New York, New BLOG
Published:
It’s been a while! I haven’t written things for other people to read in at least two years, aside from the occasional shitty tweet (now with 280 characters of bad jokes!).
I’m spending my summer in New York City, working quant at a non-quant fund primarily doing NLP with financial data. It’s been a lot of fun, programming behind a bank firewall that doesn’t let me use Google Drive, developing in Windows, and learning what words like “cash flow” and “balance sheet” and “beta cuck” mean. (Just kidding.) In all honesty, I’ve learned a lot of things I wouldn’t have expected. It’s been great to connect with old friends from high school that are in the city and to meet new people! I also haven’t had a single bad meal yet.
School’s also been good. I really enjoyed CS110, where I finally learned about computer networks and also built some really cool programs. Now when my dad talks about his job (he works for T-Mobile), I can kind of understand what he’s talking about. Also, networking now means something to me other than grasping for weak similarities with strangers while wearing the only semi-decent clothes I own in some conference center. It was not fun taking two 3 hour exams back to back after only eating a McDonalds yogurt parfait and drinking some nutty-ass coffee with 220 mg of caffeine in it, but there’s a silver lining: I’ve wrapped up a lot of my core classes, and I’m eager to move into more upper level stuff. It’s a little scary, since I’m going into classes where my mathematical foundations and background knowledge will be way less useful than they’ve been in the past. It’s daunting but exciting! Thank god for grade inflation.
My life is pretty calm right now (hence the time to whip up this shit), so there’s not a whole lot more to say:
My little brother just finished up at MOP (Math Olympiad Program)! So proud of him. Such a large-brained child but still a total goober at heart.
I’ve discovered I’m a morning person that hates waking up. I 100% do my best work in the mornings like right after I get up but I just LOVE sleeping in.
Skinny Pop is maybe the best snack ever. My internship has a fucking truckload of it. It’s delicious, light but kind of filling, and doesn’t make you hate yourself (we have slim-jims for that). What more can you ask for?
The New York Subway puts DC Metro to shame. It’s SO much cheaper and well-distributed. Also, speaking of transit, I haven’t used Uber in like a year ‘cause I had a real shit rider rating (aside: I didn’t even like puke in the backseat, I just straight up didn’t talk and racked up a lot of 4 star ratings for that. In New York it’s been climbing) so I ended up getting like a 40% off discount for a week so I was zipping around Manhattan for like 2 bucks a pop. It was fantastic. Lesson learned: alternate like every 6 months between Uber and Lyft and reap the benefits.
Twitter is the best. I would pay for that shit. It’s so fucking funny and actually just like a great news source; I end up reading a lot of research articles and reading cool weird longform journalism pieces.
I want to get a tattoo! I have some ideas for what I want and where to put it. It’ll probably be a giant one on my face that says “Arrillaga Chicken Ruined My Life.”
I don’t know how often I’m gonna do this, especially when school starts back up, but hopefully fairly often! In a lot of my technical-heavy quarters I feel like not clever and like I feel my personality get duller and duller.
Here’s a bunch of stuff I’ve consumed and enjoyed recently!!!
Things I’ve Eaten
Jongro BBQ - Thanks Jiyon for the suggestion!! Unbelievable. The galbi with marinade almost made me cry. Puts Honey Pig/Iron Age to shame.
Joe’s Pizza - Three bucks. Big slice of fresh, delicious pizza. Usually kind of a line but still super fast. What more can you ask for?
Momofuku Noodle Bar - It was fine. Noodles were super good but it was pricy and packed.
Baohaus - Eddie Huang wasn’t there :( super tasty but not a great deal in terms of calorie/dollar. Luckily, Joe’s Pizza is like a block away, so a slice afterwards evens it out.
Sukhumvit 51 - Drunken Noodle. Two crab rangoons. Ten dollars. Find me a better deal in the City other than the $1.25 Peking Duck bun in Flushing.
Eileen’s Special Cheesecake - Objectively eh, but for the price it was great. This was my third “Worth It” restaurant, and the only one where I disagreed with the ranking.(Guisado’s and Sushi Stop in LA were great).
Nino’s 46 - For the price, crazy good pasta.
Noodle Village - Fuck me up. I love Chinatown.
Things I’ve Read/Am Reading
Stories of Your Life and Others, Ted Chiang - Really good science fiction. The eponymous story (which got turned into the movie Arrival, which I adore) was actually underwhelming, but there’s a bunch of standouts! (Thanks for the book Robin!)
Chemistry, Weike Wang - Won the Hemingway award! About an Asian-American grad student, talks about all sorts of things. The prose is lovely and the content relatable. (Thanks for the suggestion Victoria!)
Sour Heart, Jenny Zhang - Fucking brutal. A series of short stories about Asian-Americans growing up in New York City. So many different tones. It is intentionally (as the title implies) not easy to stomach, but the prose is just insane.
The Most Amazing Bowling Story Ever - I dunno. I just like it.
My Addicted Son - Heart-wrenching shit. Read it after watching the trailer for Beautiful Boy.
Bo Burnham’s Age of Anxiety - I would die for Bo Burnham.
Requiem - Kinda old, but remains to this day one of my favorite things I’ve ever read!
Countdown Regression: Sharp and Calibrated Survival Predictions - Awesome work in time-to-event prediction from two people that inspire me every day, Tony and Anand.
A Unified Approach to Interpreting Model Predictions - Interpretability for tree ensembles! And anything else!
Deep contextualized word embeddings - Everyone and their mother has already read this paper, but it’s still super cool! Context-dependent character-level word embeddings. Plug them in for GloVe and get SOTA!
Why RL is Flawed - As someone who doesn’t really have a good grasp on reinforcement learning, this was extremely helpful! All of these articles, along with a lot of the ones on distill.pub, are great.
I basically read The Ringer every day. It’s the closest thing (it’s essentially the same thing, but less longform-y) to Grantland, which I dearly miss.
Things I’ve Watched/Listened To
Markdown sucks for video embedding. Sad.
Dirty Computer - Album of the year. Watch the movie. Listen to the music. “I would cut off my toes for Janelle Monae.” - Anonymous
Movies I want to see: Sorry to Bother You, Eighth Grade, Beautiful Boy, Ocean’s 8, Ant Man and the Wasp (lmao), not Hereditary. Side note: Ocean’s Eight could have totally been called Ocean’s Ocho. Y’all FUCKED UP.
The Incredibles 2 - The short wrecked me. The movie was great!!! Jack Jack is arguable the greatest movie baby of all time. Did you know Edna Mode is voiced by BRAD BIRD, who looks like your white friend’s “cool” dad? icONIC.