Last night, after leaving the hackathon, I started to feel as though time was moving more slowly than usual, and my brain felt strangely agitated. The sensation intensified toward bedtime, and I ended up unable to fall asleep at all. After investigating, I realized that several cans of “sparkling water” I had consumed during the event actually contained a large amount of vitamins and stimulants, including caffeine and green tea extract. In effect, they were closer to Red Bull or Monster energy drinks than to ordinary sparkling water. I should have paid more attention to the nutrition labels, but I was too preoccupied with the hackathon to do so.
2026-10-12
2026-10-11
MongoDB hackathon
This hackathon drew a much larger crowd than the previous one I attended, with hundreds of participants and 93 projects submitted in total. Unlike the previous event, the judging emphasized topic impact and live presentation more than technical execution. Since the theme focused on harnesses and databases rather than motion and graphics and I also ran into hardware issues during my presentation (screen sharing and a broken mouse), I did not perform as well as last time. Even so, the project ranked 10th out of 93, was completed well ahead of schedule (with most of the time spent on demo production rather than on the actual development), and I had a great time on Sunday in a wonderful venue with nice food and drinks.
See this repository for more information about the project, which implements a harness and database backend for my earlier DrawTalk frontend.
https://www.instagram.com/kub1ai/p/DeZxSg2FoVv/
2026-09-30
Runway hackathon
For the first time in my life, I participated in a hackathon, hosted by Runway, whose products I have long admired. I especially like their motion brush feature, though it seems to have disappeared after Gen-2.
For this hackathon, I wanted to revive the motion brush as a direct manipulation tool that could complement other input modalities such as text prompts, keyframe images, and guide videos. See this repository for more information, including code, process, and demo videos.
Overall, I found this to be a very satisfying experience: an intense 6-hour event in which I could fully focus on ideation, design, implementation, experimentation, and demo production. Initially, I thought I would be the only participant over the age of 20, but the demographic turned out to be more diverse than I expected. I also got to see some very interesting demos from other participants.
https://www.behance.net/gallery/256531401/RunwayHackathon
2026-09-13
Kusama: Infinity
I watched this documentary on hoopla about Yayoi Kusama’s life and art. It chronicles her difficult childhood, struggles with mental illness, and her resilient journey from decades of isolation and obscurity to eventual acclaim and influence on the art world.
The documentary is visually compelling and deeply inspiring. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in art, psychology, and the power of perseverance.
2026-08-31
Great collaboratorg
While writing my research statement recently, I realized how much I owe to Rubaiat Habib Hazi for my work over the past decade. He has been a great collaborator and my number one co-author on my Google Scholar profile.
When I expanded from graphics to HCI, thanks to my first official PhD student, Jun Xing, who interned with Rubaiat at Autodesk, Rubaiat provided timely guidance on HCI and content creation throughout our collaborations. When I joined Adobe, I worried that I could no longer work with him, but fortunately, he joined me just a few months later. We continued our collaborations over the years, resulting in 25 publications (including 5 best paper or honorable mention awards) and product features in Fresco Motion and generative motion graphics.
I am grateful for his support and friendship, and feel lucky to still be able to work with him after all these years.
2026-08-15
2026-07-04
Hot run
For experimentation and token-minimizing I have been running some open-weight LLMs (e.g., llama3.2 for text and qwen3-coder:30b for code) locally on a MacBook via ollama within VS Code. I noticed that long-context tasks (e.g., analyzing a complex codebase and generating a new feature) can take a long time and compute, eventually heating up the device to a hazardous degree, especially under an ambient room temperature over 90°F.
https://www.instagram.com/p/DaXY3tDj8nM/
2026-06-14
The meaning of life II
Biological life forms are evolved to procreate, ideas are disseminated to propagate, and I exist to serve others instead of myself.
2026-05-30
Belongings
Anything that depends on others, can be taken away from us, and is not ours.
Which basically applies to everything, including our life, as we will all die on day.
But we can prioritize them based on their proximity to and controllability by us – mind, body, wisdom, skills, relationships, accomplishments, money, jobs, etc.
We won’t fear losing something if we don’t think it belongs to us.