The Glow of Summer Has Faded, Now...

The glow of summer has faded, now… and the moonlight jellies carry on toward the great unknown.

The Great Unknown

It has been more than two months since I last wrote a blog post, and three or four months since my last Life Record. Now that it is already the end of July, and I happen to have had a remarkably eventful month, I decided to write it all down.

At the beginning of July, I was “fortunate” enough to be among the first people to finish a pile of CRs. On a whim, I bought a ticket to Chongqing and set out on the first solo trip of my life. To be honest, I was not happy with the trip. Traveling alone only made someone who already tends to wake up at noon even more undisciplined. I really admire badada in this respect. Each day, I had only a few hours in the afternoon to explore. After two years of undergraduate life, my physical condition has deteriorated dramatically. I am more fragile than the chocolate shell of a Chocliz ice cream bar: more than ten minutes in the sun makes me dizzy and nauseous. Chongqing is famously a furnace, so I spent all three days feeling as if I were about to throw up. I also grew up in the waterways of Jiangnan, and every generation of my family is thoroughly from Jiangsu or Zhejiang. I simply cannot handle the numbing spice of Sichuan and Chongqing cuisine. On my first night there, I ordered wontons in chili oil for delivery, and my stomach hurt so badly that I could not sleep. After that I did not dare try any spicy Chongqing food, which of course meant missing quite a few local delicacies. That was a shame. Throughout the trip, I was also harassed by someone who made me physically uncomfortable, and I do not want to say more about that here. In short, the trip was unpleasant and left me rather wary of solo travel. Tomorrow, though, I am heading to Quanzhou and Fuzhou with my bestie.

After returning to Shanghai, I got back to work in the lab. Finals week and all the major course projects had held up my research progress, and I was completely lost in my first meeting back. Thanks to a senior student’s guidance, I quickly found my footing and caught up. I then spent about ten days completing a fairly important component. My senior became busy rushing for the HPCA deadline, however, which left me with another gap of almost ten days. During those ten days, I became obsessed with Stardew Valley. That is also where the title of this post comes from. I had actually played Stardew Valley a long time ago, but it did not appeal to me then, and I quit after a few days. Seeing Yitiaoren so addicted to it made me decide to try again, and just like that, I fell back into it. This time I completely understood what makes the game so wonderful, perhaps because of my state of mind at the moment. Last year I loved playing Honor of Kings, so a laid-back farming game that still required looking up guides on Xiaohongshu did not interest me. But after something very unpleasant happened at the beginning of this year, I never opened Honor of Kings again. Come to think of it, I started playing in third grade, which makes it ten years now. Over those ten years, I have picked it up and put it down many times, each time quitting because of something unpleasant. Stardew Valley, in my view, asks for a whole free evening: you need to clear your mind and immerse yourself completely. With last year’s intense workload, followed by the double assault of coursework and research in the first half of this year, I clearly could not do that. Now I have been lucky enough to find a quiet gap, and my mind is much more at peace. Before summer break, I was constantly anxious. I hoped to push my project forward at full speed over the summer, submit it in September, and use the experience to apply directly for summer research. I soon realized, though, that systems work cannot be completed overnight. My current project has gone through several major refactors and has only now begun to resemble a proper framework. It matters more to make the work solid before submitting it. There is no point rushing summer research applications either. SJTU and Fudan were both added to a blacklist a few days ago, which may mean that getting a J-1 visa will be difficult. If remote work is the only option, the barrier will naturally be somewhat lower. For now, I should focus on the work in front of me. My thoughts about the future have also begun to waver. Recently, HR representatives from several very well-known companies reached out to me, and we had a few conversations. On July 19, I also visited the WAIC exhibition and came away with the strong feeling that if I do not claim a share of this pie soon, there may be none left to claim.

badada and I, two conference freeloaders, sweeping up souvenirs everywhere

Of course, I still have not figured out whether I want to enter industry and make money. I was born into a family that is not particularly short of money, so I do not have much to worry about materially. Yet since childhood, I have had an almost obsessive desire for financial independence. It was also why, when filling out my Gaokao university choices, I decisively gave up PKU’s Yan Garden, which had been my spiritual anchor throughout senior year. As for academia, I am deeply pessimistic about it and have no desire to linger there. The situation changes too quickly; even the direction of the next month is completely unknown. I love encountering new things and am always willing to try them. I love mathematics, especially algebra, which may be the only traditional thing I truly like. I work on systems, but I am completely uninterested in traditional systems and do not want to touch them. I have no regrets at all about choosing computer science as my major. As someone who loves being wherever the action is, how could I not respond enthusiastically to the trend of the era? Looking ahead, WAIC left me very interested in embodied AI and world models. Perhaps I could move into building the relevant infrastructure someday. As for my current multimodal work, I still cannot see what purpose image2 serves beyond pleasing humans. But after reading a blog post, I came to feel that AI4fun is itself a deeply idealistic pursuit. I used to think OpenAI and Gemini should abandon it entirely. In fact, G seems to have already done so. On second thought, though, it has every reason to exist. I seem to have wandered off topic again. The final day of summer in Stardew Valley is the Dance of the Moonlight Jellies. At that moment, I felt as though I had found an anchor for my life right now: I must keep moving toward the great unknown.

It really is beautiful. Sadly, I have no spouse in the game; apparently, if you do, you can watch the jellies dance together with your beloved.

From July 12 to July 24, I attended a computer science summer school jointly organized by SJTU, Tsinghua, and PKU. Being rather physically fragile, I took part in almost none of the off-campus visits and only attended a few classes with mandatory check-ins. The quality of the material varied wildly. Overall, it felt as if SJTU had thrown the courses together merely to tick a box, and I was not very satisfied. During the summer school, however, I met several students from the first-year Yao Class and the second-year information science program. Among them were winners of two NOI gold medals, a provincial Gaokao champion, and people whose spoken English was even better than mine. In my first nineteen years, the chance of encountering people like this was no more than 0.1%. They were all nice and outgoing, and I really enjoyed talking with them. I also look forward to possible academic collaboration in the future.

🥰🥰🥰

This summer, I also completed my first paper submission. After radically reworking my machine learning course project, I tossed the result into the AAAI lottery. My wish is simple: as long as it is not rejected early, that counts as a victory.

And of course, there were the World Cup and F1. Continuing a tradition I started in 2018, I watched the showdown between Spain and Argentina. I have liked Cristiano Ronaldo since 2016. Since practically everyone in my WeChat Moments supports Messi, I hardly even dare admit that, so naturally I was not rooting for Argentina to win. I have also supported Manchester City since 2020. I am very fond of Rodri and De Bruyne, which made Spain versus Belgium painful to watch, and I like Pep Guardiola as well. Unsurprisingly, then, I was supporting Spain. I first noticed Pedri during the 2022 World Cup. Although I am not a Barcelona fan, I really like Pedri himself. A few days ago, during his China tour, I went to Suzhou and saw him in person, which made me incredibly excited. As for F1, the final race before the summer break finally ended the day before yesterday. Lando at last secured his first Grand Prix victory as LN1, and I was delighted. Ferrari’s strategy team, meanwhile, remains as disastrous as ever.

Pedri really is so handsome.

Overall, I have been fairly relaxed this summer. On the one hand, I did reasonably well in my coursework last semester; on the other, I have also made substantial progress in research. I hope I can maintain this state through the rest of the summer and keep moving toward the great unknown.

Finally, when my bestie and I were making travel plans, we were both so lazy that we kept putting everything off and still had no decent itinerary even today. That led me to begin developing Vagebot. Feel free to follow the project. I will finish and open-source it as soon as possible!