Hey me, long time no real talk. I feel like I’ve been stuck in this weird small talk phase with myself on this journal, and I’ve kinda hit the point where I don’t really feel guilty for it anymore. After all, this isn’t meant to be a task or a chore so I’m kinda relieved I don’t feel bad about “neglecting” this. I’ve been pretty stressed recently, and right now I’m getting over that cusp of being suddenly overwhelmed and hopefully in the direction of taking action now. This is a little happy milestone, because I guess I used to have the route of being overwhelmed, and then being suicidal and fighting back urges to off myself. Now at least I feel more in power and in control about it, and I have the hope and motivation to do something about it. I have several interviews lined up, varying from smaller companies to things like Meta and Apple. I’m pretty stressed about the big companies since those are both positions for machine learning. I’ve spent the last 4ish years of my life specializing in machine learning, but I’ve only now had the wakeup call that I’m not even close to prepared for what is expected from me for a machine learning interview. It’s like I’m only now finding out about leetcode. I’m pretty afraid I’m going to be honest, I keep finding myself wanting to sit in my comfort zone of solving leetcode questions, but I know I need to just figure out and learn this machine learning technical details as fast as possible. I pray this work out some way or another.
I had an interview call today with the recruiter for Meta, and it went well. The interviewer told me they were going to try to prepare me as much as possible and give me all they can to help me succeed, so I’m incredibly thankful for that. I also later received an email from apple for an interview for a ML/DS position, and so I’m both anxious and nervous but also incredibly excited and thankful. I am going to try to cram as much as possible for ML interview prep, since I realized my school hasn’t really prepared me for the kinds of questions they would ask me. I will get through this.
Tomorrow I have my first round interview for Meta, and its for a machine learning engineer position. I’m terrified since I don’t know if I’m ready for it, as the bar is miles above just a master’s degree. I’m afraid of having the opportunity for exactly what I am dreaming of, and what if I fuck it up and fail. I’m afraid of resenting myself for not doing enough or not doing as much as I should have. But that fear won’t help me now, will it?
I uninstalled tiktok a bit ago, and now I find myself falling victim to the Instagram reels doomscrolling. Looking back at it now, I realize how much of my time I waste just scrolling mindlessly, doing things I don’t even really want to do. I want to try fully stopping this scrolling pattern, as I’ve mostly replaced it with Reddit now. I’ve somewhat reverted to my prior patterns, but let me try setting a screen time limiter or something of the sort later. I also want to get bigger, or heavier. I’d like to be bigger. And stronger I guess, it feels like a shortcut to strength and that’s what I’d like I think.
I’ll write about this later, but I guess in a weird nova-effect way I’m glad it’s broken. I’m sad it’s $100 wasted due to negligence, but hey I’m glad what happened. I’m happy I’m resilient enough to not get caught up by it either.
I had a good interview today, and so I hope to hear back with the final round soon. I also got another email from another smaller company offering an interview, and I hope that it goes well since I’d love to be able to actually do good work.
Turns out the job application isn’t really a prestigious job, but rather just generating data for an LLM for coding tasks. I feel like I’d crush it, but at the same time it may get soul sucking. Oh well.
I wanted to write more about this but I ended up staying up way past when I needed to go to bed by because I was dopamine addicted to leetcode questions. I just kept doing one more, and then just one more until I finished like an additional 15 or so. This is a better form of dopamine addiction I’d say but still DAMN. I wanna write more about this song later, but I was really fucking with it today – I got home and immediately worked on learning to play it on the guitar. I love the imagery from it.
Today A came to martial arts, and I realized how I’m comfortable with the thought of it now even though earlier on I was afraid of friend groups mixing at all. I do feel kinda low right now, maybe I should have gone to the gym. Oh well, tomorrow I definitely will – with my no tech stimulation day. I hope I enjoy reading!