RC Week 2

Mon

ehehehehe it’s late but I really wanted to have v1 of my personal website done (after thinking more about it, i realized i wanted to just have 1 site for personal/professional/blog). here it is: https://gracekwak.me/ It’s nothing fancy (it really looks like my obsidian theme HAHA) but I like it and it gets the job done! i also have my first blog post up, for rc week 1 (which is literally a copy-paste of my daily check-in messages) (https://gracekwak.me/blog/2024/11/11/rc-week-1) I wanna add photos, finish migrating stuff from my old Notion portfolio, and get jekyll working locally (thank you to @Maura for your help!) if anyone else wants to know how I did it (I’d previously had 0 jekyll experience), I followed this awesome guide: https://jmcglone.com/guides/github-pages/ and I got some help by looking at the code for @Michael ‘s site https://github.com/msgtn/msgtn.github.io

also hci meeting was super cool! nice turnout and i’m honored people were on board to read the jia tolentino essay :D

Tues

another day!

• first #missing semester**! learned a few new life-changing commands like cd - and >> and solidified general concepts that I’d never had explained to me in such a cohesive way before – the lecturer is great. and there were some things where i was like, “oh yeah i already know that,” which builds my confidence in this crucial beginning phase – before it gets crushed in future lectures lol (and then built back up with experience, etc.)
• first W1’24 #ARENA** checkin+worksesh**: went through [0.0] woo
• some style changes to my website

now that i have my personal website (basically) done, i want another project to work on in parallel with arena+missingsemester! I want to work on something that’s at the edge of my abilities… something RL? hashlife algo for game of life?

Weds

• coffee chat with @Michael thank you michael :) and yes RL pairing during/after RL zero-to-hero
• sent email to phd student in a lab i wanna join (not rc-related but i really wanted to get it done today and it took a really long time haha)
• @Brandon ‘s self-hosting/homelabbing workshop! thank you for organizing it, I feel like this topic is something that has a steep learning curve and is daunting for newcomers – like it’s something where there’s a clear in-group and an out-group and difficult to jump from out-group to in-group (at least for me). i personally would never have felt like i could get into this on my own because i’d just start googling really basic things and get confused and lost and feel like an idiot for having to look them up (and then still not being able to understand, blaming myself for that too) and cry. i really liked that when you were talking about “why would you wanna do this” and one of the reasons was “it sparks joy”, you also mentioned “but it might not spark joy for you and in that case, don’t waste your time and energy on this.” part of me has always been ashamed of not being interested in certain tech/engr things, especially maker/tinkerer/hobbyist things and i’m (still) insecure because I feel behind and incompetent since I was not one of those computer-obsessed kids (who in the stereotype, are usually white and cis male which i’m not). but i have other interests and they are equally as valid and valuable, this is my one wild and precious life and the world needs me to be me etc. that said I think i might wanna self-host my website and obsidian files if I have time during my batch! hehe
• i’m really happy with the groupies i’m in (missing semester, arena) and i wanna have a somewhat big project going in parallel with that. scrambled+spiraled trying to come up with project ideas for which 1) i can pair with other recursers to tap into the benefits of this community and 2) something where instead of me doing an exercise for my own understanding (for which a solution is available online), i’m bringing something new into the world that’s my own idea, and 3) i’m genuinely excited about. going into RC, i thought this was going to be some “RL for robotics and compositional modeling based on papers i think are cool” but for reasons 1) and 2), this seems not what i wanna do anymore, i’ll save it for the grad school environment. also talked with @J and @Justin about this – thank you :)
• coffee chat with @Shenai aah hi i’m worried i sound good in writing but then when people actually talk to me they’re disappointed because i’m just like brain empty idk… thank you for your patience shenai :)

anyway, two new ideas that fit my 3 points above:

• obisidan community plugin to drag to reorder blocks (looks like this plugin/feature doesn’t exist… maybe one did in the past but it’s not active anymore)) and i’d use this every single day! note-taking group people? :eyes: a good intro to desktop app dev for me? :star:
• (after remembering and re-reading this article A look at search engines with their own indexes, i realized it has a non-generalist search section which i’d previously glossed over but now with my interest in building models via composition of smaller models, i’m like wait, of course – use specialized search engines for different kinds of queries/purposes. although having just one search engine for everything is convenient, it is a big black box and probably(?) doesn’t excel at everything the way that a coalition of specialized engines can) something related to search engines: a website that lets you select which search engine you wanna use – does this already exist? where you type in a query and then there’s different buttons for different search engines – it’s so you can easily toggle between different search engines and compare results (which are like different lenses for seeing the internet) (@Cindy do you know if this exists?). or a site where it combines a few results from each search engine onto the same page.
• related idea to the above: i’ve always wanted to find content that is cool and indie and lesser-known, random blogs by real people, IndieWeb and Web 1.0 stuff. there is like, hackernews and mastodon but i’m not into consuming feeds (whether it’s a news feed or a social media feed) and i’d prefer to encounter serendipity while doing my usual internet searches. – the non-generalist search engines in that article are exactly what i’m looking for, i think. or otherwise an excellent starting point :D these two are my favorites so far: https://search.marginalia.nu/ , https://teclis.com/

ya girl has written WAY more words than code so far… but trust, it’ll happen

(what’s also fun is that when i did my first check-in, i like, didn’t hold back because i didn’t think people would read other people’s check-ins. but then i saw several people react to my check-in and from then on, i was like damn ok well it’s too late now, this is happening and here we are!)

Thurs

• some website improvements (rss feed, badges, recs page) https://gracekwak.me/
• missing semester lecture 2: super super glad i’m doing this with a group – thank you all. i was considering doing this on my own but it would have been way too overwhelming for me
• no progress on arena hehe…
• read through the missing semester lecture 2 notes, really helped me understand what happened
• presentations were cool as always :)
• organized my obsidian notes so that i wouldn’t go nuts!

phew. yesterday was bad but I think i had to go through it in order to feel better (today I feel much better). growing hurts sometimes. but now I’m in a headspace where I’m thinking of more silly project ideas and i’m happy!

Fri

• wrong answers only: made a failure resume in

  \LaTeX
  

  ! it actually took me more effort than I thought it would to come up with valid things i have failed at because a lot of the things that i feel ashamed of, it’s not really fair to blame myself for because it was out of my control. i punish myself by saying “i should’ve known better / tried harder” but it’s like “no, I literally could not have because if i could have, I would have.” there is no other path. there is only one path and it’s the one you’re on.

like sometimes i just got unlucky. and it’s easy for me to focus on the things that i got unlucky for and feel like the dice are weighted against me and i start to feel deeply resentful toward the universe and others; but when i actually think about it, i do have a lot of things i’m immensely lucky for and wouldn’t trade for the world.

i’ve made some decisions that other people can (and do) judge/criticize me for because yeah they don’t follow the well-worn formulaic paths of success (not that there’s anything wrong with following a formula, i love math). i think it’s actually not that hard for me to make these decisions in the moment (i love the exhilaration that comes with taking a leap, it’s part of what brought me to RC!) and trust that my future self will be able to handle any potential consequences; the real challenge is standing by these decisions after the fact, to live with the now-tangible present consequences of my past decisions. (and it’s always the consequences, not the good stuff, that the brain naturally focuses on…)

there’s a common perspective of like “every experience (good and bad) that i’ve had in my life has brought me to this very moment. it’s hard to say whether all the good things would have happened if I hadn’t gone through all the bad things, and right now i’m very happy/grateful with all the good things, thus i am at peace with all the bad things.” this doesn’t work for me. because of course, if you had magically avoided the bad things that happened, you would be in a completely different place with different everything (good and bad). your bad things might be equally as bad or maybe even worse – but they might be not as bad; similarly, your good things might be equally as good or actually worse – but they might be even better. you just don’t know! sometimes i feel like i’d take that gamble because given the option to exchange my worst bad things for the chance of less-bad bad things and better good things, i’d take it, because i feel like my bad things are especially bad while my good things aren’t especially good ok this is another instance of me feeling unlucky when it’s not actually true… but! but! i don’t feel particularly attached to any of the good (or bad) things in my life; while i am immensely grateful and happy to have them, i don’t think there’s anything unique/special about them – but that doesn’t detract from their value because replaceability is on a totally different axis; in fact, replaceable-ness makes life feel a little less tenuous because “if I weren’t in this particular circumstance, I’d simply be in some other circumstance” / “if i hadn’t done this, i simply would’ve done something else” / “if I weren’t me, I’d simply be someone else.”

• arena checkin with fall 2’s @Christina
• coffee chat with @Emily
• pairing with @Nicole on missing semester lec 2 exercises
• pairing on rc_self_directives with @Johann omg our first python library for us both!
• inquired about obsidian plugin…!

things I wanna do this weekend (but might not be able to because my partner is coming to visit me from the other side of the country!!!)

• finish lec 2 exercises
• read arena RL chapter