, "flickr"=>nil, "facebook"=>nil, "foursquare"=>nil, "github"=>nil, "google_plus"=>nil, "keybase"=>nil, "instagram"=>nil, "lastfm"=>nil, "linkedin"=>nil, "orcid"=>nil, "pinterest"=>nil, "soundcloud"=>nil, "stackoverflow"=>nil, "steam"=>nil, "tumblr"=>nil, "twitter"=>nil, "vine"=>nil, "weibo"=>nil, "xing"=>nil, "youtube"=>nil, "wikipedia"=>nil}The year of 20232023-12-31T00:00:00-08:002023-12-31T00:00:00-08:00https://jasonwei20.github.io/posts/2023/12/blog-post-22<p>Somehow I didn’t get to writing up a blog post for the past three quarters, so this blog post will be about the whole year.</p>
<h1 id="work">Work</h1>
<p>Obviously, joining OpenAI was the defining action for me this year.
Foremost I’m a believer that the environment that I’m part of matters a great deal, and OpenAI surely has some of the most hard-working people that I’d like to continue working with for a long time, among which include Barret, Liam, John, and Wojciech.
The other important thing is that OpenAI is a totally new environment, which has been a forcing function for me to grow and not overfit to (small degree of) success that I had achieved at Google.
While it’s been temporarily challenging to find my role at OpenAI, I am confident that the change will be good for me in the long run.</p>
<p>The other thing that I’ve grown a lot from is spending time pair programming with Hyung Won.
I am less scared of looking at new codebases now than before, and even enjoy taking more time to understand the tools that I am using now.
One interesting thing now at OpenAI (and probably other places, too) is how fast-paced it has become. It’s hard to feel comfortable and there is a constant thirst for launching the next thing.</p>
<h1 id="health">Health</h1>
<p>In terms of weightlifting, I haven’t been disciplined and regressed quite a bit—my bench is less than one plate now.
I got into practicing soccer recently, and there were few weeks where I was good about practicing. I hope to practice more in 2024 as a fun way to get in my cardio, and also hope to learn about deliberate practice.
I started a new thing where in addition to my work hours, Jerry also checks whether I hit my exercise goals for the week. Having Jerry check my work hours has been key for discipline.</p>
<h1 id="travels">Travels</h1>
<p><strong>ICML</strong>. I went to ICML in Honolulu, Hawaii, which was a good opportunity both to meet people I hadn’t seen in a while and for leisure. It was fun to catch up with people like Jack Rae, Denny, Rishi Bommasani, Shayne Longpre, Albert Webson, and Tengyu Ma. There were a lot of memorable moments:</p>
<ul>
<li>The OpenAI party, which was at a nice Hawaiian venue, and a lot of people attended.</li>
<li>Went surfing for the first time at Waikiki beach, and with some coaching from Andrew Kondrich, I managed to catch the first wave I tried.</li>
<li>Hike at Diamond Head park with a lot of people.</li>
<li>Swimming on Sunset Beach with Karina and Thomas. The beach was really nice because it wasn’t crowded at all and the water was so clear.</li>
<li>Sunset cruise where we hung out with Michael and Helen.</li>
</ul>
<p><strong>Seoul</strong>. I went to Seoul to give a talk at the Samsung AI Forum conference.
Seoul is a really amazing city.
I have been long been a fan of Korean food and I enjoyed the meals that we went to. The food was pretty good but not necessarily what my taste buds craved, but the experiences (raw fish meals, korean bbq intestines, cold noodles) were really great.
I even liked Seoul more than Singapore, as the culture was new felt a bit deeper, though Singapore is much easier to navigate as an English or Chinese speaker.
I wish I spoke korean though, since most people would try to speak Korean with me.</p>
<p>It was really fun to hang out with my high school friend Jae, who gave me a taste of what it is like to live in Korea.
We started the day by going to Gyeongbukgung Palace, which was a nice walk even though it was cold.
We then went to the Jimjilbang, which really felt like an authentic korean experience, from body scrubs we got from an old Korean gentleman to the shared soap bars, small towels, and drinks.
After that, we met Jae’s friend Tae and went for a traditional korean BBQ with beef intestines and then watched soccer at a bar with some of Jae’s friends from Brown.</p>
<p>I really enjoyed staying three nights in Signiel Seoul, which is the nicest hotel room I’ve stayed in (sorry MBS).
The room’s design was incredible and the view from the 92nd floor was amazing.
The service is really world class, starting from the people who open the door for you, the check-in being automatic, and the room service.
At Signiel I enjoyed time alone working out at the gym and at their bathhouse with a great view.
The experience inspires me to work hard.</p>
<p>The other splurge I got on this trip was flying first class back to London. The nice parts of that were that I basically had my own private check-in, where a Korean Air employee escorted me across the border control that is usually for diplomats. The first-class lounge was also almost private. The food on the flight was also pretty good, though it was way too much food.</p>
<p><img src="/images/IMG_7160.jpeg" width="30%" />
<img src="/images/IMG_7250.jpeg" width="30%" />
<img src="/images/IMG_7227.jpeg" width="30%" />
Left, Signiel Seoul; middle, lunch with Hyung Won’s family; right, with Jae at Gyeongbukgung Palace.</p>
<p><strong>Korea again, and Singapore</strong>.
I went back to Korea again for a small workshop with around 30 attendees, which was held in Pyeongchang. The hotel was quite old and in a bit of the middle of nowhere like the Shining, I enjoyed it nonetheless. Singapore was fun because I got to hang out with Zou Kai, who I hadn’t seen for a while, and Jerry. We hung out at Marina Bay Sands, played ping pong at Google Singapore, ate Durian in China town, attended the EMNLP party, visited the Google office, and in the end we even got COVID (it was OK in the end).</p>
<p><img src="/images/IMG_7350.jpeg" width="23%" />
<img src="/images/IMG_7368.jpeg" width="23%" />
<img src="/images/IMG_7359.jpeg" width="23%" />
<img src="/images/IMG_7372.jpeg" width="23%" />
Left, Pyeongchang hotel where we had the small conference; left-middle, me and Jerry at the Marina Bay Sands pool; right-middle, me with Jerry and Yi at the mall in Singapore; right, lunch at Google Singapore with Jerry and Kai.</p>
<p>Other than the three big trips, Karina and I also took a few weekend trips.</p>
<ul>
<li>April 29 ish: Karina and I went to Yosemite National Park with Yifei and Anna. The hike was challenging physically, but there was a nice contrast between the hot sun and the melting snow on the top of the mountain. The second day, Karina and I went on a shorter hike and enjoyed some views around x road.</li>
<li>May 27: We went with Andrew and Lauren to redwoods forest.</li>
<li>Jun 11: Karina’s friend Kamille got married in Yosetime, so we went again. We spent the first day working at a starbucks because we both had some work, and the second day we went on a nice hike.</li>
<li>June 18: Karina and I went to a CHAI alignment workshop, which was in the middle of the woods. I was on an AGI panel with Stuart Russell and Max Tegmark. Max asked me some pointed questions, but it was fun anyways.</li>
<li>June 30: We visited my mom for a few days Texas.</li>
<li>Aug 18-23: Karina and I went to New York to help move her stuff to Sf. Karina got us tickets to the strokes concert, which was a lot of fun. We also went to the restaurant Due, which was recommended Jordan Schlansky. Their mussels were really good.</li>
<li>Dec 21 - Jan 2: Karina and I stayed at my Mom’s place in Texas. We had a lot of fun playing soccer together, getting drunk and exchanging christmas presents, watching the new years light show, and using the hot tub.</li>
</ul>
<h1 id="meeting-people">Meeting people</h1>
<p>It was an honor to meet people who I really admire, and they inspire me to aim for greatness.</p>
<ul>
<li>Coffee with Bret Taylor at Sightglass</li>
<li>Drinks with Wang Xing at Grand Hyatt SFO</li>
<li>Meeting with Sam Altman (together with Hyung Won)</li>
<li>Coffee with Qi Lu at sightglass</li>
<li>Meeting Sergey Brin and Jeff Dean at the Google Mountain View office.</li>
</ul>
<p><img src="/images/IMG_7032.jpeg" width="19%" />
<img src="/images/IMG_6939.jpeg" width="19%" />
<img src="/images/IMG_7080.jpeg" width="19%" />
<img src="/images/with_qi_lu.jpeg" width="19%" />
<img src="/images/IMG_7441.jpeg" width="19%" />
Left, hanging out with Albert and Shayne at ICML; middle-left, meeting up with Wang Xing; middle, with Karina at the Strokes concert in New York; middle-right, with Qi Lu; right, Karina.</p>{"name"=>nil, "avatar"=>"taverna.jpeg", "bio"=>nil, "textemail"=>nil, "location"=>nil, "employer"=>nil, "googlescholar"=>nil, "personal"=>nil, "email"=>nil, "uri"=>nil, "bitbucket"=>nil, "codepen"=>nil, "dribbble"=>nil, "flickr"=>nil, "facebook"=>nil, "foursquare"=>nil, "github"=>nil, "google_plus"=>nil, "keybase"=>nil, "instagram"=>nil, "lastfm"=>nil, "linkedin"=>nil, "orcid"=>nil, "pinterest"=>nil, "soundcloud"=>nil, "stackoverflow"=>nil, "steam"=>nil, "tumblr"=>nil, "twitter"=>nil, "vine"=>nil, "weibo"=>nil, "xing"=>nil, "youtube"=>nil, "wikipedia"=>nil}Somehow I didn’t get to writing up a blog post for the past three quarters, so this blog post will be about the whole year.Fall 2022: 情商2022-12-31T00:00:00-08:002022-12-31T00:00:00-08:00https://jasonwei20.github.io/posts/2022/12/blog-post-23<h1 id="travels">Travels</h1>
<p>During the holidays, I enjoyed the opportunity to travel, since it gives me some space to step back and look at the bigger picture, both in terms of career and also personally.</p>
<h2 id="brain-star-summit">Brain STAR summit</h2>
<p>For our team’s annual summit, we went to Santa Monica Beach.
It was fun to hang out with co-workers from other offices (such as Denny and Xuezhi) and I felt that meeting people outside the office in a social setting really us closer.
On the first day, we did some activities in LA office (which was in a converted airplane hangar), and we ended with a sunset cruise in the evening, which had alcohol, great food, and karaoke. I didn’t expect some members of our team to be karaoke and hip-hop dance stars!</p>
<p>On the second day, we had a morning of group activities in another office, and then had a group activity called the Amazing race, which involved going around LA and solving various puzzles. The race involved going around the Venice beach boardwalk, playing at the arcade, riding the bus, Venice beach and Muscle beach. Our team ran the entire way so the first to cross the finish line, but we incurred a penalty because we missed one of the puzzles. Unfortunately this means the team that cross the finished line after us won (darn you Ed!) To end the night, I had a great dinner involving Quoc, Denny, Yifeng, and lots of beer.</p>
<h2 id="thanksgiving">Thanksgiving</h2>
<p>My brother, Xiaoying, and I went home to Texas for thanksgiving. I remember working a bit, and other activities such as working out, playing badminton, watching the world cup round robin matches, eating hotpot, and going to the cowboy town.</p>
<p><img src="/images/IMG_6419.jpeg" width="32%" />
<img src="/images/IMG_6631.jpeg" width="32%" />
<img src="/images/IMG_5423.jpeg" width="32%" /></p>
<p>Left, Brain Reasoning team; middle, just me; right, me with mom and brother in cowboy town.</p>
<h2 id="neurips">NeurIPS</h2>
<p>NeurIPS is the biggest social event of the year for the AI community.
I got to spend a bunch of time with Yi and Hyung Won; we went to a nice dinner the first day with Albert, and also had a random hangout outside with the Colin Raffel crew.
On the second day, I spent almost four hours at the Google booth continuously talking to people, then hung out with Maarten, and then I went to a nice citadel party with Xiangning and some Chinese folk after.
On the third day, I presented the belated CoT poster, gave a talk at Stanford, and then hit the OpenAI party. The party venue had nice music.
On the thursday, I had a bunch of random coffee chats and went up at a Stanford kickback and hit bourbon street at night.
On friday, we met Zoubin and then wandered into a Huggingface party, and ended the night with an “authentic” New Orleans jazz bar (no other conference attendees in sight).
Some people that I felt it was special to see and spend more time with include Andrew Dai, Sam Greydanus, David Dohan, Jacob Austin, Albert Webson, John Nyugen, Andrew Lampinen, Jack Rae, Xavier Garcia, and Charlie Lovering.</p>
<p><img src="/images/IMG_6492.jpeg" width="32%" />
<img src="/images/IMG_6481.jpeg" width="32%" />
<img src="/images/IMG_6507.jpeg" width="32%" /></p>
<p>Left, dinner at a Sushi place; middle, OpenAI party with Flan team; right, lunch with Sam.</p>
<h2 id="portugal">Portugal</h2>
<p>I had a great fun going on vacation to Portugal, visiting Lisbon and Porto.
Lisbon was a city with inexpensive and flavorful food, such as seafood rice and egg tarts.
Ubers were very cheap, so it was easy to get around.
Our family went together with family friends, and it was fun to see them all and to be together.
We played some classic games together, such as Secret Hitler and Truth or Dare.</p>
<p><img src="/images/IMG_6547.jpeg" width="32%" />
<img src="/images/IMG_6586.jpeg" width="32%" />
<img src="/images/IMG_1714.jpeg" width="32%" /></p>
<p>Left, chapel of bones; middle, with Jerry at Porto; right, whole crew at the Christmas Market in Lisbon.</p>
<h1 id="getting-covid">Getting COVID</h1>
<p>After going to Xiaoying’s company holiday party on Dec 9, I got COVID from Dec 12 and recovered by Dec 17. COVID sucks! On tuesday and wednesday, I was hit with high fever and a throat pain that has been commonly described as “a knife going down my throat”, which would wake me up. I am thankful for Xiaoying for inviting me to her house and taking care of me. After this experience, social events for me should require clear justification and I should try to wear a mask whenever I can.</p>
<h1 id="closing">Closing</h1>
<p>I felt that this quarter flew by quite quickly with the traveling and getting COVID.
Overall it was quite fun. As much as I enjoy traveling, I’m looking forward to a bit of heads-down work for the next quarter (no traveling planned).</p>{"name"=>nil, "avatar"=>"taverna.jpeg", "bio"=>nil, "textemail"=>nil, "location"=>nil, "employer"=>nil, "googlescholar"=>nil, "personal"=>nil, "email"=>nil, "uri"=>nil, "bitbucket"=>nil, "codepen"=>nil, "dribbble"=>nil, "flickr"=>nil, "facebook"=>nil, "foursquare"=>nil, "github"=>nil, "google_plus"=>nil, "keybase"=>nil, "instagram"=>nil, "lastfm"=>nil, "linkedin"=>nil, "orcid"=>nil, "pinterest"=>nil, "soundcloud"=>nil, "stackoverflow"=>nil, "steam"=>nil, "tumblr"=>nil, "twitter"=>nil, "vine"=>nil, "weibo"=>nil, "xing"=>nil, "youtube"=>nil, "wikipedia"=>nil}TravelsSummer 2022: Nuance2022-10-01T00:00:00-07:002022-10-01T00:00:00-07:00https://jasonwei20.github.io/posts/2022/10/blog-post-22<p>I’m a bit late to write this point, but I’ll still try to recount my experience from July to September.</p>
<h2 id="work">Work</h2>
<p>This summer at work was especially fun since interns join in the summer and they bring new energy.
I hosted a few interns, Mirac and Shayne, for the first time, and it was a new learning experience for me to not only help them accomplish their goals but also to balance that with respect to my own research interests.
Ruibo also joined Google and it was fun to hang out with him around the office.</p>
<p>I’m glad I found new collaborators who I enjoy working with, especially Yi, Le, and Hyung Won, who share a lot of the same interests as me and work just as hard.
Finding such people to work with I think will help me prevent burnout and continue finding the motivation and environment to produce great work.
We all worked pretty hard to get the Flan paper to come out, and I’m proud of what we put together.</p>
<p>The biggest career lesson for me in the past few months was to learn from Yi, Ed, and Quoc about strategic awareness.
What I mean by that is to know your own goals and incentives within the context of the broader Google organization.
For instance, how does your project align with long-term goals that leadership has? What is the history and context for why a particular decision was made?
I learned about the importance of considering these factors when choosing a project to work on that will not only have big impact but also garner the support of leadership.
(And actually, Ellie told me the importance of garnering support for your work a while ago, but only now do I actually understand what she meant!)</p>
<h2 id="singapore">Singapore</h2>
<p>Singapore is probably one of my favorite places that I’ve traveled to, due to the rich culture and great food. Here is an excerpt that I wrote while I was there:</p>
<p><em>I am writing this excerpt from the rooftop lounge.
If MBS is not a flex of humanity I don’t know what is.
It is at the boundaries of pleasure and luxury that I have experienced.
The towers are grand, and the design—a boat on top with the infinity pool—is inspired.
An experience like this motivates me to reach the edges of my career so that I can have the financial capacity for more such experiences, and to join the part of civilization that frequents those places.</em></p>
<p><em>Hawker centers are unpretentious.
They activate the neurons in my brain that remind me that I am of Asian heritage.
There is no pressure to act a certain way and no one is looking at you.</em></p>
<p>In addition, it was great to meet Yi. He and I have a lot of the similar thoughts on research: how to make the most of research, how to frame papers, etc.</p>
<p>Oh, and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Titdsrt8xs&ab_channel=JasonWei">[here]</a> is some video footage of my time in Singapore:</p>
<p><img src="/images/IMG_5977.png" width="32%" />
<img src="/images/IMG_6089.png" width="32%" />
<img src="/images/IMG_6154.png" width="32%" /></p>
<p>Left, with Yi at La Pau Sat; middle, Marina Bay Sands rooftop pool; right, with Yi at Chijmes.</p>
<h2 id="fun">Fun</h2>
<p>I don’t remember anything specific that I did for fun, though I had a couple of nice dinners, for my birthday, with Xiaoying, and with Ruibo and Yiren.</p>
<p><img src="/images/IMG_5834.png" width="45%" />
<img src="/images/IMG_3457.png" width="45%" /></p>
<p>Left, with Ruibo, Yiren, and Zheer; right, with my brother on my birthday.</p>
<h2 id="conclusions">Conclusions</h2>
<p>Overall, I think a grew a lot this term in terms of work.
In particular, I think I’ve taken on a more complex view of AI research world than before and will try to be more intentional about what I put out into the world.</p>{"name"=>nil, "avatar"=>"taverna.jpeg", "bio"=>nil, "textemail"=>nil, "location"=>nil, "employer"=>nil, "googlescholar"=>nil, "personal"=>nil, "email"=>nil, "uri"=>nil, "bitbucket"=>nil, "codepen"=>nil, "dribbble"=>nil, "flickr"=>nil, "facebook"=>nil, "foursquare"=>nil, "github"=>nil, "google_plus"=>nil, "keybase"=>nil, "instagram"=>nil, "lastfm"=>nil, "linkedin"=>nil, "orcid"=>nil, "pinterest"=>nil, "soundcloud"=>nil, "stackoverflow"=>nil, "steam"=>nil, "tumblr"=>nil, "twitter"=>nil, "vine"=>nil, "weibo"=>nil, "xing"=>nil, "youtube"=>nil, "wikipedia"=>nil}I’m a bit late to write this point, but I’ll still try to recount my experience from July to September.Spring 2022 (摸鱼)2022-07-01T00:00:00-07:002022-07-01T00:00:00-07:00https://jasonwei20.github.io/posts/2022/7/blog-post-21<p>I learned a new Chinese slang phrase recently called 摸鱼, which means “slacking on the job”.
It captures how I feel these months pretty well.
The fact that I’m writing this post after the entire quarter further underscores the unstructured feelings and lack of intentionality these days.</p>
<p>Nonetheless, several fun activities happened this quarter.</p>
<h2 id="work">Work</h2>
<p>Despite the feelings of 摸鱼, some of my biggest work accomplishments so far happened this quarter.</p>
<ul>
<li>Sundar <a href="https://twitter.com/Google/status/1525188695875366912">presented chain-of-thought prompting at Google I/O</a>. This was by far the greatest accomplishment in my career. Just sublime! Never imagined this would happen.</li>
<li>I wrote a nice <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.07682">survey paper</a> on emergent abilities with senior researchers that I really respect.</li>
</ul>
<p>I’m also super excited to have interns in the office and Dartmouth PhD friends in the area for the summer!</p>
<h2 id="travels">Travels</h2>
<p><strong>ACL 2022.</strong> I was fortunate to be able to attend ACL in Dublin from May 21-28. I met Colin Raffel and Clara in person for the first time, as well as other people I had only known virtually. We had a blast at the Guinness Brewery, as well as at the Deepmind party at the Bottle Boy. I then got sick with some viral infection and stayed in the hotel room for the rest of my time at Dublin :(</p>
<p><strong>Visiting my dad in North Carolina.</strong> I visited my dad from June 8-12 at his new home in North Carolina. I am glad that he seems to be doing well. We had fun going to Duke Gardens and to the North Carolina Zoo.</p>
<p><img src="/images/IMG_5604.png" width="23%" />
<img src="/images/IMG_5610.png" width="23%" />
<img src="/images/IMG_5653.png" width="23%" />
<img src="/images/IMG_5029.png" width="23%" /></p>
<p>Left: meal on first-class Aer Lingus flight to Dublin.
Left middle: Guinness Brewery in Dublin.
Right middle: Silverback Gorilla (SBG) in North Carolina Zoo.
Right: my dad, brother, and me at Duke Gardens.</p>
<h2 id="fun">Fun</h2>
<p>Just a list of fun memories:</p>
<ul>
<li>Apr 3: Went sailing with Yifei and Gutow and Gutow’s cousin</li>
<li>Apr 9: Filoli Gardens and Windy Hill Open Space Preserve</li>
<li>Apr 11: Reconnected with Jae when he was here visiting SF!</li>
<li>Apr 19: Attended the Lizzo concert at Shoreline Amphitheatre on Maarten’s last day at Google <a href="https://youtu.be/c7hFLQ6x3oY">[video]</a></li>
<li>Apr 30: Hiked Windy Hill Open Space Preserve with Jeffrey, Jen, and John</li>
<li>May 8: Flew to Texas to surprise my mom for Mother’s Day :)</li>
<li>May 17: Hung out with Hyemin around Stanford</li>
<li>Jun 4: Well Within Spa and Santa Cruz amusement park</li>
<li>Jun 19: Shoreline Park and Lake with Xiaoying</li>
</ul>
<p><img src="/images/IMG_5462.png" width="23%" />
<img src="/images/IMG_4823.png" width="23%" />
<img src="/images/IMG_5596.png" width="23%" />
<img src="/images/IMG_7622.png" width="23%" /></p>
<p>Left: lunch with Jae.
Left middle: surprising my mom on Mother’s Day.
Right middle: with Hyemin at Baylands.
Right: with Xiaoying at Shoreline Park and Lake.</p>
<h2 id="conclusions">Conclusions</h2>
<p>I had nice memories this term, even though my work lacked structure and focus. Notably, I had little to say this time about topics I typically write about: lifting, tennis, reading, dreaming, etc. I am looking forward to improving on this front for next time.</p>
<p><img src="/images/IMG_2315.png" width="32%" />
<img src="/images/IMG_5638.png" width="32%" />
<img src="/images/IMG_5440.png" width="32%" /></p>
<p>Nice pictures that Xiaoying took of me.
Left: Googleplex.
Middle: Santa Cruz boardwalk.
Right: Windy Hills Nature Preserve.</p>{"name"=>nil, "avatar"=>"taverna.jpeg", "bio"=>nil, "textemail"=>nil, "location"=>nil, "employer"=>nil, "googlescholar"=>nil, "personal"=>nil, "email"=>nil, "uri"=>nil, "bitbucket"=>nil, "codepen"=>nil, "dribbble"=>nil, "flickr"=>nil, "facebook"=>nil, "foursquare"=>nil, "github"=>nil, "google_plus"=>nil, "keybase"=>nil, "instagram"=>nil, "lastfm"=>nil, "linkedin"=>nil, "orcid"=>nil, "pinterest"=>nil, "soundcloud"=>nil, "stackoverflow"=>nil, "steam"=>nil, "tumblr"=>nil, "twitter"=>nil, "vine"=>nil, "weibo"=>nil, "xing"=>nil, "youtube"=>nil, "wikipedia"=>nil}I learned a new Chinese slang phrase recently called 摸鱼, which means “slacking on the job”. It captures how I feel these months pretty well. The fact that I’m writing this post after the entire quarter further underscores the unstructured feelings and lack of intentionality these days.Winter 20222022-04-01T00:00:00-07:002022-04-01T00:00:00-07:00https://jasonwei20.github.io/posts/2022/4/blog-post-20<p>This quarter was filled with travels and family time.</p>
<h2 id="wacv">WACV</h2>
<p>From January 3-9, I traveled to Hawaii for WACV.
I wanted to get a sense of what was exciting in computer vision.
Most of the papers in the conference focused on specific applications of computer vision (which tend to be in the physical world).
I got the sense that most people in CV did not think about language or AGI, which felt a bit like a failure to think long-term.
I also got the feeling that the CV field is not as motivated by human perception as it should be, as I was not aware of any work that uses human perception as a motivation for a new CV models.
I enjoyed Kristen Grauman’s Keynote talk on how CV techniques can be used to analyze fashion trends (kinda like social science).</p>
<p>At the conference I met another Googler Maryam and a Microsoft researcher Muhamed, and we and some Boston University and UC Berkeley students together went to visit some tourist attractions.
We went to Akaka Falls, Rainbow Falls, Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, and downtown Kona.
The unforgettable moment, however, was <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynR_Nlv7V9c">a challenging hike up a scenic cliff</a> near Kohala Mountain Road at sunset.
The view was as sublime as any landscape that I had seen in Iceland.
Muhamed was also a fascinating being to meet, and it was eye-opening to hear about his experiences.</p>
<p><img src="/images/IMG_5158.jpeg" width="32%" />
<img src="/images/IMG_5201.jpeg" width="32%" />
<img src="/images/IMG_5224.jpeg" width="32%" /></p>
<p>Left: Rainbow Falls. Middle: scenic cliff near Kohala Mountain Road. Right: group picture at Hawaii Volcanoes National Park.</p>
<h2 id="family">Family</h2>
<p>In february, I was so grateful to spend some time back in Texas with my family.
My grandpa and grandma are still in good health, and spending time with them means the world to me.
I feel like the additional maturity I have gained since the last time I saw them allowed me to connect with them and appreciate them on a deeper level.
I enjoyed playing chess with them, and even seeing <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9aTwqfbJlA">my grandpa ride a bike</a>.</p>
<h2 id="beibei">Beibei</h2>
<p>Our family’s cat, Beibei (my brother calls him Brian), passed away in late March, after being with us for more than ten years. He became more outgoing and sociable throughout the years, and our whole family loved him. I will miss him dearly.</p>
<p><img src="/images/IMG_5234.jpeg" width="23%" />
<img src="/images/IMG_5244.jpeg" width="23%" />
<img src="/images/IMG_0169.jpeg" width="23%" />
<img src="/images/IMG_5267.jpeg" width="23%" /></p>
<p>Left: selfie with my Grandma and Grandpa. Middle left: me and my Grandma. Middle right: riding a mule. Right: Bei-bei destroys my Chinese chess game with my mom.</p>
<h2 id="travels">Travels</h2>
<p>I was thinking about doing a PhD and so I visited the programs that I had got into to get a better feel of what is out there.</p>
<p><strong>Seattle / University of Washington.</strong> I had wanted to go to UW for a long time, and Luke is my dream advisor (he is so nice, and is one of the best NLP researchers in the past five years IMO). Everyone at UW seemed collaborative and friendly, and I think I would learn a lot by joining Luke’s group. Seattle was absolutely beautiful when it wasn’t rain, but I’m a bit hesitant on living there—I don’t know how I would adapt to the city life and the cold weather.</p>
<p><strong>Princeton.</strong> Princeton has been a dream school of mine for a while. Visiting made me nostalgic of Dartmouth, as I loved the Ivy feel and close-knit culture. As my friend Maxine says, Princeton is basically Dartmouth on steroids: the history is older; the people are richer; the architecture is fancier. It was really cool to meet Danqi in person, and I could tell the students in her group were all close to each other.</p>
<p><img src="/images/IMG_5295.png" width="23%" />
<img src="/images/IMG_5309.png" width="23%" />
<img src="/images/IMG_5301.png" width="23%" />
<img src="/images/IMG_5313.png" width="23%" /></p>
<p>Left: visiting my cousin Michael and his fiance in Seattle. Left middle: UW campus. Right middle: Gas Works Park with some friends. Right: Princeton.</p>
<p><strong>London / Cambridge.</strong> I stayed with my friend and former boss Kai in London. It was absolutely a pleasure to meet the people in his circle and see his life in London. I think it’d be really cool to be part of his start-up, and I got a better understanding of what a luxurious lifestyle means. I also took the train to Cambridge, which was a pretty cool town to walk through, although I didn’t have enough time to really walk through the colleges.</p>
<p><strong>Zurich / ETH.</strong> Zurich is one of the nicest cities I’ve been to, and reminds me a lot of Copenhagen. It felt like a really nice society to live in: the streets are clean, the city is very organized, the people are well-groomed and well-dressed. I feel willing to move to Zurich—city life and the cold weather were small factors compared to the adventure offered by spending half a decade in one of the most iconic European cities. Who could turn down such an adventure? Ryan is also really tall…</p>
<p><img src="/images/IMG_5320.png" width="23%" />
<img src="/images/IMG_5327.png" width="23%" />
<img src="/images/IMG_5342.png" width="23%" />
<img src="/images/IMG_5344.png" width="23%" /></p>
<p>Left: London eye. Left middle: Seurat painting. Right middle: Zurich opera house. Right: the Limmat River.</p>
<h2 id="reading">Reading</h2>
<p><strong><em>Stories of the Sahara</em> by Sanmao.</strong>
Stories of the Sahara is about a Chinese woman’s adventures living in the Sahara desert with her Spanish husband.
I never really understood why Sanmao chose to move to the Sahara, but reading about her life was fascinating.
My favorite story is the one where Jose gets stuck in quicksand when the sun is about to set.
Some Arab travelers pass by, and instead of helping Sanmao rescue Jose they try to capture her. She evades the travelers and goes back to rescue Jose by using the wheels and backseat of her car to form a path into the quicksand and tying her clothes together to form a rope.</p>
<p><strong><em>Howard Stern comes again</em> by Howard Stern.</strong>
Reading this book gave some unique insight into the lives of celebrities.
The first takeaway is with respect to honesty: Howard is so up-front about personal problems he has and mistakes that he’s made in the past.
The second takeaway is how hard celebrities work. Media gives the impression that celebrities live these idealistic lives where they just pursue their great passion and go to parties, but the reality is that most celebrities work so hard that they don’t have time to hang out, etc. One example is Conan, who lives and breathes comedy for more than a decade. Of course there is Howard himself, who never misses a day of work, and learns everything possible about someone before interviewing them.</p>{"name"=>nil, "avatar"=>"taverna.jpeg", "bio"=>nil, "textemail"=>nil, "location"=>nil, "employer"=>nil, "googlescholar"=>nil, "personal"=>nil, "email"=>nil, "uri"=>nil, "bitbucket"=>nil, "codepen"=>nil, "dribbble"=>nil, "flickr"=>nil, "facebook"=>nil, "foursquare"=>nil, "github"=>nil, "google_plus"=>nil, "keybase"=>nil, "instagram"=>nil, "lastfm"=>nil, "linkedin"=>nil, "orcid"=>nil, "pinterest"=>nil, "soundcloud"=>nil, "stackoverflow"=>nil, "steam"=>nil, "tumblr"=>nil, "twitter"=>nil, "vine"=>nil, "weibo"=>nil, "xing"=>nil, "youtube"=>nil, "wikipedia"=>nil}This quarter was filled with travels and family time.Fall 2021: Travels and New Beginnings2021-12-31T00:00:00-08:002021-12-31T00:00:00-08:00https://jasonwei20.github.io/posts/2021/12/blog-post-19<p>This quarter was pretty eventful with my move to mountain view, a bit of traveling for EMNLP, and transitioning to a permanent role at Google.</p>
<h2 id="personal">Personal</h2>
<p>I finally moved to Mountain View in late October. My family drove one of our cars over from Plano, and we and my brother spent a couple of days together. I was happy to show my mom around the Google campus and show her what my life would be like.</p>
<p>Before moving to Mountain View, I went with my Mom to the Texas state fair in Dallas. It was a lot of fun to spend time with her walking around and looking at the attractions. We went on a nice (slow) ride that brought us a couple hundred feet into the air for great views of Dallas.</p>
<p><img src="/images/texas_fair_bigtex.jpeg" width="32%" />
<img src="/images/texas_fair_food.jpeg" width="32%" />
<img src="/images/texas_fair_pig.jpeg" width="32%" />
Left, Big Tex; middle, the huge turkey legs they served; right, one of the pigs at the fair.</p>
<h2 id="emnlp">EMNLP</h2>
<p>It was great to finally travel to attend EMNLP 2021 this year at the Barcelo Bavaro resort in Punta Cana (Dominican Republic).
Though only a portion of the typical number of conference attendees came, I had fun meeting folks from NYU, Hopkins, and Ellie’s lab.
It was a special pleasure to catch up with Soroush as well.</p>
<p>The resort had some nice amenities and was a good spot for a conference.
It was very nice that food and booze were included (buffets were OK, one a la carte restaurant Chez Gourmet was amazing, though), and each room had its personal jacuzzi.
The beach and pool were also great.
I wish I spoke better Spanish to communicate with the staff.</p>
<p>The traveling felt luxurious too, as I had my first first-class flight, something my parents have never had a chance to experience.
With my Amex platinum card, I also experienced the nicer airport lounges for the first time (I had only been to United before).</p>
<p>One of the lounges in the Punta Cana airport had an infinity pool (interesting seeing Sam Bowman there).</p>
<p><img src="/images/emnlp2021_resort.jpeg" width="48%" />
<img src="/images/emnlp2021lunch.png" width="48%" />
Left, the Barcelo Barvaro Resort; right, a lunch with some Googlers and some grad students.</p>
<h2 id="new-york-city">New York City</h2>
<p>It is immediately obvious that New York City stands in stark contrast with Mountain View.
In many ways, New York is an exciting place bustling with well-dressed women, artsy buildings, and some of the oldest American culture. It is truly the most iconic city in the world.
The New York Google office is appropriately stylish, and I enjoyed meeting my colleagues, especially Hyung Won and Dan.
In other ways, Mountain View is a nicer place to live—warmer weather, no noisy streets, not as much rain, etc.</p>
<p><img src="/images/punta_cana_airport.jpeg" width="48%" />
<img src="/images/aires_ny.jpeg" width="48%" />
Left, the infinity pool at Punta Cana airport; right, an dinner with AI residents.</p>
<h2 id="fitness">Fitness</h2>
<p><strong>Weightlifting.</strong>
With the bit of traveling that I was doing, I wasn’t as committed as I wanted to be about weightlifting. But I got my bench up to 165 for 5x5 again.</p>
<p><strong>Tennis.</strong>
I almost didn’t play tennis at all, except for twice with some other Googlers.</p>
<h2 id="reading">Reading</h2>
<h3 id="peak-secrets-from-the-new-science-of-expertise-by-anders-ericsson-and-robert-pool"><em>Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise</em> by Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool</h3>
<p>The ideas discuss in this book will be life-changing if you can implement them correctly. An overarching observation is that experts have better mental representations than novices do. So the question is how to develop these better mental representations, where more information is processed and instinctively analyzed.</p>
<p>The first concept in the book is <em>purposeful practice</em>, which involves (1) having a specific goal, (2) focus, (3) feedback, (4) staying just outside one’s comfort zone, and (5) working through temporary plateaus with new techniques and approaches. To be honest, most of the stuff I do, whether it’s tennis, or programming, doesn’t even meet half the criteria for this bar! Imagine what I’m leaving on the table…</p>
<p>Taking purposeful practice even further, <em>deliberate practice</em> further requires both (1) being done in a well-established field, and (2) an experienced coach actively involved in tailoring practice and learning techniques. Unfortunately, being an engineer doesn’t qualify, because there isn’t accumulated knowledge about deliberate practice, and there is no objective criteria for superior performance.</p>
<p>Luckily, Ericsson and Pool have suggestions for when deliberate practice is not possible. They suggest the following steps:</p>
<ul>
<li>Identify the expert performers</li>
<li>Figure out what they do that makes them so good</li>
<li>Figure out training techniques that allow you to do it, too.</li>
</ul>
<p>For moving past plateaus, figure out exactly what is holding you back. Which mistakes are you making and when? Push yourself well outside of your comfort zone and see what breaks down first.</p>
<p>A couple of very motivating anecdotes.
Ben Franklin, when trying to learn to be a good writer, took examples of good writing, distilled them into outlines, and then tried to reproduce the original piece.
Champion swimmers, instead of daydreaming during the movement, pay attention to every detail of performance, “each one done correctly, time and again, until excellence in each detail becomes a firmly ingrained habit”. I should do this for lifting.</p>
<h3 id="in-order-to-live-a-north-korean-girls-journey-to-freedom-by-yeonmi-park"><em>In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl’s Journey to Freedom</em> by Yeonmi Park</h3>
<p>Park’s tells an eye-opening story about how challenging some humans in this world have it.
Although I do not have the energy to do a comprehensive write-up at the moment, I would reading this book again to myself.
She gave me new insight into just how different human experience can be in terms of starvation and sex slavery.
A particularly interesting idea that she also brought up was that the North Korean people were also oppressed linguistically, as they had no words for representing or communicating experience that we take for granted in the modern world (e.g., “love”, “therapy”).</p>
<h2 id="who-are-my-heroes">Who are my heroes?</h2>
<p>The usual suspects:</p>
<ul>
<li>Sam Harris</li>
<li>Conan</li>
<li>Bald and bankrupt</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="closing">Closing</h2>
<p>In the final days of the year, I traveled home to spend time with family. My family friend Eric and his family came by to visit, and I had a nice time in our backyard bathtub watching The Christmas Chronicles with Albert. I also started getting into the Waking Up App with Sam Harris.</p>
<h2 id="songs">Songs</h2>
<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrazTo8xVds">Impoding the mirage</a> by The Killers is soulful.</p>{"name"=>nil, "avatar"=>"taverna.jpeg", "bio"=>nil, "textemail"=>nil, "location"=>nil, "employer"=>nil, "googlescholar"=>nil, "personal"=>nil, "email"=>nil, "uri"=>nil, "bitbucket"=>nil, "codepen"=>nil, "dribbble"=>nil, "flickr"=>nil, "facebook"=>nil, "foursquare"=>nil, "github"=>nil, "google_plus"=>nil, "keybase"=>nil, "instagram"=>nil, "lastfm"=>nil, "linkedin"=>nil, "orcid"=>nil, "pinterest"=>nil, "soundcloud"=>nil, "stackoverflow"=>nil, "steam"=>nil, "tumblr"=>nil, "twitter"=>nil, "vine"=>nil, "weibo"=>nil, "xing"=>nil, "youtube"=>nil, "wikipedia"=>nil}This quarter was pretty eventful with my move to mountain view, a bit of traveling for EMNLP, and transitioning to a permanent role at Google.Summer 20212021-10-01T00:00:00-07:002021-10-01T00:00:00-07:00https://jasonwei20.github.io/posts/2021/10/blog-post-18<h2 id="research">Research</h2>
<p>I won’t discuss research in detail here, but I did spend a good amount of heads-down time at my computer. The <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.01652">FLAN</a> project has been the biggest work I’ve been a part of.</p>
<h2 id="fitness">Fitness</h2>
<p><strong>Weightlifting.</strong>
I did not improve much on this end, as my bench pretty much stayed at 155 for 5x5 for the entire 3 months. At the time of writing this (Oct 14), I can’t think of any excuses for why. I think one reason is that I did not eat as well.</p>
<p><strong>Tennis.</strong>
I also did not get to play tennis as much as I wanted, though the few times I did play I felt like I was hitting well.
Especially when Ian was there, he would give me good tips like stepping into the court and hitting through the ball.
I even beat Abhishek in a baseline game to 11 once, maybe one of the highlights of my tennis career.</p>
<h2 id="personal">Personal</h2>
<p>In September, our family moved from Virginia to a house that my mom bought in Plano, Texas.
It will definitely be a transition period for our family, as my brother will also start college, and I think it’s a good opportunity to gain new perspective on the important things in life.
So far, the house in Plano is a much more appropriate size, and it’s relatively modern. The location is great, as we can drive to a grocery store in 3-4 minutes, and probably more than a hundred restaurants within ten minutes. Before, it took 5 minutes just to drive out of our neighborhood!</p>
<h2 id="us-open">US Open</h2>
<p>Seeing world class tennis players play in person was a significant experience for me.
On the first day for R1, John, Allen, and I got front row (corner) seats to see Nick Kyrgios play Roberto Bautista Agut.
In person, Kyrgios actually hits a very smooth backhand and a very hard forehand.
RBA somehow got everything back.
It was amusing that Kyrgios kept refusing to put his towel back in the towel holder and opted to throw it onto the floor instead.
Overall, however, the match was a bit disappointing, as Kyrgios kept missing his first serves and lost in three sets.
Before that match, we also saw Aryna Sabalenka play Nina Stojanovic, which was a great match (I developed a small crush on Stojanovic).</p>
<p>The next weekend, I made a day trip with Abhishek and Ash to watch Djokovic play Nishikori for R3.
We got second ring seats in Ashe stadium for around $400, which weren’t that close but were still pretty good.
Watching Djokovic play was simply inspirational.
He is basically a god at the sport and has mastered every physical and mental component of the game.
Even though he lost the first set, he did not seem bothered with a short-term loss and knew that he was still going to win.
Djokovic’s backhand and strokes on the run are pure beauty.
Watching the best tennis player in the world play has inspired me in terms of isolating each component of a craft (whether tennis or research) and mastering them all.
Moreover, other people may have certain strengths, but you should work harder than them and develop even stronger weapons (for Djokovic, this is movement, return, and backhand).</p>
<p>My favorite part was really the practice sessions, though.
I basically stood at the fence and saw a lot of good players practice.
Naomi Osaka hits very heavy shots.
Medvedev is tall and hits powerful, low, flat strokes.
Simona Halep radiates intensity and focus (she might have made eye contact with me while picking up a ball).
Rublev ruthlessly crushes every ball.
I also saw Felix Auger-Aliassime, Gael Monfils, Shapovalov, Schwartzman, and Taylor Fritz.
During Dimitrov’s R1 game, I sat one seat away from his girlfriend and his coach.</p>
<p>Finally, great revelations sometimes spawn at the most banal moments, literally.
To enter the US Open, John and I waited for more than an hour in a “no bags” line.
The line next to us, for people with bags, was much longer.
However, because there were ten metal detectors in that queue and only two metal detectors in our queue, the people in that line got in much faster.
And so the lesson is that absolute position matters way less than velocity.
This is broadly applicable.
For example, it matters less how good I am at tennis today than how fast I am improving; it matters less how good of a researcher I am today than how much each paper I write is better than the previous one.</p>
<p><img src="/images/21_shirley.jpeg" width="48%" />
<img src="/images/21_us_open.jpeg" width="48%" />
Left: Shirley, Eric, Me, and June at Shirley’s birthday party. Right: Allen, Me, and Sully at Armstrong stadium for the Sabalenka-Stojanovic match.</p>
<p>All footage I recorded from the US Open is <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_D8CfoSkFE">[here]</a>.</p>
<h2 id="washington-dc">Washington, DC</h2>
<p>I made a nice trip with family to Washington DC.
We went to the Museum of American History, where my brother and I particularly enjoyed the Military History exhibit.
Then, I walked around from the national mall to the lincoln memorial.
Passing the WWII memorial and to the Lincoln memorial along the reflection pool, I thought about the sacrifices that those before us made so that I could have freedom in my daily moments.
This experience underscored how fortunate I am to have this life, and the reason why present also means gift.
So many before us gave their lives so that we could have the freedom and opportunities in ours—it would be disrepectful to waste their sacrifice by watching youtube all day.
It is sad to leave such a beautiful city that I grew up near but hadn’t visited much.</p>
<p>I then went back a couple of days later to visit the Museums of African American History and Natural History.
The Museum of African American History is a stunning experience that helps bring light to the challenges overcome by Blacks in America. Particularly touching was the the first exhibit, which documented the lives of free and enslaved Blacks from 1400 to the American Civil War, who were treated basically as commodities.
I think as we gain a better understanding of neuroscience and human consciousness in the future, the abhorrence of slavery will be even more recognized.
I also noticed that as an adult, I was much more open to learning about history, which I now see as a study of the most significant events in human well-being, than when I was forced to learn such things in high school.</p>
<p>I also saw the Museum of Natural History briefly, though it seemed like it’s mostly for kids. I enjoyed the exhibit on “Human Origins”, though.</p>
<video src="/images/21_bench_sully.mov" width="49%" autoplay="" loop="" controls="" muted=""></video>
<video src="/images/21_reflection_pool.mov" width="49%" autoplay="" loop="" controls="" muted=""></video>
<h2 id="reading">Reading</h2>
<h3 id="lying-by-sam-harris"><em>Lying</em> by Sam Harris</h3>
<p>This essay is a short and sweet argument against lying, especially white lies.
Lying means intentionally misleading someone when they expect the truth.
The summary of the argument is that (barring extreme situations) telling the truth may cause to uncomfort in the short term, but leads to better outcomes in the long run.</p>
<p>These are the two arguments I found most compelling.</p>
<p><strong>Honesty as a filter.</strong>
First, honesty acts as a filter for the people around you.
For instance, if a friend asked me to read a manuscript they wrote and I thought it was bad, I might be compelled to lie and say that it’s good so I don’t hurt their feelings or explain why.
But upon a closer analysis, it becomes obvious that honesty actually leads to a better outcome.
Let’s say my friend wanted uninhibited feedback on their manuscript.
By telling them what I thought wasn’t great about their work (and this can be done in a nice way!), I’ve potentially saved them from future rejections or receiving the same criticism from their advisor.
Moreover, next time they send me a manuscript and I say I do like it, they know that it’s worth something.
On the other hand, if they are offended that I didn’t like their paper, then they won’t interact with me further, which is actually a good thing because I do not want to interact professionally with people like that.</p>
<p><strong>Truth as a mirror.</strong>
The second reason to always tell the truth is that it holds a mirror in front of yourself.
Let’s say that you are canceling a date with a girl because you think she’s too fat.
Lying and saying that your car broke is easy enough, and you wouldn’t think about it any further.
But if you are always honest, you have to comfront the honest truth about yourself, which is, what kind of person are you to not go on the date just because the girl was fat?</p>
<p>At this point, enough people who I admire from various walks of life (Mark Manson, Randy Pausch) have preached the value of honesty that this is a no-brainer for me.</p>
<h2 id="who-are-my-heroes">Who are my heroes?</h2>
<p>The usual suspects:</p>
<ul>
<li>Sam Harris</li>
<li>Conan</li>
<li>Bald and bankrupt</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="human-programming">Human Programming</h2>
<p>One interesting thing that I’ve been thinking about is how one could “program” oneself in the spirit of self-improvement.
From a first-principles standpoint, the person you currently are is a function of the sum of your past experiences.
This is analogous to a neural network being a function of the data it is trained on.</p>
<p>As a concrete example, one who reads the work of great writers every day is likely to adopt the style and thought processes of those writers, leading him to produce high quality writing.
Conversely, someone whose friends are into alcoholism are more likely to value such activities.</p>
<p>The action item for me comes from the realization that I consume multiple hours of video every day.
Some video is obviously much higher quality that other video.
For instance, spending a year listening to Sam Harris podcasts will likely be a better influence than watching all the Kali muscle videos on youtube.
What if I limited my experience consumption to the content most likely to have a positive influence?</p>
<p>In this vein, here is a list of what I consider positive influences—specifically, how each person can rub off on me positively.</p>
<ul>
<li>TV/Movies
<ul>
<li><strong>Sherlock</strong> (and The Imitation Game): logic, critical thinking, intelligence, nuance</li>
<li><strong>Killing Eve</strong>: humor, smoothness, European culture</li>
<li><strong>Counterpart</strong>: thinking big, being on the world stage</li>
<li><strong>The Great Gatsby Movies</strong>: live an exciting life, old school America</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>Public figures
<ul>
<li><strong>Elon Musk</strong>: first-principles thinking, long-term thinking, dreaming big</li>
<li><strong>Sam Harris</strong>: consciousness, death, honesty</li>
<li><strong>Conan</strong>: humor, high-energy, wit, intelligence, sociability, quick-thinking</li>
<li><strong>Lady Gaga</strong>: creativity, love</li>
<li><strong>David Goggins</strong>: motivation, hard work, taking things to the extreme</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>Youtube:
<ul>
<li><strong>Bald and Bankrupt</strong>: open-mindedness, worldliness</li>
<li><strong>Thomas Afu</strong>: Chinese and European culture, open-mindedness</li>
<li><strong>Andrew Kirby</strong>: productivity, thinking in terms of time</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>Writers:
<ul>
<li><strong>Steven King</strong>: beautiful writing, high standard of prose, dedication to one’s craft</li>
<li><strong>Cal Newport</strong>: productivity, meta-career skills</li>
<li><strong>Mark Manson</strong>: being a desirable person</li>
<li><strong>Anchee Min</strong>: vulnerability, honesty</li>
<li><strong>Brendan Burchard</strong>: the lifestyle described in <em>High Performance Habits</em></li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>Academics:
<ul>
<li><strong>Randy Pausch</strong>: time, meta-habits</li>
<li><strong>Henry Lee Smith</strong>: old-school thinking, genuine passion for linguistics</li>
<li><strong>Ryan Cotterell</strong>: linguistics, creativity, “thinking like a scientist”, love of learning</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="closing">Closing</h2>
<p>Overall, it was a term where I put in a lot of hours into work.</p>
<h2 id="songs">Songs</h2>
<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrazTo8xVds">Impoding the mirage</a> by The Killers is soulful.</p>{"name"=>nil, "avatar"=>"taverna.jpeg", "bio"=>nil, "textemail"=>nil, "location"=>nil, "employer"=>nil, "googlescholar"=>nil, "personal"=>nil, "email"=>nil, "uri"=>nil, "bitbucket"=>nil, "codepen"=>nil, "dribbble"=>nil, "flickr"=>nil, "facebook"=>nil, "foursquare"=>nil, "github"=>nil, "google_plus"=>nil, "keybase"=>nil, "instagram"=>nil, "lastfm"=>nil, "linkedin"=>nil, "orcid"=>nil, "pinterest"=>nil, "soundcloud"=>nil, "stackoverflow"=>nil, "steam"=>nil, "tumblr"=>nil, "twitter"=>nil, "vine"=>nil, "weibo"=>nil, "xing"=>nil, "youtube"=>nil, "wikipedia"=>nil}Research I won’t discuss research in detail here, but I did spend a good amount of heads-down time at my computer. The FLAN project has been the biggest work I’ve been a part of.Spring 20212021-07-01T00:00:00-07:002021-07-01T00:00:00-07:00https://jasonwei20.github.io/posts/2021/7/blog-post-17<p>This quarter was tough in terms of work but I had to do it.
Starting May 2, for five weeks I spent as much time as I could working, only playing tennis three times.
One week, I spent 47 hours on coding/experiments (this is a lot of time for me).</p>
<h2 id="research">Research</h2>
<p>With a stroke of luck, I had two papers accepted to ACL, and the other two accepted to findings.
Ruibo’s MARS paper was pretty good, and looks like the data augmentation survey paper is getting a <a href="https://mobile.twitter.com/omarsar0/status/1391729605766262785">bit</a> of attention.</p>
<h2 id="fitness">Fitness</h2>
<p><strong>Weightlifting.</strong>
Not playing tennis as much gave me additional mental bandwidth to focus a bit more on weightlifting. My pull ups are getting pretty strong, hitting 65lbs for a 5x5 and doing 90lbs for a set of 3 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pE2zvytYpmE">[video]</a>.</p>
<p><strong>Tennis.</strong>
Not playing for a bit, I definitely feel less in shape and I’m not able to feel the ball as well as before.
The couple of times I played in June, I got tired quickly and my arm was sore for days after.
But I did get a nice <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQU5rZ3Ha8A">video</a> of me playing against Ash.</p>
<h2 id="personal">Personal</h2>
<p><strong>Learning Danish.</strong> Sadly, I decided to give up my Duolingo streak on Danish. Surprisingly, I felt that relieving myself from a daily activity of only five minutes actually translated to much more freedom than just five minutes.</p>
<p><strong>Making videos.</strong>
Prahlad, Ash, Abhishek, and I went to Shenandoah National Park / Big Meadows in April and Luray Caverns in early May. I <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWRuuu-VM3s">raced</a> Abhishek.</p>
<p><strong>Selling our childhood home.</strong>
We made the decision to put our childhood home <a href="https://youriguide.com/12905_rose_grove_drive_herndon_va/">for sale</a>. We sold it for 1.699M.
In September, I will move to New York and my brother will move to Palo Alto, and our house is too big for just my mom to live in.
My mom is a true superhero, as she prepared the house for sale (non-trivial!) all while having two jobs and cooking for my brother and I.
Some house tasks that needed to be done included painting the walls, throwing away our old furniture and old clothes (there’s a lot of that), selling stuff, and scrubing the bathrooms.
I helped out whenever I could, especially with tasks that required moving furniture.</p>
<p>My grandparents visited, but I was too busy with EMNLP and other work to give them the time that they deserved. I feel bad about this.</p>
<p><img src="/images/21_family.jpeg" width="48%" />
<img src="/images/21_house.jpeg" width="48%" /></p>
<h2 id="reading">Reading</h2>
<h3 id="the-cooked-seed-by-anchee-min"><em>The Cooked Seed</em> by Anchee Min</h3>
<p>After re-reading Anchee Min’s <em>Red Azalea</em>, I decided to read her autobiographic sequel, which is about her life moving to America. Anchee Min again demonstrates complete vulnerability, and gave color to a several ideas that I found touching.</p>
<ul>
<li>The first is about hard work—Anchee worked five jobs at once and made so many sacrifices, both physically and mentally, to learn to speak English and survive in America. My current challenges pale in comparison. I believe there is much to be learned from the immigrant work ethic, especially in terms of dedication and finding the necessity to succeed.</li>
<li>Second, I resonated slightly with the East meets West culture clash, as Anchee clarified many of the historic underpinnings of many habits that I had seen in my family growing up. Moreover, Anchee brought to light that some things that I have long taken for granted—healthcare, freedom of speech, believing that one could make it in life—these were not so readily available during China’s cultural revolution.</li>
<li>Finally, through Anchee’s personal description of raising Lauryann, I saw many characteristics of sacrifies that my mom made to give me and my brother the upbringing that we had (though my mom was more lenient than Anchee). I felt a thorough admiration for the challenges one undertakes in being a parent.</li>
</ul>
<h3 id="conscious-a-brief-guide-to-the-fundamental-mystery-of-the-mind-by-annaka-harris"><em>Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind</em> by Annaka Harris</h3>
<p>This book was indeed brief, and a bit disappointingly so. The topic, however, is relevant and thought-provoking. What is consciousness? Harris says that an organism is conscious if it is “like something” to be that organism. To me, this definition is not satisfying. The book also provided a reasonable case for panpsychism, which posits that all matter is conscious, to varying degrees.</p>
<p>This book did spark me to consider whether we could make a machine consicous. Would an algorithm that could, at any given time, describe in natural language what it felt like to be it, be conscious? It would be cool to build something like this.</p>
<h2 id="who-are-my-heroes">Who are my heroes?</h2>
<ul>
<li>I have pretty much watched all Conan remotes, and I’ve watched a lot of his videos multiple times.</li>
<li>I watched the counterpart TV show. It is really good, and I am obsessed with Christiane Paul, who plays Mira.</li>
<li>I’ve also watched a couple of Famke Janssen movies/shows.</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="closing">Closing</h2>
<p>It was a tough three months, and I hunkered down on the work that had to be done. In terms of research, I think I grew tremendously, (“moonshots only!”) and I feel so fortunate to be in a sitation where I can focus on research without other parts of my personal life consuming my time and energy.</p>
<h2 id="songs">Songs</h2>
<ul>
<li>The new <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4yn98ht1ViU&ab_channel=rivertine">The Strokes album</a> is great.</li>
<li>Cigarettes after sex is great.</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="youtubers">Youtubers</h2>
<ul>
<li>bald and bankrupt, as always.</li>
</ul>{"name"=>nil, "avatar"=>"taverna.jpeg", "bio"=>nil, "textemail"=>nil, "location"=>nil, "employer"=>nil, "googlescholar"=>nil, "personal"=>nil, "email"=>nil, "uri"=>nil, "bitbucket"=>nil, "codepen"=>nil, "dribbble"=>nil, "flickr"=>nil, "facebook"=>nil, "foursquare"=>nil, "github"=>nil, "google_plus"=>nil, "keybase"=>nil, "instagram"=>nil, "lastfm"=>nil, "linkedin"=>nil, "orcid"=>nil, "pinterest"=>nil, "soundcloud"=>nil, "stackoverflow"=>nil, "steam"=>nil, "tumblr"=>nil, "twitter"=>nil, "vine"=>nil, "weibo"=>nil, "xing"=>nil, "youtube"=>nil, "wikipedia"=>nil}This quarter was tough in terms of work but I had to do it. Starting May 2, for five weeks I spent as much time as I could working, only playing tennis three times. One week, I spent 47 hours on coding/experiments (this is a lot of time for me).Winter 20212021-04-01T00:00:00-07:002021-04-01T00:00:00-07:00https://jasonwei20.github.io/posts/2021/4/blog-post-16<p>This past term at home passed by fast. I worked, but it feels like I didn’t make too much progress.</p>
<h2 id="research">Research</h2>
<p>Alas, all of my pre-google submissions were accepted.
My paper on multi-task view text data augmentation was accepted to EACL, and my therapy conversations and few-shot text classification papers were accepted to NAACL.
Having these papers accepted was a good start to my publication record and gave me some more confidence for submitting papers, especially after rejections from COLING and AACL.</p>
<h2 id="applying-to-phd-programs">Applying to PhD Programs</h2>
<p>I applied to PhD programs again, with low expectations. My low expectations were justified: I got rejected from Stanford, MIT, and UW. I was very excited, however, to have been accepted to ETHZ with Ryan Cotterell. I worked with Ryan on a psycholingistics project. He is very creative (approriately, Albert Einsten, who went to ETHZ, said “true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination”), and I would love to continue working with him.</p>
<h2 id="fitness">Fitness</h2>
<p><strong>Weightlifting.</strong>
I started working on shoulders and triceps a bit in early january, but then one day I started getting a worrysome clicking sensation in my left shoulder, which I had had before. This stopped my progress for about a month, bringing me down from my 5x5 bench press from 170 lbs to 145 lbs.
I had a bad effect on my fitness thereafter, for which I did not really improve my bench press. In some highlights, however, I did do a murph in less than 55 minutes, and separately also did 250 pull ups in one hour with Abhishek.</p>
<p><strong>Tennis.</strong>
The one thing that I changed about tennis is that I tried to engage in <em>deliberate practice</em> by doing mostly drills during practice sessions. Some of the drills that I did included:</p>
<ul>
<li>Cross court on “yellow” balls, down the line on “green.”</li>
<li>Returner of feed must hit two forehands in a row.</li>
<li>99 bananas: 5 points for winners and points won at net, 10 for overheads. Minus 5 points for every shot hit into the net. Sounds stupid but teaches you not to hit it short.
I also tried to work on volleys and serves every practice.</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="personal">Personal</h2>
<p><strong>Learning Danish.</strong> I kept up my Duolingo streak (161 days!). But, the lessons are getting hard, and I often have to look at the translations during the exercises.</p>
<p><strong>Making videos.</strong> I recorded some videos of me playing tennis, such as this <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RQkIyhvvBY&list=PLde1z_HYAVJxIxzxx49lZQEknoGkbqyyK&index=3&t=557s&ab_channel=JasonWei">warm-up session</a> and this <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbrArNvGD9Y&list=PLde1z_HYAVJxIxzxx49lZQEknoGkbqyyK&index=4&t=1s">drill</a>.</p>
<p>I moved my working space to the upstairs sunroom in my house, which had really great lighting.
<img src="/images/sunroom_office.jpg" width="100%" /></p>
<h2 id="reading">Reading</h2>
<h3 id="high-performance-habits-by-brendan-burchard"><em>High Performance Habits</em> by Brendan Burchard</h3>
<p>This may be the best self-help book I have ever read. I read it twice. In fact, I liked it so much that I bought a hardcover version of it, even though I already have it on kindle.</p>
<h3 id="the-institute-by-steven-king"><em>The Institute</em> by Steven King</h3>
<p>This is another paranormal thriller book by Steven King. It was pretty good (but not as good as <em>Misery</em>). The good thing was it was not too spooky, so I didn’t get the willies as much before bed.</p>
<p>I wanted to read <em>A Field Guide to Lucid Dreaming</em> in more depth but couldn’t find the time.</p>
<h2 id="who-are-my-heroes">Who are my heroes?</h2>
<ul>
<li>I guess Conan is funny.</li>
<li>My Google mentors are great.</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="closing">Closing</h2>
<p>This term feels a bit like a failed attempt to seek clarity, both in my research directions and in my fitness.</p>
<h2 id="songs">Songs</h2>
<p>No new songs.</p>
<h2 id="youtubers">Youtubers</h2>
<ul>
<li>bald and bankrupt, as always.</li>
</ul>{"name"=>nil, "avatar"=>"taverna.jpeg", "bio"=>nil, "textemail"=>nil, "location"=>nil, "employer"=>nil, "googlescholar"=>nil, "personal"=>nil, "email"=>nil, "uri"=>nil, "bitbucket"=>nil, "codepen"=>nil, "dribbble"=>nil, "flickr"=>nil, "facebook"=>nil, "foursquare"=>nil, "github"=>nil, "google_plus"=>nil, "keybase"=>nil, "instagram"=>nil, "lastfm"=>nil, "linkedin"=>nil, "orcid"=>nil, "pinterest"=>nil, "soundcloud"=>nil, "stackoverflow"=>nil, "steam"=>nil, "tumblr"=>nil, "twitter"=>nil, "vine"=>nil, "weibo"=>nil, "xing"=>nil, "youtube"=>nil, "wikipedia"=>nil}This past term at home passed by fast. I worked, but it feels like I didn’t make too much progress.Fall 2020: A New Beginning2020-12-31T00:00:00-08:002020-12-31T00:00:00-08:00https://jasonwei20.github.io/posts/2020/12/blog-post-15<p>This quarter, I started my AI residency at Google. In other words, it’s grind time, and I need to get my life together.</p>
<h2 id="research">Research</h2>
<p><strong>On paper rejections.</strong>
I got rejections for two papers from both AACL and COLING (and also bad reviews at EACL), which was hard to stomach and had me questioning what mistakes I had made with these two papers.
Is it wrong to be upset by rejections and happy for acceptances when there is so much noise in reviewing?
Perhaps this is a call for me to focus more on the systems than the results.</p>
<p><img src="/images/20f/20f_room.jpg" width="100%" />
My home office (converted from my old bedroom).</p>
<h2 id="fitness">Fitness</h2>
<p><strong>Weightlifting.</strong>
My brother and I bought a weightlifting rack for our house, and it was a great purchase.
With easy access to weights, I improved my bench from 145 to 165lbs, and hit a PR of 205lbs at a body weight of 138 lbs (my last PR, 200lbs, was over a year ago, and I weighed 157lbs).
It helped to track my lifts on <a href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1svX0zuMAuPm-y6QdHbSMelaNsVT7DYOPFrsaAgsH3as/edit?usp=sharing">Google Sheets</a>.
However, I did not follow-through on my plans to routinely do a murph challenge.</p>
<p><strong>Tennis.</strong>
I continued to play tennis 1-4 times a week.
Since I’ve been playing regularly for a while now, I am starting think about improving my tennis game as well as getting in exercise.
I worked on my backhand, which is now more consistent, at least against rally balls.
I also played a lot more singles and sets, and so my serve also improved a lot—my first serve can be a weapon, and on a good day I will double fault less than once per game.
Some things for me to think about and work on:</p>
<ul>
<li>For the ready position, squat down much lower than you think you need to.</li>
<li>Intentionally read the ball and recover after the shot. You might not hit like a 5.0 player, but you can recover like one if you try. Red light, yellow light, green light is a great exercise for reading the ball.</li>
<li>For forehands, instead of jumping up, transition your body weight forward. Also, wait to drop the racket.</li>
<li>For backhands, make sure to keep the left arm bent on the backswing, and then flex your chest with my left hand pointing backwards when hitting the ball.</li>
<li>For serves, the key is in a good toss. Tossing the ball higher gives more time for a bigger serve motion and longer rackethead travel path. Bend and push off both legs for power, and bring the right foot up to the left like Andy Murray. Hit the ball while it’s high in the air, and make good contact. On the first serve, the ball should go directly down into the court.</li>
<li>For volleys, remember to contact the ball in front while moving forward. If the ball bounces close to your feet, get low and either take it early or off the bounce.</li>
</ul>
<video src="/images/20f/IMG_4307.mp4" width="49%" autoplay="" loop="" muted=""></video>
<video src="/images/20f/IMG_4332.mp4" width="49%" autoplay="" loop="" muted=""></video>
<p>Left, 5x5 pull ups at 1 plate; right, 1RM touch-and-go bench press at 205lbs.</p>
<h2 id="learning-danish">Learning Danish</h2>
<p>I decided to start learning Danish on duolingo.
At the time that I write this, I have a 75 day streak!
But that doesn’t mean I can speak at any competent level.
I was originally hoping to be able to travel to or live in Denmark again, but that probably won’t happen for a while.
Therefore, I see learning Danish a mental exercise, as well as a way to learn more about Danish culture.</p>
<h2 id="miscellanea">Miscellanea</h2>
<ul>
<li>My brother got in Stanford for his undergrad! I am so proud of him.</li>
<li>For thanksgiving, my mom, my brother, and I had an amazing meal and played poker with family friends.</li>
<li>Installing the <a href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/df-tube-distraction-free/mjdepdfccjgcndkmemponafgioodelna?hl=en">distraction free youtube extension</a> on chrome helped substantially curb my youtube time by blocking their recommender system.</li>
<li>I didn’t get in a good habit of meditating this quarter, unfortunately.</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="making-videos">Making videos</h2>
<ul>
<li>Tennis <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jeuH4vW7Mq8">practice</a>; <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpCNIBomYEg">game</a> against william; another game <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r16M2dZpSFs">[part 1]</a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bdd9MJip20">[part 2]</a>. (Notice my serve got much better from the first game with william.)</li>
<li><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcp9w16NuV4">Reviewing</a> my Dartmouth admissions file.</li>
<li><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wo20LOjGBHM">Reflecting</a> on 2020.</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="reading">Reading</h2>
<h3 id="metaphors-we-live-by-by-george-lakoff-and-mark-johnson"><em>Metaphors We Live By</em> by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson</h3>
<p>The message of this book is that people often (and often unknowingly) use physical and social experiences as metaphors to better understand abstract concepts such as work, time, mental activity, and feelings.
Specifically, human thought processes are metaphorical, and we use <em>conceptual metaphors</em> are used to understand one idea in terms of another.</p>
<p>Within conceptual metaphors, there are three subtypes:</p>
<ol>
<li><em>Structural</em> metaphors present complex concepts in terms of simpler ones. E.g., argument is war; time is money.</li>
<li><em>Orientational</em> metaphors give concepts a spatial orientation. E.g., more is up; healthy is up; happy is up.</li>
<li><em>Ontological</em> metaphors allow us to refer to something as an entity. E.g., the mind is a fragile object (he broke under pressure); activities are containers (Jerry <em>got out of</em> doing the dishes); personification.</li>
</ol>
<p>Here’s one that applies to my favourite pasttime: <em>tennis is war</em>.</p>
<h3 id="the-outsider-by-stephen-king"><em>The Outsider</em> by Stephen King</h3>
<p>I hold Stephen King to high standards, and this book did not turn out the way I had hoped.
It starts with the murder of a boy with unmistakable evidence, but the man charged has a rock-solid alibi: what happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object?
I thought there would be a real solution to the story, but it turned out to be supernatural.
Still, reading Stephen King has improved my writing vocabulary and creativity noticeably.</p>
<h3 id="the-almost-nearly-perfect-people-by-michael-booth"><em>The Almost Nearly Perfect People</em> by Michael Booth</h3>
<p>Michael Booth breaks down the Scandinavian facade that is often idolized in today’s media.
He embeds history and anthropology into his retellings of some of his experiences traveling Denmark and learning about Danish culture.
His accounts often seemed too biased against Denmark, however.
Nonethess, I enjoyed the nuggets of Denmark that resurrected in my memory while reading the book.</p>
<h3 id="the-third-door-by-alex-banayan"><em>The Third Door</em> by Alex Banayan</h3>
<p>This was a gripping story of how a college student went to interview Bill Gates, Tim Ferris, Larry King, and others about what they did early on in their careers to become successful.
The main door is the one with 99% waiting in line, the second door is for rich people and VIPs, and the third door is a more convoluted path and is how these people became successful.
Other than prioritizing relationship capital and connections over financial gain, it wasn’t clear to me what exactly the third door is.
However, the book was an inspiring tale of the hustle of entrepreneurs and gave some good insights on how to send emails to busy people.
Some inspiring concepts nonetheless:</p>
<ol>
<li>Qi Lu, president of online services at Microsoft, hacked his sleep and sleeps for four hours a night. He spends the rest of the time working.</li>
<li>Sugar Ray Leonard, professional boxer, calls the hidden reserve of strength that people have, what allows a mother to lift up a car off a trapped child, the Reservoir.</li>
<li>Elliot Bisnow’s five rules: never use your phone in a meeting, act like you belong, don’t post on social media to impress people, don’t break anyone’s trust, adventures only happen to the adventurous.</li>
<li>Warren Buffett reads everything carefully: reading the damn footnotes is Buffett’s outlook on life.</li>
<li>Become unattached to succeeding or failing, rather, focus on trying and growing.</li>
</ol>
<h2 id="who-are-my-heroes">Who are my heroes?</h2>
<p>The usuals: Conan, ice1cube, Randy Pausch, Sam Harris.</p>
<h2 id="closing">Closing</h2>
<p>Though this fall marked the start of my AI residency, life was still about building the habits and routines that I had been doing before, only now, I’m busier and the stakes are higher.</p>
<h2 id="songs">Songs</h2>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHNVhrQZG6E&ab_channel=TheKillersVEVO">My Own Soul’s Warning</a> by The Killers is probably one of the ten best songs I’ve ever listened to.</li>
<li>Best of 20{17,18,19} mixes by Mr. Suicide Sheep are what I’ve been listening to while programming.</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="youtubers">Youtubers</h2>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Auh74d_OG8Y">Conan & Jordan Schlansky</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKY58bqNVFA">PPPeter</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.youtube.com/c/baldandbankrupt/videos">bald and bankrupt</a></li>
</ul>{"name"=>nil, "avatar"=>"taverna.jpeg", "bio"=>nil, "textemail"=>nil, "location"=>nil, "employer"=>nil, "googlescholar"=>nil, "personal"=>nil, "email"=>nil, "uri"=>nil, "bitbucket"=>nil, "codepen"=>nil, "dribbble"=>nil, "flickr"=>nil, "facebook"=>nil, "foursquare"=>nil, "github"=>nil, "google_plus"=>nil, "keybase"=>nil, "instagram"=>nil, "lastfm"=>nil, "linkedin"=>nil, "orcid"=>nil, "pinterest"=>nil, "soundcloud"=>nil, "stackoverflow"=>nil, "steam"=>nil, "tumblr"=>nil, "twitter"=>nil, "vine"=>nil, "weibo"=>nil, "xing"=>nil, "youtube"=>nil, "wikipedia"=>nil}This quarter, I started my AI residency at Google. In other words, it’s grind time, and I need to get my life together.