I've been thinking about...

head empty, all thoughts

I have had a lot of free time these past two weeks, my evenings thus far desolate and deprived of much activity, although that promises to change again, soon, and slowly but surely I will return to a level of busyness that I enjoy, or so I hope. In the meantime, though, I’ve been reading and rotting around the apartment, mostly, and, of course, I’ve been thinking, which is what one tends to do in the empty days. In particular, I’ve noticed how many of the sentences in my daily journaling have started with “I’ve been thinking about…”—here are three of those things.

racing to idle

In the world of computer architecture, there’s this idea called “race to idle,” which is to say: in many cases, the lowest-energy way of completing a task is to get through it as fast as you can, and then to drop into a low-power idle state, where the processor is doing nothing. This is for a number of reasons; a large part, for example, is that it is easier to turn parts of a CPU off in an idle state than to dynamically change the voltage and the frequency while maintaining full-chip function. Of course, things are constantly changing in the computer architecture world as people constantly try to produce better performance; heterogeneous architectures make it possible for us to physically differentiate cores, meaning that it might actually be better to run tasks for longer on an “efficiency core”, and, besides, dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) has gotten a lot better in the past decade or two.

The idea of “race to idle” is really interesting to me. It’s the inverse of an idea you see in other fields, which is that it’s generally better to stay at a constant level of performance; if, for example, you’re traveling a distance x over time t, and your energy expenditure is proportional to the square of your velocity, it’s best to set your velocity to (x/t) throughout. I also think it’s a better model of how we work as humans, save for some ramp-up and ramp-down costs; if I’m not working, I’m spending a lot less energy than if I’m thinking about anything at all, even if I’m not thinking very hard.

All this setup is to say: I think I’m really used to racing to idle, and it’s hard to get used to a different style of working, especially as I’m still getting ramped up. In sophomore fall, labs for 6.009 (Fundamentals of Programming) used to come out on Saturday mornings, and I used to just sit down at my desk and not stop coding until I had finished it, before finally deciding what to get for a late lunch, and then I wouldn’t touch the class for most of the rest of the week. (It was COVID fall, so, you know, not much else was happening.) This is not only a very weird and specific paradigm of work to have built up, but also a behavior that feels less acceptable at work, because, well, it’s still work hours, but I can’t work in high gear for the whole work day either, so…it’s weird. Or, it feels weird. And, instead of chilling out in the office, I’m doing a lot of busy-waiting,¹ which doesn’t feel particularly healthy either.

This is probably a transient feeling; I’ll get busier at work, and I’ll come to miss the idle cycles, but it does feel important to me, as a paradigmatic shift in how I work—no more constant breaks and twelve-hour sprints to finish a project followed by a day of rest, but something more paced out and more complex, and something I’ll have to adapt to so that I can also feel efficient here.

proof by contradiction

One thought I have had recently is that, since childhood, I have constantly been looking for proof that I’m not as good as I think I am. This tendency comes from two sources, I think: first, I’ve always really disliked people who act like they are smarter than they actually are, for no immediately obvious reason, so I try to avoid that as much as I can. Second, I grew up in South Dakota, and so, naturally, I assumed this sort of underdog posture when leaving the state; I assumed going to MIT would be a huge shock where suddenly I wasn’t the biggest fish in the pond anymore, and I would need to adjust my self-assessment accordingly.

Mostly, though, adjusting to MIT was fine. I wouldn’t say that my years at MIT went swimmingly, per se, but the difficulties certainly weren’t in the academics. Classes were challenging, sure, but I survived most of them and did well in a few, and it wasn’t bad. I kept waiting for something to burst my bubble, to contradict my gradually growing belief in myself, and…nothing did, I guess.

At some point, I started actively looking for things that might put me back on solid ground. I tried taking 93 units of classes in a semester—it was hard, but I made it through. I tried conducting an orchestra for the first time—same deal. I tried walking 63 miles from Kittery, Maine to Cambridge, Massachusetts. It definitely put me on solid ground, but I did it, nonetheless. Instead of shrinking, my ego has grown, and grown, and soon I will truly believe there is nothing I cannot do.

The reason I’ve been thinking about this again recently is that there were many moments during this past school year where I truly thought I had finally been bested—there wasn’t the slightest possibility I would finish the MEng thesis.² Finally, the experiment would reveal that the emperor has no clothes, that I would fail to live up to something that I had expected of myself. That, too, failed to materialize. And, sure, I do also know my limits now, a lot better than I used to—I know, for example, that I really struggle to focus on and properly pace long-term projects, in part because of the “race to idle” mentality—but I still feel like overwhelmingly I have proved my disbelief in myself wrong, and I am simultaneously worried that my ego is going to explode and that something else is going to come along and finally put the nail in the coffin.

I don’t know. The attitude is a strange one; not clearly unhealthy, but not necessarily great, either. It’s not a growth mindset, per se, but a sort of “proof by contradiction” for a fixed one.³ It has the shadings of impostor syndrome, but the growth in my self-confidence has been too large to truly call it that. Regardless, it’s something I’ve noticed, and something I’ll be thinking about in the near- and maybe long-term as I continue to try and grow and contradict myself (very well then, I contradict myself. (I am large, I contain multitudes.)).

how life becomes poetry

For a very long time, I have been thinking about how one grows as a writer. In freshman year, when I was choosing to major in Writing, I remember my advisor at the time—also my philosophy professor—telling me: “Your writing skills are good enough. You should major in something like History or Literature, so you have something to write about.”

As time has gone on, I have continuously thought about that advice. I don’t regret not having taken it; that is to say, I am glad I did the Writing degree and not something else, because I did get a lot out of it. But, when I finally took my first Literature class in senior year, I really loved it, while also feeling that I might not have been emotionally mature enough to appreciate that same class just a few years before. I chose my major when I was seventeen; I don’t know if that version of me would have appreciated contemporary plays, or modern poetry—certainly, I know that I had not started to really enjoy art museums yet.

Nowadays, the trade between reading and writing comes in waves and phases. In the summer after junior year, I finally settled into reading again, and since then it’s been a back-and-forth: I fill myself with words from books I’ve read, and then I drain words onto the page in the form of poetry, blog posts, plays, or some combination of all three. The most recent phase has been a reading one: in the past few weeks, I’ve torn through four books, between two books of poetry, a memoir, and a novel.

The thing I am yet to understand is how living and reading and all these things actually become writing. I have this overwhelming sense I need to “live more,” but every moment I spend observing is a moment I spend outside the moment of living. I have this overwhelming sense I need to read more, but burying myself in a book on the bus feels like I am setting up this impenetrable barrier between me and the world I am supposed to be learning about.

I often don’t even know what, specifically, I’m gaining from living or reading or learning for writing, except that I am doing it. I go to plays, and Sounders games, and I buy a scarf, and I spend twenty to thirty minutes waiting at a bus stop at 9:30 PM after choir rehearsal, watching the people mill about at the intersection of 85th and Greenwood. Sometimes, I read on the bus, sometimes I listen to podcasts, and sometimes I do look around and see what’s happening. I do these things and I don’t know what is shaping me and what isn’t and if I’m growing at all, except that I am getting older and that I continue to desire to write.

Still, there are moments that do catch my attention, like the man throwing bread in a square where the pigeons have already left, or the person handing out flyers on the street corner dancing for the bus driver, and I suppose I will continue to pay attention to this world, and I will continue to write, and maybe something will come of it. Maybe, just maybe.

1. This is also a term of art, so to speak, although I think the implication is clear from the name. It refers to a tight loop where you just keep checking if a condition is true, preventing any other work from happening on the system and preventing the system from going to sleep. This is bad, for obvious reasons.

A related idea to this is the difference between polling and interrupts. In computer systems, there are two ways of methods of processing events: you can either periodically ask “hey, got any news?” (polling) or have a newsie punch you in the face anytime there’s something new (interrupt). Interrupts tend to be preferred despite their complexity, partially for the “race to idle” characteristic. if you have to wake up every thirty seconds and refresh your email, it’s going to be worse than if you go to bed and have your phone alarm wake you if something important comes in, or so the theory goes. (Of course, this can go horribly wrong, e.g., if the newsie gets a bunch of news at once that spawns more news, or if one of the fifteen newsies you have is lying to you. This is called an interrupt storm.)

Man, I like and think about computer systems even more than I thought I did. I should get that checked out sometime.

2. In fact, I texted one of my best friends in late July “I am like, 90% confident I am not going to graduate.” This was one of at least five texts (and probably more) I sent my friend to that effect over the course of March through July, not to mention the dozens of in-person conversations I had with other friends with the same idea. My MEng degree was awarded today, Wednesday, September 18th.

3. I think my mindset is unusually fixed, despite literally having grown so much over time. I often think about my very first UROP advisor, who told me “in research, some people have it and some people don’t. You have it.” This stuck with me in a way that makes it hard to really break my understanding of the world out of that rigid binary which always leaves one wondering, “well, do I have it?”