Clear Water Bay

Today I finally decided to go out, despite the heat. So basically I hopped on bus 91 and here I am in Clearwater bay but it's a pretty good place

There is a beautiful beach here it's like a lot of young children like kindergarten to like just normal children, a lot of people here there's a boats and yeah it's pretty fine. I just accidentally came here actually like since we hopped on bus 91 and I don't know where to go, like the bus 91 just took me to the terminal station where it's a pleasant little beach. The beach is kind of small to be honest, like it's not a long way but like there's a lot of people I feel a little bit better despite the ongoing stress. There's such a large number of young people, like a lot younger than me.

It basically quickly became like real hot and it was quite mountainous. There's a lot of ups and downs this beach is uh somehow like a tiny fraction of a beach you would see in like San Francisco but anyways like it's really fine. I'm just going away from the beach going to somewhere like hopefully a populous like city whatever.

So basically I went into a Japan home shop, and I was like, are there clothes, are there like utility stuff, and then they're like, we don't speak English. I don't understand a word what they're saying, and basically, so they are like we can communicate in Mandarin and I was like fine and tried to communicate. They ended up understanding me and the shop assistant's like, he actually speaks great Mandarin. That was the first time I got a compliment when I was speaking in Mandarin, though. After all what's the point of being in Mandarin so hard?

Anyways I arrived in Hong Kong in around like 7.9, and I first met the teacher Gary Chan, and he assigned me some work. However, my research here is going a total disaster, and I became very very sad and miserable.

Grad Student's Code

So like there is a grad student who had written some TCN code, and I was supposed to look at it. But like there was too many obvious mistakes, like, just too much shit in his code in almost every blocks.

Like these mistakes include: Using a sliding window but throwing away 99 percent of data by hardcoding the length you need to traverse to get the sliding window, Mixing the Training and Validation data, Cheating by manipulating the testing data.

Well these mistakes makes me seriously question the Integrity of HKUST, and like how crappy this school's PHD research really is? I thought as a novice everyone should be better than me, but what the hell is that?

Unable to Implement Code from a Paper

So I read a TCN paper and couldn't do it and it was pretty confusing how they did it. Anyways I ended up emailing the author(ended up using their personal Outlook Mail I searched from Google instead of the crumbling France mail server they had in the paper) trying to get a source code, but they wouldn't give me. Like there is no way the loss could go down or like this will lead to any result. Made me pretty mad.

The professor kinda wanted me implement or "reproduce" some results from papers I guess, but he recommends me some really shitty papers from like crap Chinese universities no one's ever heard about.

Anyways, pretty soon people started ghosting me. I would post a lot of my thoughts into the group chat and nobody would respond or react. I feel very annoyed. I hate the goddamn WeChat but there wasn't anything I can do about it.

Sleeping Schedule Problems Again

Basically I ended up again into this stay up all night schedule, and there is little I can do about it because I got literally mentally broken.

Signing up for Counseling then Canceling it

I saw on the website that I am available for mental counseling, then I quickly signed up for it, thinking I am eligible. The counselor called Stephanie sent me back a email saying "she isn't available at that time slot and we can adjust it to 11 am", and I replied, I was like "fine", to which she didn't reply. I was using AWS SES SMTP these days anyways. Then I went to the counseling at August 7th at 11am, then the manager tells me Stephanie wasn't available at 11 am, and I have to come at 4:30(the original time slot) again. Coincidentally, my mom showed up at 4:00, so I have to meet with my mom instead of going to the counseling. I mean, I didn't know the probability of these things happening but they do happen. The result is that I went there and got it canceled.

Plus also they used PHP code on their website, which is quite slow, and they frequently claimed your data is confidential while you must sign in, so nothing is confidential anyways, and even E2E and open source code on a malicious server won't be confidential. I already suffered from assuming something is confidential once. I am not gonna assume it again, only if you connect to a website through a tor endnode and go against browser fingerprinting with anonymous names(which is quite irrelevant).

I later went to mental counseling again, and I met with a counselor named Will. I told Will about my anxiety and worries about computer science, how I lost my hobbies and got isolated with friends, how I couldn't find anything else to do, etc. Will seems a nice guy, but I don't think he understand my struggles. He recommended me trying to find other activities to do other than computer science.

Cognitive Decline

I suffered strong cognitive declines these days, including not being able to find paper and cotton swabs in Grocery Store, and not being able to figure out how to use common apps. I didn't know how to use the Sim card. I couldn't log in to the app. Things haven't improve a little bit and I doubt they will, and I couldn't figure out how to use Discord or anything now. Well, I guess that this is the cause of me messing up with the HongKong pass in the first place. Chinese mandarin is simply too hard for me.

Moreover, they use traditional Chinese and Cantonese, which sounds like jibberish.

I used many days figuring out how to use the School email system or connect to wifi, when I finally learned how to use it(then I learned I cannot keep the mail when I leave, most likely because they don't wanna pay the Azure fee). HKUST uses Outlook, so basically I set up email forwarding to process all my emails in my AWS workmail with Lambdas and backed to S3.

Then again like I spent almost 30 days trying to figure out how to get the student card, and the process was just too complicated for me, and the teacher repeatedly asked me to do it and do it faster, but I just couldn't figure out how to do it easily. Well, I finally did it on the end of July, signed up and yeah, got my student card from the locker room, but then the student card was only gonna be used for 30 days.

Disinterest in Doing Things

I spent most of the time confined in the dorm or the Starbucks or a strange auditorium playing my laptop. It is kind of hot, and whenever I go out I sweat. So I have zero interest in going anywhere.

I also have few interest in almost everything these days.(well I did watch the Olympics)

Setting up Decentralized Servers

I set up my Peertube and Mastodon(something I have been trying to do for a really long time). But anyways I finally did this again. Like basically back in March I couldn't figure out how to configure the Postgres and SMTP. I joined Mastodon Social in May but then quit. Mastodon Social server is too liberal and makes me very uncomfortable.

I set up my server successfully and I am starting to post in my Mastodon Servers and Peertubes.

I also set up Metabase backed with my favorite database MongoDB to visualize the finance data.

About Research

So like here in research I was supposed to work with another person, but she couldn't figure out how to effectively use Github, so there is nothing I could do actually, and she didn't communicate much with me(like I had thoughts and like but I received no response or anything). She tried to train a TCN but ended up wasting a lot of resources with the validation loss not going down(massive overtraining), and then presenting the results without looking at the logs. Also she forgot to inverse scale the results of her useless crap of overtraining. She also messed up the sliding window completely. And yeah, so I am mostly on my own, since the grad student and the so called teammate was pretty much useless.

I fucked up last year in the Deep Learning course and I had a horrible time with Resnets or LSTMs, so I had to review it all again. Oh how stupid and lazy was I to study these concepts like I haven't known them at all. Anyways, turns out like I did seem to learn something more, though I am trash as hell anyways.

Then I tried to apply those methods like LSTM and Transformers back into the localization problem, and fed in those data. But I am getting nowhere and the result is just purely horrible. At least I know they can fit, but the validation is having extremely high turbulence and the testing result is having high variance, it overfits all the time.

I tried to read some code from a paper but it was like a lot of data preprocessing problems and I couldn't do much without a good partner. So I am pretty doomed to failure here.

About Stupid Laptop Problems

By the way I also changed from Debian to Fedora. Fedora is much better though, like the Debian insisted on using the free libre AMD driver, causing problems like glitches in Wayland, Chromium crashing the Gnome Shell, and Firefox being laggy. Anyways, none of these problems happen in Fedora, thanksfully. But from the user experience there is almost no difference in Gnome in Debian, Fedora and ArchLinux, so yeah, except like in Debian you have to upgrade a lot of packages to newest(like nodejs was like 18 on it, and you have to upgrade to 22, and then nodejs updated got a problem).opportunity

I previously blamed the Firefox problem on Mozilla, but it ended up to not be Mozilla's problem. Anyways as Google Chrome is banning Ublock Origin I am endoring Mozilla right now, and I am also using Thunderbird and K9 email clients(with my AWS SES as server).

About Meeting with USTC teachers

There was a meeting on the end of July with USTC teachers(like all students here gather for a meeting), and like everybody was talking about how he or she felt and "suggestions", and I didn't talk much, mainly like how I was like not gaining progress and mostly focused so there wasn't much I perceived anyways.

The other students mainly talked about like the diverse life in HongKong, but it was too hot for me to go out anyways. They also talked about like how they were doing a lot of valuable research with lots of different students(which is really cool).

Also I thought nobody from USTC likes using YouTube or data hoarding or self hosting, so I really couldn't relate to them. I was previously using YouTube quite a lot but recently like I tried to stop my media addiction by using LibRedirect to open the FreeTube on Firefox, and utilizing NewPipe(a really good client for not only YouTube but also Chaos Computer Club and any Peertube instances), but like nobody was interested in any "hobbies" of mine.

The teacher mentioned that Hong Kong can "give you an excellent immersive opportunity to learn English", which though, made me quite wonder why they didn't talk in English right there, but for me it was quite opposite as Mandarin was a lot way harder than English, and I identify English as my native language.

About Start of Semester in HKUST

Well it wasn't start of semester for me though. as my semester back in USTC will start in September, but in August 9th people are coming back to HKUST, and there are quite a lot of them with student clubs posters all over the walls.

But unfortunately I am interested in None of any clubs. I did sent two emails to computer science club but got no response, very sad.

About Guards on Campus

There are a lot of police guards here in HKUST, so much that in 2 am if you go out you can find 1 guard every 100 meters. It feels like being watched(though they don't do much to you).

When I was at the beach at 3 am police cars zoomed by occasionally.

About My Mom's Visit

Just some normal talks which leads nowhere and it's not like it helped anyways, but I thought like at least my parents are the only person left in the world to care even a little about me though? Anyways, i should and I am very grateful always to my parents.

Conclusion

Yeah, so that is like somewhat conclusion of my life from coming here to the middle of August, and it's not like its changing much, but I need to remind myself I am better off then a lot of blue collar workers anyways. It's like, the hopelessness keep building up and nothing changed here.