I arrived back in Los Angeles from Taipei, concluding my senior trip in Taiwan, Thailand, and Japan. I had a great time traveling with my Yale '25 friends right after our graduation in May. It was an once-in-a-lifetime experience to host and show my friends around Taiwan, exploring the cities of Taipei, Kaohsung, Tainan, and Taichung as well as going to Thailand for the first time.

My dad recently got a new Tesla Model Y, which has hardware version 4 versus the hardware version 2 of our Tesla Model 3, and we autopiloted it to In-N-Out near Rowland Heights to grab dinner and then autopiloted it back to our house. Tesla is certainly winning in autonomous vehicles because it felt just as smooth and safe as a Waymo but way cheaper because it didn't require the radar sensors or the special mapping that Google does in order for Waymo's to work - it instead relies solely on vision. I think Tesla's bet on vision really paid off, and there probably is no need for sensor fusion here; I'm anticipating the robotaxis trial in Austin, Texas to see how far this goes.

When I arrived home, I showered and then slept at 8pm but then woke up at 2am. Since I couldn't go back to sleep due to jetlag, I decided to read Amy Chua's Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother as I saw it in an Eslite Bookstore in Taiwan and have been meaning to read it for a while but never had the chance to. This book was interesting and although I couldn't really relate to it, I'm sure a lot of my Asian friends could. Some very scary parents in the world. I learned about the authorative style of parenting that is common in Asian parents that somehow works when the child is obedient but backfires when the child is rebellious. I'm part of the rebellious kind so thankfully my parents weren't like that because probably would have ended up worse-off overall. Although, I have to say that I did really respect the commitment that she had for her children - albeit shown in a completely different way that what I would've imagined.

As a brief fitness update, my friend and I are doing this challenge of doing 1 more pushup than the previous day, and we're currently at 49 pushups now (I did an extra 48 to make-up the ones that I did not do yesterday). I split these into 6 sets of 16-15-15 and then 16-16-15 and then an extra 4 because I can't math. This took me one painful hour to complete, but I felt extremely pumped and ready to go after it. I'm planning to figure out the gym membership thing and go back to the gym. Need to get fit for a post-college glowup!

After finishing the book, the pushups, and eating my breakfast, I was finally able to practice the violin after not touching it since my recital last month. I practiced Brahms Violin Sonata No. 1 in G Major for an hour and then messaged a friend that will play the piano part with me in San Francisco when I move up. Looking forward to jamming and potentially crashing the SF Conservatory practice rooms (we'll hopefully find some friends there).

My YC friends keep bugging me to move back to SF so I'm figuring the housing thing soon. Probably in July?

I unpacked some of my stuff from my backpack to get my room desk setup for more coding adventures. Getting ready to grind the startup again. But first, I'm gonna rest up to fix my jetlag.

Oh, I also started reading the Chinese novel that I got while in Taiwan called 美麗國度. Probably will write some analysis on it tomorrow. It takes me some time to read Chinese but getting the hang of it. I'm also in the midst of Zero to One by Peter Thiel.

I've been keeping up with the latest AI research by browsing through Hugging Face's daily papers. I did come across some interesting work on revisiting reinforcement learning for LLM reasoning and speech emotion detection. Listened to the podcast with Alexandr Wang on the Y Combinator channel - congrats to him for the $14B Meta investment into Scale. Maybe one day, I... Austin, that's a long-shot.

What did I do today:

Practiced Brahms Violin Sonata No. 1 in G Major
Unpacked my backpack to rebuild my room setup
Completed 97 pushups (48 + 49 today)
Read and finished Amy Chua's Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother
Autopiloted to home from airport in Tesla Model Y
Updated this site to add a journal section
Helped my dad clear the garage
Reset day to fix my jetlag
Studied up a little on recent AI research papers
Started reading 美麗國度 and Zero to One