Wednesday, October 19

[soid]

 Woke up around 9:10am. I ate a large breakfast since I was going to a dentist and didn’t know for how long I wouldn’t eat. Large but not healthy: bread, Bulgarian eggplant dip from Trader Joe’s, a boiled egg, coffee, some scary sugar cookie that I took from the school buffet yesterday.

Then going to the dentist. The subway was crowded, the next train was 7 minutes away. Then that train was full and just passed non-stop. The next train picked us up, but we stopped in the tunnel for another 5-10 minutes. Twitter said something happened to the signal in uptown. So I was 20 minutes late to the dentist, and they told me they started another patient, but I could wait, so I waited till 12pm. 

Then the doctor gave me anesthesia, then there was blood; I closed my eyes. She put stitches on my gum. 20 minutes, paid $422. A step for a tooth implant. Then I felt like a dog that messed something up and got kicked, then it calmed down, and it just sits quietly looking into the void without understanding why it got kicked, feeling unfairness, why can’t the dog be just happy and joyful, and do whatever.

1:30pm Office Hours with Song. Quick question, quick answer.

2-4pm NLG seminar. Ethics of large language models. Someone mentioned that the paper I read the night before (Stochastic Parrots) was controversial and the author were let go from Google, prohibited from putting Google name on it. I thought it was a fine paper summarizing risks of language models; quite a strange story. A guest from OpenAI told us how they designed Dall-E to prevent showing gross stuff. Filtering training data, queries classifiers of various aspects. It's neat they didn't just make a cool model and brag about how great it was, but tried to prevent its misuse.

4pm I didn't eat lunch on time after dentist, so I got quite hungry later. Also couldn't eat anything solid. Turns out it’s not easy to find a soup after 4pm. Walked around, finally found it at a deli. Chicken soup with very yellow broth. Yummy. I sat outside and ate the soup. This grim looking deli stairs down on the basement level, and many pretty and smart looking girls walking in and out with brown bag sandwiches in their hand.

5-7pm kicking it in the library. 

7-8:30pm went to a talk at Undergrad Math Society: Finite state automata and topological theories with defects. Let's see how topology can be married to computer science. There is a construction that makes an FSA into a vector space of finite dimensions over a boolean ring (B-semimodule, B is a boolean ring) by exploiting the fact that some substring in regular language can be repeated. Then somehow they get a minimal unique FSA from that space, and then I got lost, but somehow we got to cobordisms of low dimensions. 

I got hungry late cause I ate late lunch, and then I read the instruction given to me by the dentist: it said I should have relaxed today. Oh, well, too late.

Bed by 2am, but thoughts-attack till after 3am despite feeling tired and sleepy.

Comments

[juan_gandhi]

How interesting. I mean, the topological view of FSA. I'd view it categorically. I thought the only application of topology to computing is Scott's topology.

And my condolences regarding the gum; did not they give you some vicodin?

[soid]

Scott's topology looks interesting, thanks. They found this FSA relation recently, but they still don't know how useful it can be; he did mention the categorical view, monoidal category something.
The gum didn't hurt, so there were no need in painkillers; just made me fatigued.