After a company training today a fellow employee from another division pinged me: Are you in the research group? That sounds fun!
Me: Research is a fun job as long as you are comfortable failing 90% of the time. 🙂
November 11, 2021
November 8, 2021
The implications of the physics of time
Time only moves forward.
We cannot change the past or predict the future.
So it is pointless to regret the past or fear the future.
November 7, 2021
With great power comes great hassles
With great power comes great responsibility, but the real trade-off lies in the hassles.
October 30, 2021
OKR 2021
For OKR 2020, I rated myself 80 percent:
- Published 2 top papers with 2 student first authors.
- Contributed to a newly released motion brush feature in Adobe Fresco, and received 6 granted and 4 filed patents.
- I am relieved some of my management duties (for now) after my last direct report became a professor in NYU.
- I have yet to start top impacts.
-
The creative practice (mainly drawing and animation) has heightened my sense of observation and can help me focus/relax into a zone similar to meditation.
I finished Quicksilver, the first volume of the Baroque Cycle, my yardstick for book reading.
The default period is from July 2021 to June 2022 unless stated otherwise.
Publish top papers
Publish at least 4 papers in top graphics/HCI/vision/ML venues, such as ToG (including SIGGRAPH and SIGGRAPH Asia), CHI/UIST, NIPS/ICML, CVPR/ICCV.
Build top products
Ship at least 1 product feature and file at least 4 patents.
Develop top talents
Help at least 4 students publish in top graphics/HCI/vision/ML venues individually.
Recruit/refer at least 2 top job candidates.
Lead top impacts
This is a new category created last year that I shall start.
Have fun, be awesome
Practice sketching and animation to a professional level.
Continue learning a third language to complement the one Asian and one European language I already know.
Finish the baroque cycle.
October 17, 2021
Immigration policy
Luck and coincidence put us inside of the border, separating those who might be smarter, tougher, and no less deserving to be here.
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? 🙂