well, one day i will write about my love for lasercutters but for now

pi day party

held a party which surprised me in many ways, including the pie. this is possibly the most photogenic thing i’ve ever made ??? normally i make janky s*t since i usually don’t enjoy the process, just the result, so it is satisfying to have this result i’m unreservedly proud of

(slowly unlearning and learning that cooking and baking from scratch can be fun instead of stressful time eater)

recipe

I used this recipe https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/41719/apple-berry-pie/

but substitute berries with frozen berries: i microwaved for a minute or two, drained 80% of the excess juice.

(also left out the butter. also used store bought crust. very impressed by my roommate who made crust from scratch)

Basically it’s mixing sugar, starch, and some cinnamon in a bowl, then slicing apples and putting in some berries, stirring it, letting it sit for 20 minutes, and that’s some it for delicious pie filling (some baking required).

After that it’s just pour into a pie tin with crust and then put another crust on top. That’s where you can have fun! See 3d printed cookie cutters below

 

3d printed the cookie cutters

Source files

• https://makerworld.com/en/models/787165-alphabet-cookie-cutters#profileId-725035 -> Letters
• https://makerworld.com/en/models/79399-number-cookie-cutter#profileId-83881 -> Numbers
• https://makerworld.com/en/models/465683-pi-cookie-cutter#profileId-392279 -> pi the file has pi flipped so have to be careful to flip the crust again after cutting out

I scaled X-Y and not Z.

Rinsed and then used to cut into crust.

top

the satisfying thing about dough is you can just fix your mistakes by smushing the dough back together heh

bake

So tasty. Oh yea I made another one recently.

second π

This is second pie, I put butter in but it’s not noticeable in the taste tbh.

Crust

After baking

blergh part of blog

this blog is unapologetically my messy life and not a Ycombinator resume blog, sorry if you are looking for interesting technical details

[THOUGH. good reminder I should blog about stuff from work, like powershell aliases, excel macros, regex differences between languages, vs code’s interpreter vs jupyter, streamlit/stlite/pyodide, working with uv, python packaging, writing code architecture instead of scripts, working with copilot, etc.]

a general feeling of: focusing on what makes me happy for accomplishing rather than what others think. realizing that it is fleeting (even people in my daily life will fade in and out, let alone cred on the internet), but also that career success is not a zero-sum game. my only path to success is does not rest on going viral or citations or even solving world hunger. success is simply following my values while still having enough to achieve my goals and support those around me and finding the inner peace in that. a stillness in no longer thrashing around wanting to have what other people have

i mean i can say this now that i have had a steady income for half a year for basically the first time in my life now so no shade on past me lol very valid to want what other people had at the time

of course still recognizing all the fortune that led me to live where i do and be born where i was to the family i was in; as some youtube person once said, no matter how smart, resourceful, talented, and skilled someone is, if they are born in say rural Botswana, they will never become a billionaire.

we are made and unmade on the shoulders of not just giants but all the people around us

*gets off soapbox, creakily, since i’ve probably told the same story twice to everyone i know*

oh technically non technical topics, buying my own textbooks with my sweet sweet disposable income (which is another blergh in itself, wild to go between hanging out with student income / grad student equivalent income after subtracting out people you’re supporting, and the other half of my mit network lol. but remember! embrace being rich and all the advantages life has given me. “be who you are because everyone else is already taken” –i forget author. i’ve lived the, my life is a tool for greater cause, strategy and it ate me alive. time to shift strategies), decorating my cubicle / planning to with this delicious neon led rope stuff, mapping robots, and fancy electronic bikes

OH RIGHT FANCY EBIKES and how they break that’s a long story lol

welp looking back at my last post where i was like “i’m done with this activism / social work stuff, it has clearly been terrible for me, time to focus on fun technical problems and work and make money”

WELP

turns out i’m a federal employee and my workplace went from happy chill nerds to hostile workplace in the space of 3 days. like getting daily emails in my inbox saying “you suck, why don’t you quit” “if you don’t quit we’re going to fire you” except it’s all my coworkers and my supervisors and no one knows what’s going on or where we’re getting orders from (hint: some rich f*kwad probably)

i have so many thoughts on this, but i’ve just been messaging friends and writing angsty notes to myself and such instead of idk getting activism stuff done. also i have been actively trying not to get activism stuff done i guess. keep an even keel

is this how i felt about COVID in 2020? probably. but then i felt alienated from my coworkers. here i at least feel everyone is in the same boat (in some sense. some much worse than others)

i.e. there’s a high likelihood i’m going to lose the one person i work with on a daily basis to this for no reason other than random cruelty

yea let’s put the “we should traumatize all employees” person in charge of HR, A++ qualification

ugh in the meantime i still need to get science done but i really just wanted to sink into the cool technical problems for like a year or two, really, truly

i mean in an abstract sense life is still great. people would kill to be in my position. i’m not sure why i cannot let this rest and have dropped all my side projects and even interview prep (which now of all times , when stable government job turned into harassment and random firings job, should be a time to keep going). i have been trying to balance it out at least. i did not sink my all into a petition for vought (see: “we should tramatize all employees”) so i only lost one night of sleep when he was confirmed rather than two weeks. and i was crushed but the next day picked my next goal to focus on.

ah. one day i’ll stop being an angry person and just be happy. some day.

that’s enough for 4 am today i think. need to give a work presentation tomorrow, write actual data science / machine learning code so i can be where i want to be in 3 months or so (idk on the way to a publication?) which tbh i haven’t felt paid well enough to focus on (and also working completely alone made me super grumpy)

anywho

oh yea happy very late vday, this made me laugh:

https://ml-valentines.github.io

nerds, the lot of them

2025 goals

re: blissfully ignoring the outside world, that is my goal for 2025: be a rich d*bag. something about earning lots of money and donating it. turn a blind eye to … misery … or something …

… okay i don’t think i could go so far as to work on promoting tobacco but there’s probably stuff in between like “study illicit massage parlor industry and be depressed about humanity” and “figure out how to circumvent climate change regulations to expand oil and gas drilling”. otherwise i don’t think i can be useful in 2025-2029. thanks sexism. on the other hand still super proud i got to vote for two different women presidential candidates in my life time !!!! one day it will happen. even if i have to do it myself heh.

running

i guess that will be a goal. first though, finish my app, “have you run as much as my hamster”.com. my hamster ursula probably runs 1-3 miles every night heh

anger as an identity

I think a lot my identity was built around anger. it made me angry as a kid to travel and see someone younger than me, missing limbs, in rags traveling around on essentially a furniture moving dolly begging for money. meanwhile i had flown across the world.

Why would the world be so cruel and unjust? it really made me mad. this anger drove me past any insecurity and anxiety and self-hatred to keep going. i didn’t believe i could get into MIT, but i applied in part because yes, i wanted to change the world.

I didn’t believe i could get into grad school, but i applied because — okay actually i just applied because i’d be paid the same but actually get health insurance. it didn’t have much to do with anger lol

Anyway, anger in various forms has driven me through life. In some sense, anger is part of my identity, and I’m afraid to let go of it. I fear that if I stop being angry, I’ll stop trying to change the world.

But having anger at the world as a part of my identity, makes coming to terms with my inability to change it rather painful. Or makes it harder to see the small bits I do change and the change that happens over time.

I want to give myself permissions to be happy, to be confident that I won’t ever stop trying to change the world.

My wild implementation plan is to go to the opposite extreme and focus on being a rich douchebag and/or having tech bro optimism (that tech will fix the world), idk lol it’ll be a fun year

reflections on undergrad me: pep talk needed

i rewatched my hexapods video https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=qTh-OGA_LeM

(context: for the 2.007 class which is a robot competition, i elected to go do my own thing and build a hexapod, because … idk i wanted a dancing hexapod)

and WOW i can hear all the lack of confidence and downplaying and a little bit of the misery (that’s probably more my own memory though) in the (rather mumbled) voiceover. and reading my old instructables. i actually did a ton. it’s not as much as i wanted but it’s still a ton. it helps me hear it in my own voice right now.

when i watch a video of 2025 me in ten years, i want to come away with a sense of this person is super competent, confident, articulate, and rightfully proud of their own achievements and technical skills