In this blog, I usually upload stuff I learnt, or simple reviews of stuff I’ve done. The problem is that writing about stuff I learnt takes a long time, and I usually never finish them. Also I rarely do anything special, so there is just an overall lack of post.
So to compensate I’ll just write this weekly bullshit stuff, where I can yap about random stuff that I’ve thought throughout the week. I say weekly, but it probably won’t be exactly weekly, knowing myself.
Anyways, here we are.
School
I’m know 2 weeks in to this semester. I have one hell of a schedule (9 classes, 5 clubs, 1 lab intern, 1 miscellaneous), but I’m still alive. Hopefully I’m still alive until the end of the semester. Everyone who sees my timetable was always shocked and asked if this was physically possible, which is understandable.
Honestly, 9 classes is hard to achieve even if you want to, as there is a high chance that multiple classes open at the same time, forcing you to pick one. However, by some miracle, this hasn’t happened to me. I was able to pretty much squeeze in everything in a way that no two classes overlapped with each other.
As to whether this is physically possible, I’m somehow managing a schedule of sleeping at 2am and waking up at 9am. This alone makes it possible to survive every day of the week without crashing out at least once. Also, know that I wake up at 9 even on the weekends, I have around a total of 10 hours of more time to do stuff, and that’s actually really nice.
Other than that there’s not much going around at school, since the semester just started.
Oh, and as a default I don’t eat breakfast and lunch on weekdays. Too busy.
Also, programming languages and analysis is extremely fun and I strongly recommend everyone to listen to it. You will be enlightened.
Club Activities
So I’m doing 5 clubs. This by itself isn’t much of a problem, however, this year I’m doing a band and actually going to perform. This makes a huge difference.
I was planning to play in a band starting this year. I planned two sessions with the keyboard because I did play the piano at some point, but for some reason my friend persuaded me to join a third session as the guitar. Mind you, I’ve never properly played the guitar before.
Now, I’m not a fan of ruining other peoples lives, so I somehow had to figure out the guitar. Turns out this wasn’t all that hard, as the guitar TAB wasn’t too hard. I probably managed to crunch in about 9 hours of practice this week, and managed to memorize 4 minutes out of the 6 minute song, while playing at decent speed. I’m still making mistakes all the time though. Hopefully an extra few hours will solve that.
This is my first time playing in a band, so I’m extremely nervous of ruining the performance. Hopefully that doesn’t happen.
Other than the band, the only other club I’m actively participating in is POSCAT. Not much has happened yet, other than the fact that I am know addicted to gambling and the club room basically became one of my seniors practice range for making cocktails. I like cocktails, so I’m not complaining.
Poker
Recently, a saying that the P in POSCAT stands for Poker. I didn’t know how to play, but the ex-president of the club taught me, and know I am addicted.
When we play poker here, we bet real money (not a lot though, otherwise it becomes real gambling) to avoid trolling. Around my second time playing, I managed to win around 50000 won. The dopamine was insane.
After that though, I’m at a constant loss. It’s not like I keep getting terrible starting hands. It’s the fact that when I get a good starting hand, there exists some other person with a slightly better one. In fact, just the other day I was holding a flush, but I lost to another flush because they were holding a queen. The shock was something I have never felt before.
Still, although I am losing money, it’s not a huge amount, and pulling something like a straight is extremely satisfying. Also there is a slight chance of winning more money, and thus I have become addicted to this. No other source of pure dopamine is left.
Don’t gamble.
Problem Solving
I’m not doing much of PS these days, other than team practices and Codeforces. The reason is 1) 9 classes can kill a person and 2) turns out there are a lot more fun stuff other than PS.
I still enjoy PS, and would like to further study, but know I’m more in a state of doing it casually rather than competitively, as I would like to do a lot more during university. PS just eats up way to much time if you go at it seriously. As for ICPC World Finals, before coming to university I thought that I had to go there, but know I feel like it’s fine if I don’t. There are a lot stuff to do other than that anyway.
I’m still going to aim for APAC though. This one is like, really possible. Also next years APAC is in Tokyo, so I can go to Japan to buy more manga.
Also I suck at Codeforces. Last one I solved 1 problem (Div 1+2) and got around -150. I don’t really care anymore, as I’ve got plenty of stuff to worry about and I really don’t want to be stressed about something so small.
Lab Intern
I’ve started doing a lab intern sort of thing with my friend at the FPC lab, where people study about precision and errors in math libraries along with programming languages. Not much has happened and I still don’t know much as I just started. Still, learning about floating point numbers is very interesting, as it’s something that’s happening all the time on my computer, but something that I’ve never really given much thought about.
I met up with the people in the lab, including the professor, and we had lunch and talked about stuff. One topic was about how almost all CS professors were in the AI field, and there was a serious lack of professors who worked in the theoretical field. Another was about how whenever I advertised or appealed about a subject or topic, people would run away from that. Strange, because I speak the truth and the truth only.
Hopefully as time progresses, I’ll have more to talk about the lab intern stuff.
AI
I plan to do the undergraduate research program again this year. Only this time, I plan on dabbling with AI.
I never liked AI research, as to me it felt like the “research” was just taking some giant pre-trained LLM and tweaking it a little to achieve a slightly better performance. Like, what is the point? It’s not like there’s some theoretical, or even intuitive justification of the model. It’s literally just, we tried this, and it turned out to be okay. I just didn’t see the meaning in that.
Nonetheless, AI itself is very interesting, although frustrating to use. The main frustration is that I have no idea of “why” things turn out the way they do. If things don’t work well, I can only guess the reason. As someone who is into math and theoretical CS, this makes me extremely uncomfortable.
So, I would like to do AI research, a proper research hopefully, such that I can better understand what’s going on in the AI world, and also hopefully get some better insight of what is actually going inside the model, what is happening inside what people consider a black box. My ultimate goal is to either find or develop some theoretical foundation, as currently there seems to be little to none.
Of course, I myself don’t know much about AI, so I’m teaming up with my roommate, who is also interested in AI, and a friend from POSCAT (Fixed from the museum post). I strongly argue that Fixed is currently one of the top 2 most skilled 2nd year in AI, and without her I’ve got pretty much 0 hope in this.
People?
Not sure what to call this section.
I said I was going to try a new club this year, but I ended up not doing so, for a number of reasons which I feel are obvious. Still, I did meet some of the freshman who enrolled this year.
In fact, the freshman at POSCAT and the people participating in the study at PLUS are extremely skilled, like better than I am. This is good news, and the future of POSTECH is looking bright. Looks like I can finally retire now.
Other than that, nothing much. I feel like I’ve gotten closer to the main people at POSCAT (thanks to poker), which is nice.
Money
As I have talked about in may UGRP post, I managed to earn some money, but the more the better. So I am doing a tutoring program at my school, which would earn me about 200000 won per month. Should be enough to fund myself a slightly better meal. At the same time I’m slightly regretting my choices, because that in of itself eats up quite a lot of my time.
School definitely is fun, but I’m so going to decrease the amount of classes I’m taking next semester.
Anyways, that’s all from me, hopefully this continues to next week. Cheers.