2025 Update

Website

Since the last last update when I decided to revive my neocities website, there has been a lot more activities. Unfortunately, due to low motivation and laziness, I have not been able to finish a number of blogs and microblogs … There are definitely a number of topics I want to explore but I am in a slump and need to make some changes in how I manage my time … to be more productive. I’ve been reading less blogs and articles so the LinkBlog is starting to look bare …

Academic Studies

Previously I mention that I lost a lot of my initial interest in the domain after the 3rd year of my studies and therefore decided to take a year-long break from my studies to pursue an internship in telecom. The experience was … boring … I loved having lunches and taking walks with the team but the work was dull.

Originally I was supposed to find a summer job before returning to school in the fall but due to my impatience, I ended up signing a 16 months contract with an enterprise who designs CPUs and GPUs … so I am placing my education on hold for another year …

To give more context, most of the summer jobs are posted in the winter. However, I started my job search in the fall where most of the long term interships are available. After being rejected from what I thought would be a decent chance to get into the government for the summer (I’ve interviewed with them in the past and did very well but this time, they rejected me on the first stage of the interview), I ended up applying to any jobs that sounded remotely interesting regardless of their lengths of work. That is how I ended up moving around 400km away from my hometown and also delaying my graduation. It is getting scary because it’s been so long since I’ve done any serious Mathematics. To those who studied Engineering, the Math you do is vastly different from the Math I take, I know this as a student who had to start from year 1 despite having completed a degree in Computer Science which is way closer to Math than Engineering is to Math. It does depend on your country and institution, but there is a huge difference between the Math for future Mathematicians-wannabes and everyone else. It is a bit weird to explain but in Canada, the Math major is split into two categories:

1. Math for those wishing to go to graduate school in Mathematics or do serious Math
2. Math for those who wish to study Mathematics but not necessary pursue higher education in the field

In the former, students are exposed to some concepts of real analysis in their first year and is very theoretical and proof heavy. There’s little computation in the program. In the latter, students are exposed to proofs from a course on Mathematical proofs but it is identical to what Computer Science students had to take at my alma mater. The program is more computational heavy and resembles the Math courses that CS and Engineers take but with a bit more emphasis on theory.

Meeting my friends before my move and seeing them graduate and starting graduate school made me miss Math a bit. Although I did lose a lot of my initial interest in the subject, I do still want to look into the subject a bit more. Perhaps I’ll review some stuff from linear algebra (you should definitely read Linear Algebra Done Right if you are interested in the theory aspect), read some entertaining Math books (i.e. Math Girls series), and look into Mathematics for Machine Learning or Robotics during my spare time.

What I’m Doing Right Now

As I mentioned, I’ll be working for another year at a company in their GPU division. I’m not doing anything exciting but it’s definitely way more exciting than my previous internship. I’ve been having fun reading their new test and verification framework and learning the internals of their GPUs including the hardware architecture and assembly, something I’m not too familiar with and outside of my expertise. Though, I only need to know at a high level of the various components of the GPUs and writing basic shaders in assembly for my role.

It has been exactly a year since I’ve seriously started to study French and I sure did overestimate my knowledge of the French grammar … While I learned a lot, my progress in the language has not been smooth. Considering languages is my weakest subject, my progress has been acceptable. For context, despite only speaking English fluently, I struggled to learn a single language which greatly impacted my academic performance. I actually have been provided a translator before when I was a kid, and I’ve been asked if I was international due to my poor English in Highschool.

The French language can be broken down into 3 categories or 6 levels if we follow CEFR (Common European Framework of Reference). I stupidly chickened out of A2 (advanced beginner) back in November so I asked the examinators if I could downgrade my level to absolute beginner. Unsurprisingly, I aced it as it. In March, I took the advanced beginner exam (A2) and also aced it which was also not a surprise considering I was originally planning to take the exam back in November.

I plan to continue my studies in French for the next year and take the “lower intermediate” (B1) exam in the coming Fall. Lately, I’ve been debating if I should pick another language such as my mother tongue now that my parents will never know that I am learning it (I would hate if my parents find out because they would be so happy but it would make communication easier as we can stop goolging words and also stop relying on translations to communicate with each other. I am not too close to my parents so I never picked up the language). Though I don’t know how feasible it is to learn 2 languages, learn CS, and Math would be … very difficult to juggle.

Learning my mother tongue has always been in my list of to do but something I’ve put off since it wasn’t a priority. It sure would be less awkward when strangers communicate with me in Korean or request that I do translation for either a visiting or new Engineer from Asia since everyone assumes I’m not a native English speaker due to my mediocore English profeciency and name. Though if I was to pick up my mother tongue, it would only be till the latest available language exam available in the near available city before I return to school. Then I’ll place my studies on hold till after I become fluent in French. Though I do wonder where this thought to learn another language came from. Perhaps it’s my manager saying random Korean greetings to me (which I ignore because I’m not sure what to respond without revealing my equally terrible prononciation).

I want to conclude that Youtube Shorts are evil and Youtube should give users the option to disable this feature. Short form is ironically a big time consumer despite its length. It is just way too addicting.