A collection of interviews on hard work.

Richard Feynman

There's no talent or special miracle ability to understand quantum mechanics, to imagine the electromagnetic field, that comes without practice and reading and learning and study.

If you take an ordinary person who's willing to devote a large amount of time to study and work and thinking and mathematics and timeline, then he's become a scientist

John Carmack

There's a small subset of people that can be obsessive about things. Obsession can get things done that just practical prudent pedestrian work won't, or at least won't, for a very long time.

Kevin Systrom

There's no way you can expect changing the world without working very hard. Even people who changed the only nudged the world in a slight direction. To have great outcomes you need to work 3 standard deviations above the mean.

Andrej Karpathy

The focus should be more on how much you do. Pick the things you're interested in and spend 10,000 hours.

Jonathan Blow shares how his insights on solving hard problems in this clip.

In a big project, you don't have to solve every problem at once.

You'll get crushed under the load of everything you have to do and not get anything done.

It's better to have a forward moving wavefront of which problems are we tackling seriously right now vs which problems we're just doing that kinda sucks but is good enough for now.

This is okay as long as you're going back and improving the suboptimal solutions later.

If you get a rough draft of your program, you can use that to figure out how you want it to behave.

Some initial ideas you have might not be a good idea. You you can refine those ideas by having something approximating those ideas.

The faster you get to those approximation the better.

The more time you spend working in that space of your approximation to the thing you want, the more you become an expert in that specific field

And the better you get, the better your decision making about technical issues

If you make hard decisions later, they will be made better by a more skilled person and with more contextual information.

Deferring hard decisions is important for good craftsmanship in some cases

In situations when you don't know the answer, you don't have to ignore the problem, but the right way to fix it you don't know right now.

Work on other easier problems you can solve right now that has more impact on usability.

A raw draft of notes I took at church today at Resonate, Fremont.

But those who desire to be rich fall into temptation, into a snare, into many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. - 1 Timothy 6:9 ESV

Love for money is root of evil (v 10.)

Not tithing is stealing from God.

Money blinds us from who we are, induces pride and haughtiness, makes you unteachable

It blinds us to how much we have, we buy and enjoy things you couldn’t before, luxury becomes necessity

Luke 12:15: Watch out! Be on guard against all kinds of greed

Why watch out? Its hard to know you’re greedy.

We say we just want to be comfortable, we’re self justifying

1 Timothy 6:6: Seeking contentment

Godliness with contentment is great gain

Wealth is a way of finding safety and uncertainty, you do things out of fear

A way of getting security, but not emotional or relational security

Philippians 4:11-13

Contentment I can do all things through him who strengthens me

Christian happiness by three things

• bad things turn out for good
• Good things can never be taken from you
• Best things are yet to come

You meant for evil but God meant it for good

Paul found contentment and peace in prison, facing 39 lashes facing death

How to be set free?

Seek grace. Enjoy grace.

Job said: Naked I came into the world. Nakedness I leave the world

The Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord

Nakedness is utter vulnerable. Needing security, affirmation, love, protection

Today was an eventful day.

I read a chapter of The Death of Ivan Ilyich in the train to SF.

We dropped by the Outside LLMs hackathon for a while to talk to some friends from previous hackathons.

We left for the Art Walk in Outer Sunset on Irving Street.

I met up with two other friends.

We had really good Vietnamese food at Loi's Vietnamese.

THe Pho wasn't sweet, and I ordered the special beef which apparently is stir fried before putting into pho to give it Wok hei.

After that we walked to Golden Gate Park for the De Young Museum.

It was cool to observe different paintings, sculptures, artifacts, films, writings, portraiture, textiles, etc.

One thing that I still recall is this painter who went around California hiking spots, and painted them so people knew about these beautiful spots around California. We take for granted the instantaneous transmission and consumption of media we have with the internet today.

I also recall how different parts of the world has such unique and rich culture, and what the cause behind all of that is? Why do indonesians and africans have these scary masks and rituals, what inspired these artifacts?

After that we went Clement St for some dim sum.

I had some radish cake and BBQ pork bun.

Then we went JTown SF for Marufuku ramen.

I had the $7.5 Chashu Bowl which was one of the best pork belly with rice I've ever had.

I saw my friends do Sake bombs.

Then we all took the bart home.

I drove my friends car home from bart.

It was my first time driving alone in the US.

Some of the roads were confusing and it was dark.

I made it home safely at 11:26 p.m.

It's scary times here on Earth. The North Atlantic Sea Surface temperature is higher than ever.

Geo-engineering is controversial. The idea is to intentionally change the climate of the planet.

But it looks like we've been doing it this whole time time.

We've been haphazardly geo-engineering the planet by dumping a lot of CO2 into the atmosphere, decreasing the amount of heat that we can radiate back into space.

We also release a lot of Sulfur dioxide (SO2) when we burn dirty fuels like coal and fuel oil.

In a short period of time, SO2 can decrease temperature of an area of the planet.

It happens because it's good at seeding clouds, by combining with moisture in atmosphere to form droplets of sulfuric acid.

This creates more and fluffier clouds.

This happens when volcanoes erupt, and SO2 comes out. it can cool the planet with the dust and SO2.

One really big source of SO2 is the huge cargo ships that burn the cheapest oil which has a lot of SO2.

And they produce ship tracks, which you can see from space. They are clouds by sulfur dioxide being spat out from these big ships.

The UN's IMO made a new rule for sulfur regulation in 2020.

Over the last few years, scientist found the warming of the ocean is attributed to new light hitting it that wouldn't normally be hitting it because of less ship tracks, and less dust from sahara.

Global warming is worse than we thought it was because we were shielded by the effects of other pollution that we were throwing out in the air.

This is also good because it's a massive experiment that shows the effects of local geo-engineering on the atlantic ocean.

Instead of using SO2, one way is to just shoot sea water into the air using misters that make it super tiny so it can float in the air.

Most of the water evaporates leaving behind little crystals of salt that then can seed clouds, and falls back down into the ocean.

It's going to get hot enough that we'll see marine extinction, humans dying from heat wave, etc.

The 3 things we can do:

• Stop putting new CO2
• Start taking old CO2 out of atmosphere
• Deal with impact of current warming

We're in the overlap period, where problem is big enough where we can't ignore anymore, but we can still do things to solve it.

I went to Notion HQ in SF today to listen to Linus Lee speak.

I was all the way at the back, so couldn't really extract any insight out of his talk.

I'm a big fan of his side projects. He shared how he approaches building in his blog.

He also has a page called his stream, which is his mini twitter feed.

A summary of his advice

• ideas come from personal needs, solving an existing problem, or one that doesn't exist yet
• work on the idea when motivation is highest.
• Have templates and reusable frameworks to get started quickly. Use a consistent set of tools.
• Share prototypes early, embrace the rough MVP as a tipping point.
• Not every project reaches completion, reflect on what went wrong and apply the lessons to future ideas.
• Make projects easy to iterate, monitor, update, and restore.
• Push outside of your comfort zone
• Build things that spark imagination and open up new possibilities, not just demonstrate technical skills.

I've been getting stuck at my work lately.

I'm laying the foundations for the codebase for my team which means I have to set everything up from scratch.

I keep facing issues with the setup process that I fail to divert my attention to other more important tasks.

I'm a victim to sunk cost fallacy, I've already spent that much time for this library, that switching over to a new library just takes more time. I did not want to call it quits.

When I get stuck, I easily lose sense of the motivation behind my work. I get annoyed by these blockers, and see them as time-wasting activities. I forget the big picture for the work that I do.

I need to constantly remind myself that I'm lucky to be able to try out new packages and tools at Tesla. And that I have the opportunity to face these errors, which is a means of collecting experience, and helping me grow as a programmer.

Instead of complaining about the errors, and being deflated, I should look at things from a different perspective.

Take a deep breath, note down your blockers, take it step-by-step, break down the problem, utilize the resource around you to fix the issue. If all else fails, find a new solution.

Facing a lot of issues is the key to prerequisite to becoming a good problem-solver. No one in life has become an expert by doing the easy things. They ran into challenges that no one has faced before, gathered all the facts, and found a way.

I participated in an internship showcase today at Tesla.

It was fun talking about my work.

Although, I didn't do a great job explaining my work. It takes a lot of skill to explain something in the simplest way possible, with just enough detail, to convey the right amount of information, and keep the person's attention.

To do that, it requires really knowing your work. That eliminates room for uncertainty and doubt, which staggers communication.

While I'm speaking, I don't know if it's too much or too little, and I believe practices makes it better. Once you know the specific points to hit, you won't be led astray by your thought process, but you have guardrails in place.

I think a good principle is to not talk about what's on the slide, but what's behind it. The idea, the problem, the why. To not talk about what's already there, but what's not there.

It's also good to come from a listener's perspective. As someone who came with zero knowledge about my work, I'm filling in the missing details, the questions in their head, and satiating their curiosity.

What I loved about this showcase is hearing about other teams who are doing similar projects, and the interesting problems other interns are solving.

The conversation scene at the start of the movie The Social Network was attention-grabbing.

This video explains why.

The idea is a two shot is impartial and does not deliver an enough of a point-of-view to convey emotion.

Instead, there's a visual rhythm of going back and forth between the two characters, where every cut is a shift in power.

And Erica is on screen more than Mark because she has control over the conversation, as she has the final word in the scene.

We feel the same tension and emotion the characters feel.

We're not just watching the conversation, we're in the conversation.

I woke up from the couch and Atal called me over.

It was close to 9.

I worked on drawing up the flow for the entire process on excalidraw.

After submission at 11:30 a.m. Atal got the cameraman to do an interview for our app.

It was my first time doing something like that, where they put a tiny mic on you.

I was mentally and physically drained, but I kept up a good persona, and did a good job overall.

Then, Atal went around showing our app, did all the talking for us in the first round of judging.

We got into the top 7 finalist, and had to present in front of everyone.

Even though all I did was control the slides, I was nervous about messing up. Thankfully Atal aced the presentation.

In the end, we got the Social Good Shout out award.

I really wanted the cash prize in the top 3, but looking at the other projects, they had a lot more technical implementation.

It was understandable since they consisted of young undergrads like me could not afford to sleep until they finished their app.

Overall through Atal, I got to meet a lot of people.

I'm glad I took the decision to reach out to people, because you never know what will happen.

You might end up coding for their team, and build a winning project.

I got the chance to talk to CEOs and YC startup founders. It was great to have casual conversations with them. Only in SF can you talk to a CEO directly.

I really want to be in SF when I graduate.

The energy here is insane.