While waiting for an evening train I noticed a familiar face in this recommended article on my mobile phone, and was shocked to discover that two of my former MSR Asia colleagues are among the deceased.
I don’t know how much their deaths are related to the work pressures, but it is a good reminder that we should take care of our health.
There is a certain truth that “pain is temporary, suck is forever”, but none of these matters if one is not even around.
I highly enjoy reading this book by Cade Metz as a brief history of machine learning (and mostly neural networks) and a tabloid on the main characters involved. You probably won’t learn much about the actual science, but you will likely be entertained and inspired.
A few days ago I noticed a dead rodent flattened on the driveway, so decomposed that it is hard to tell whether it is a rat, a mouse, a gopher, a mole, a vole, or something else.
I transferred the dead body to the compost bin via a pair of tree branches.
Today, after the garbage was collected, I found the dead body still stuck to the bottom of the bin. So I picked it up (via the same pair of tree branches), stuffed it inside a gopher hole nearby, and covered the hole with the surrounding soil.
Instead of driving, I experimented with taking MUNI bus 28 to the de Young Museum from the Daly City BART station. The stop was right north of the Golden Gate Park entrance, and I can walk through the Rose Garden on the way to the museum. The bus has a pretty frequent service (every 12 to 15 minutes, not too bad relative to the bay area public transport standards), wasn’t much slower than driving by my own along the (usually jammed) 19th avenue, and I could take time sighting the street and observing the fellow passengers. The bus was quite bumpy though, but fortunately I was well conditioned from riding the mini-buses in Hong Kong.
There is another MUNI line 44 that can lead directly to the museum, which I plan to try next time.
My dad likes to make witful observations about international relations (one of his college majors). He made another one during our conversation this afternoon, which formed a very concrete picture in my mind.
I would like to visualize it with high quality and low latency, so I found a drawing that fits my mental structure with a quick web search, generatively expanded it via Photoshop, used it as reference for Adobe Firefly text-to-image generation, generatively replaced the top of the well in Photoshop, and finally added a decal over the frog’s back via Adobe Fresco.
This whole process took a significantly shorter amount of time than if I were to manually draw the whole thing.
I guess one distinction between a communicator and an artist (or a communicator mode versus an artist mode that could be switched within every individual depending on the needs and situations) is that the former has a pretty precise goal in mind and aims to complete the task as efficiently as possible, while the latter often starts without a clear goal and then gradually reaches the outcome via an iterative exploration process.
Reviewing/handling 20 papers plus attending an intense multi-day program committee meeting is probably a lot of work for some people, but nowadays it is almost like a break to me – reading papers in topics that I might not usually pay attention to, participating in a gathering of about 100 people (like a small conference) to catch up with old friends and get to know new faces, consuming more sweets in 3 days than I would normally do in a year, and temporarily stepping away from my usual product/leadership responsibilities.
https://www.behance.net/gallery/222673301/Your-SIN-is-required-to-claim-any-tax-refund-?
This imagined story came to my mind while looking at a house-like structure built over an ocean in this exhibition on March 16 2025.
The following is the imagined story, accompanied by visuals generated from Reve, a new AI-powered image generation tool built by two former Adobe colleagues.
When I woke up I found myself in this dwelling.
There is nothing inside, and from the two open ends I could see endless blue sky and ocean.
A voice came out asking if I need anything.
I replied that I am thirsty and hungry.
I asked where I am and how I got here, but got no reply.
The food and drink came out of nowhere, and I slowly consumed them while contemplating my situation.
Eventually, I realized that my consumption came from the sacrifice of my loved one(s), who were drained slowly to death.
Being a big guy like you must have many evolutionary advantages, such as sports, dating, and even fighting for survival (when the need arises). But on this small airplane with tiny seats, you are at a disadvantage. And trying to sweet talking to me won’t change the fact that you have to overflow your body mass towards my side, and your babbling is distracting me from napping and reviewing a paper assigned to me right before the flight.
Next time, buy a bigger seat or multiple seats. You never know if your next neighbor is a big guy like you.
Joining a hot research trend is like buying a stock when the price is high.
These neural network pioneers (like Hinton, LeCun, etc.) started their works not when the field was hot, but when it was considered a dead end. And they stuck with it for decades until the right circumstances (e.g., GPU compute finally became feasible). Now, every time a new idea (about generative X or whatever) pops in the head, there might already be 10 arXiv papers on it.
It is important to know any significant new advancements, but it is even more important to figure out what and how to apply these into our own research and be able to formulate our own (unique) vision.
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