Spring 2022 (摸鱼)

3 minute read

Published: July 01, 2022

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.

Nonetheless, several fun activities happened this quarter.

Work

Despite the feelings of 摸鱼, some of my biggest work accomplishments so far happened this quarter.

Sundar presented chain-of-thought prompting at Google I/O. This was by far the greatest accomplishment in my career. Just sublime! Never imagined this would happen.
I wrote a nice survey paper on emergent abilities with senior researchers that I really respect.

I’m also super excited to have interns in the office and Dartmouth PhD friends in the area for the summer!

Travels

ACL 2022. 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 :(

Visiting my dad in North Carolina. 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.

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.

Fun

Just a list of fun memories:

Apr 3: Went sailing with Yifei and Gutow and Gutow’s cousin
Apr 9: Filoli Gardens and Windy Hill Open Space Preserve
Apr 11: Reconnected with Jae when he was here visiting SF!
Apr 19: Attended the Lizzo concert at Shoreline Amphitheatre on Maarten’s last day at Google [video]
Apr 30: Hiked Windy Hill Open Space Preserve with Jeffrey, Jen, and John
May 8: Flew to Texas to surprise my mom for Mother’s Day :)
May 17: Hung out with Hyemin around Stanford
Jun 4: Well Within Spa and Santa Cruz amusement park
Jun 19: Shoreline Park and Lake with Xiaoying

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.

Conclusions

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.