Preface
This piece is a record and reflection of my life from June 17, 2024 to June 23, 2024.
I went to Hong Kong to attend the Google AI+Web3 event and met many colleagues from my team in person; experienced sleeping in an internet cafe due to not being able to book a room; decided to adjust my life rhythm according to the 5am Club philosophy; started learning Rust for the second time; and many other interesting things happened.
Hong Kong Trip
The most interesting thing this week was going to Hong Kong to attend Google’s Web+AI event. Our project had some talks and roundtable discussions there, and I also had the opportunity to visit Google’s Hong Kong office (and got some souvenirs). After working remotely, it’s actually quite rare to have the chance to meet colleagues face-to-face. For this event, everyone in our group gathered in Hong Kong, except for one colleague in the United States who couldn’t make it. We had dinner together, played Texas Hold’em, and even continued with a stroll in Shenzhen afterwards.
Interestingly, because my colleague Ares from Hangzhou and I didn’t book a room in advance, we were still looking for a hotel around Times Square in Causeway Bay after midnight. We ended up choosing to stay overnight at an internet cafe. Fortunately, we had pillows from Google, which made it quite comfortable to sleep.
It suddenly reminded me of the experience of rushing to submit course projects before deadlines when I was studying in Hong Kong, and then buying a bunch of snacks and beer with my group members to chat by Victoria Harbour and watch the sunrise. I also recalled following the Pokémon GO map to unlock various attractions when traveling to Thailand with friends, and asking a taxi driver in Qingdao to drive around randomly, taking me to interesting places. These are all fascinating life experiences.
Although I’m a planner who usually makes meticulous plans, I also very much enjoy this randomness in life. Perhaps years later, I won’t remember what interesting speeches were given at this Google talk, but I’ll certainly never forget the memory of spending a night in an internet cafe.
5am Club Plan
Robin Sharma has a book called “The 5am Club,” which proposes the concept of waking up at five in the morning to engage in self-improvement learning and exercise to achieve the best state. Although for someone like me who often stays up until three or four in the morning or even later, it might be easier to sleep at 5am, I still long for this new lifestyle.
I had a long period of extreme self-discipline in college, sleeping at one or two and waking up at six or seven, seemingly with endless energy and time. During my postgraduate studies in Hong Kong, due to the anxiety of changing majors and academic pressure, I would wake up at six every day to secure a seat in the library, only returning to my rented room close to 11 pm, repeating this cycle day after day, yet finding joy in it.
But perhaps because much of the daytime is naturally occupied after starting work, this habit was quickly broken. To have more complete time for myself, I started sleeping later, but also waking up later. There were periods when I maintained a good state, but it was also easy to fall into some bad cycles: poor study state at night -> anxiety -> revenge bedtime procrastination -> waking up even later the next day -> low efficiency during the day -> even worse study state at night.
So I want to try and challenge myself starting this week. It doesn’t necessarily have to be strictly five o’clock, just relatively earlier, shifting the late-night study time to the morning, adjusting to start work around 11 am.
Being motivated by the study vlogs of my neighbor “polebug”, I also gained some motivation to try new fields. So I’ve set myself some more interesting goals. The first thing I learn in the morning is something not directly related to work but that I’ve always wanted to experience, such as SwiftUI, Rust, and using langchain for some AI application development practices. This time I also plan to learn by getting hands dirty, directly starting some side projects or contributing PRs to open-source projects.
Learning Rust
As mentioned above, I plan to start learning Rust for the second time. The last time I started was in 2022, and I actually learned quite seriously for a while, following along and writing some demo projects, and even made study notes “pseudoyu/learn-rust”. However, there was indeed no application scenario in my work, so I’ve pretty much forgotten it all.
There’s a Rust enthusiast named Kally in our group who kept recommending it throughout our trips to Hong Kong and Shenzhen. He even made me download an introductory video from YouTube before I boarded the plane, which was indeed quite sleep-inducing.
However, I’m seriously planning to relearn it and start writing some of my own projects. Currently, my idea is to rewrite a Go project that uses RSSHub to subscribe to multiple platform information sources in Rust, and see if there are any interesting open-source projects to participate in.
At present, I’m watching some basic videos from YouTube channels recommended by Kally, as well as “Rust Programming First Course” from Geek Time that I bought a long time ago. Rust, let’s go!
Telegram Channel 1000 Subscribers
My channel has reached 1000 subscribers! I feel like I’m expressing less and less on Twitter or other platforms, and prefer to ramble in the channel.
Actually, the desire to share has always been there. Sometimes it’s a dialogue with myself, sometimes it’s staying up late talking with people around me, and more often, it’s wanting to share with more people to get some feedback. However, as someone who has closed their WeChat Moments, I seem to have become unaccustomed to sharing these things with those around me. So for a long time, Twitter became this outlet. And this year, the readers of my blog and the followers of my channel have slowly become the objects of sharing. I feel that under the current rhythm, it seems that listening to people carefully, thinking, and responding has become a precious thing, and I often remind myself not to forget this point.
Thank you all for listening to me carefully.
Other Things
Mac
I put the newly received Google Cloud sticker on my MBP. Collection completed!
In the middle of the week, I discovered a paranormal event with my Mac. When software like Slack/Zoom opened the microphone, the cursor would go out of control, clicking the menu bar in the upper left corner at a frequency of 2-3 seconds, as if it was being remotely controlled. At other times, everything was normal. I went to Apple and spent quite a while with a tech support guy to locate that it was caused by the newly installed Bartender alternative, iBar. According to the comments section, Barbee also has this problem. You can refer to this if you encounter similar issues.
The tech guy said my reproduction, troubleshooting ideas, and operation proficiency were good enough to work there. Apple users are indeed adaptable.
Adding to the fact that one of my computers recently had its screen damaged by our other little cat, Fanfan, at home, I decided to spend a fortune to buy an Apple Care for my MBP14, which just passed its one-year anniversary on July 3rd. The Apple guy told me that if you buy it within a year, you can extend it for three more years on this basis, which seems very cost-effective, equivalent to an extra year!
Recruitment
By the way, here’s a recruitment post from my company: Work With RSS3/Job Description
We’re currently recruiting for DevOps Engineer/AI Engineer/Blockchain Engineer positions. It’s remote work with a great work atmosphere. Feel free to ask me if you have any questions. Looking forward to being colleagues in the future.
Interesting Things and Objects
Input
Although most interesting inputs are automatically synchronized in the “Yu’s Life” Telegram channel, I’ll still select a few to list here. It feels more like a newsletter.
Books
- Solaris, similar to the setting of The Three-Body Problem, Solaris orbits around a binary star system. But unlike the descent or salvation in The Three-Body Problem, Solaris might not actually care about Earth and the tiny humans on it at all. It’s just humans’ one-sided self-centeredness, even wanting to change it with their own “nobler” thoughts and values. Exploration is nothing more than hypocrisy.
- Normal People, I really like this British drama. These days, while reading other books, I suddenly thought of this one and plan to read the original novel.
- What My Bones Know, I read about half of it last year. These days, thinking about family and psychological healing issues, I flipped through a few pages before bed again.
- Atlas Shrugged, a gift from a reader, I’ve started reading it.
Collections
Articles
Videos
- vlog #60 | Female Programmer’s After-Work Study Record | Chewing on Celestia’s Documentation | Modular Blockchain | Daily English Practice | Small Desktop Renovation | Got New Equipment
- Baldur’s Gate 3: Surpassing Its Predecessors, Revolutionary Yet a Perfect Continuation in Some Aspects [Just Know How to Play Games]
- vlog #61 | Female Programmer’s After-Work Study Record | When You’re in a Chaotic State, Go Study | RUST | Reading “The Courage to Be Disliked” | Changes Exercise Brought Me | Daily English Learning | TEDTalk
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