Luck and coincidence put us inside of the border, separating those who might be smarter, tougher, and no less deserving to be here.
October 17, 2021
October 4, 2021
Don’t practice until you get it right. Practice until you can’t get it wrong.
I would do this if I have an infinite amount of time. But my life is finite, so I have to weigh the opportunity costs.
September 19, 2021
I joined NVIDIA 20 years ago
Around this time 20 years ago I got my first job in NVIDIA, an event memorable partly due to September 11 2001. (I was told on my first day of job that I was the only new member of the architecture group during the hiring freeze.)
More memorable are all colleagues whom I am grateful to work with.
Erik Lindholm and Walt Donovan were my de-facto mentors for the vertex and texture units, and I also learned a lot from other unit team members such as Henry Moreton, Simon Moy, Alex Minkin, Paul Heckbert, and Joel McCormack.
I would like to thank John Danskin for his management, and the Kumar dude who introduced the RTL book to me (sorry I couldn’t recall your full name even though I could recall your reaction to dogs).
Bryon Nordquist and Wei-Chao Chen, who worked closely with me in the adjacent units (front end and pixel), had to constantly tolerate my regression breaks.
Interactions with Jakob Nebeker (who claimed that PhD is useless but later got one himself), Will Newhall, Chris Donham (who discovered a bug caused by quantum interference), Trista Chen, and many others have made my job much more enjoyable.
Holding on to my NVDA stocks turned out to be one of the best investment decisions I have made (at this moment of writing) and the price fluctuations made a good mental training.
September 18, 2021
Sense of time during endeavors
I heard from this podcast about someone who became an elite ultra-runner after a brain surgery, as quoted from earlier article:
Her waning short term memory meant that she processed time and trail in a new way. With the ability to focus intensely on the pure task of putting one foot in front of the other over great distances, she soon established herself as one of the world’s most decorated ultra endurance runners in history.
Usually we need a sense of time/progress to manage a project, and this case provides a very interesting counter point: sometimes, not knowing the context might help us focus at the task.
August 29, 2021
Philosophy for a happy life
I stumbled upon this video; highly recommend!
Focus on what we can do (and have) instead of what we cannot (and have not).
– I think this is the most important one; how often people switch jobs or relationships because they overweigh negatives of the current ones?
Surround ourselves with the right people.
– This is not entirely under our control (e.g., the family we are born with), but we can strive to associate with the right type of people.
Have something to look forward to.
– Like mint chocolate? 🙂
August 27, 2021
You look fine
For some reason I don’t tend to look at mirrors as often as other people do, and thus sometimes walked around with chocolate on my face without realizing it.
July 29, 2021
Old tabloid
Flipping through an old issue of a tabloid that I stumbled upon a few nights ago transported my memory back in time and also made me realize that how transient are position, power, and fame that people tend to chase at the present moment.
July 8, 2021
A soothing process
Upon receiving the weekly food delivery I found out a bag of farro has been split open spilling the grains all over the box.
Usually such incidents will trigger a short bout of anger release (e.g., cursing), but (to my surprise, probably due waking up from a better-than-average sleep) I just gathered the grains via a sequence of containers of decreasing sizes and found the whole process very soothing.
July 6, 2021
Don’t respond to bots
I usually ignore inquiries (such as students seeking internships or recruiters on LinkedIn) that are obviously auto-generated with spammy, generic, robotic descriptions. If you want me to reply you in person, ask me in kind.