Now

This is my take on a now page. Last updated: January 2026.

New Year remarks

Happy New Year folks! (I know I’m a bit late, but you know what they say.)

Delays to upcoming blog posts. I apologize for the ongoing delay in posting Part 2 of the series on derivative notation (not that anyone is even reading these). I have some outstanding historical questions that I have not yet answered to my satisfaction. Rest assured that once Part 2 is posted, Parts 3 and 4 should shortly follow since they are essentially done.

Another source of the delay is that I’ve been working on a new three-part series about Calories In, Calories Out. I’d intended to publish Part 1 during, at latest, the second week of the New Year. As is customary, I’ve gotten a bit carried away by the details and I suspect I’ll still be adding to it in March. In fact, the rest of the remarks in this very section of the now page were lifted straight from the footnotes of that post, since I suspect they will no longer be remotely timely by the time I actually publish Part 1. (My original draft motivated discussion of CICO by appealing to New Year’s resolutions.)

Resolutions vs. values. I am not one to make New Year’s resolutions. I find New Year’s resolutions to be poorly conceived. In the first place, I don’t have sentimental attachments to particular days. I don’t feel especially different on holidays, birthdays (even my own), anniversaries, or the New Year. If I want to do something, then I’ll just… start. I don’t need the calendar to change for that. I am not sure when I stopped feeling that joie de calendar. Maybe I’ll write about this some other time, and possibly some other place.

Less personally, I think there is a real problem around what a resolution actually does. If you pick something vague and unquantifiable, like that you want to “exercise more”, then you’re left with effectively no direction and you’ll probably irresolutely dither about what to do to attain this goal. What does “more” even mean? If you went to the gym twice last year, is three times this year a victory? And of course, framing it as “exercise” makes it sound like a chore. You’re essentially saying that you’re committing to this thing because it’s hard and unpleasant and you wouldn’t do it at all if it weren’t a resolution. That mindset sours the whole activity before you even start.

On the other hand, if you make your resolution precise and set a clear target, then you’ve set yourself up for failure. One of two things is likely to happen: either you hit your target early, don’t know what to do next, and fall back into old habits; or something completely outside of your control derails you and the target becomes impossible. In either case you’ve abandoned whatever habit you were trying to build. OK, maybe these things don’t happen. But this target (and/or steps toward the target) end up becoming another task on your Miro board or Jira or scrum board or whatever. (Or maybe you’re like me and try to juggle all outstanding tasks in some kind of mental backlog, which also kind of sucks.) You’ve turned your life into a 90-day sprint. Maybe that works for some people, but it just depresses me.

I think a better approach is to set a New Year’s value or theme. This probably comes from my affinity for virtue ethics.¹ Instead of saying “I want to go to the gym more”, you’d say that you “value fitness” this year. It becomes a priority or consideration at the front of your mind that shapes everything you think and do throughout the year. The goal is to be able to say, at the end of the year upon honest reflection, that you did your best to embody that value. You can miss days at the gym, but if on the whole you showed up often, you can still say you embodied fitness. And if something out of your control happens, like you get injured in a car accident and you literally can’t go to the gym for some time of the year, then you can still strive towards your value. If “gym” was your resolution, then you’d have failed even though it wasn’t your fault. But if your value is fitness, then you simply adapt the meaning of fitness to the new context. You go to physical therapy and commit to recovery. At the end of the year, you can still be proud that you were fit.

That being said, I am also not setting a New Year’s value. I just do things when I want to do things.²

Happiness as a resolution. My distaste for resolutions notwithstanding, it remains popular thing to do. In a recent YouGov poll, 31% of American adults polled affirmed that they were going to make New Year’s resolutions for 2026. Unsurprisingly, lots of respondents committed to some resolution that entails body recomposition, with 25% hoping to exercise more, 22% to eat healthier, and 17% to lose weight. These are the statistics that I cited in my first draft of the forthcoming CICO blog post, and which I’ve since removed because (as mentioned earlier) the CICO post is going to take a while longer to finish.

I’d like to draw attention to the second most common resolution in the poll, which was “being happy” at 23%. I don’t know how to feel about this. On one hand, there is something pure about a person looking at the year ahead and thinking, simply, I would like to be happier. On the other hand, I am not convinced that happiness is the sort of thing that you can resolve to do, like running more or eating less sugar. I do not know exactly what happiness is but I might define it, roughly, as an alignment between your life circumstances and your genuine needs and desires, a kind of eudaimonic well-being. If there is misalignment, then I suppose you could resolve to bring life into alignment with your desires, but then why not make those specific goals your resolutions? To make “being happy” your resolution suggests that you instead seek some kind of internal resolution. And I worry—not from condescension, but from personal experience—that for many respondents, this amounts to convincing themselves that they’re happy despite circumstances that are not (subjectively) OK. You tie up and gag the voice that tells you something is wrong, or you hypnotize yourself into a feeling of contentment despite circumstances that are deeply, personally wrong. You enter a state that can feel like peace for years, until one day it doesn’t.

Now I recognize there are philosophies that contend this perspective is fundamentally wrong, that desires are flexible and that attachment to how one lives is the source of suffering. I’m probably oversimplifying here—I never got into life philosophy all that much—but my understanding is that some believe this suffering can be overcome through a genuine transformation of oneself to dissolve the conditions that generate and maintain this attachment. My primary issue with this is that, while I recognize that desires can be changed, from my personal experience the kinds of desires that are harmlessly malleable are not the same ones that beget happiness and fulfillment. The other desires, those that could be seen as contingencies for happiness, seem to be deeply and inextricably tied to self. To relinquish desires that are so authentically you in an effort to eliminate a perceived misalignment is to lobotomize a fundamental part of yourself. You are no longer you. If that’s what you’re after, then maybe there is no issue. Maybe there is no issue at all anyway; I feel that I am not the same me in Ohio as I am in California (see my previous now post).

I’m also skeptical that most people could distinguish between having truly excised attachments to particular aims and ends, and having developed elaborate mechanisms to avoid confronting painful truths. I can attest that I do not feel confident in my ability to discern the difference. At various points, I’d have sincerely reported happiness, and yet in retrospect I realize that I was repressing desires, that those desires were still there, somewhere, even if I had no conscious ability to interrogate them at the time. By this I mean that there was symptomatic evidence that someone tuned into that sort of thing might have been able to recognize, but to which I was blind until it gradually started to spill over into conscious territory some time ago. And I don’t mean for this to read as a journal entry or something; I am simply making the point from personal experience that repression can subjectively, insidiously, feel peaceful.

Moving back to California

The holidays came to a close all too quickly, and I’ve returned to California. Visiting home was, as always, convalescent. I used my time home as an actual break. I took time off from both research and work. All “work” that I did was purely discretionary. (One of these days I’ll link the big project that occupied my break, but due to my current professional engagements it’d be unwise.) I was also happy to be able to spend time with my family and cats again, as usual. For Christmas my parents got a Nintendo Switch 2 and Mario Kart World, so we had a good time cycling through the cups in Grand Prix in an attempt to get 3 stars on everything. (We failed, but that just means I’ll need to visit Ohio again soon to continue the pursuit.)

Schedules and rhythms. In all previous visits to Ohio, I’ve tried to maintain my California schedule as dictated by the clock, meaning that I’d get up around 4 or 5 AM, go to the gym, and aim to go to bed by around 8 PM. This has been difficult historically, since my dad doesn’t typically return from work until around 5:30–6 PM, and we like to go for evening walks as a family. I’d often not get to bed until 9–10 PM, and I’d accumulate sleep debt. This time I decided to just shift my routine forward (backward?) by three hours. I woke up around 8 AM and went to bed around 11 PM. It worked really well! I got more than adequate sleep most nights, and I was able to spend more time than usual with my family while still having time (and energy) to work on my personal projects.

This was also my first time visiting my family’s new home. We’d been apartment dwelling for six years before this, and my parents finally found a home that met almost all of our desiderata. My mom kept asking if the house felt homey and if I’d adjusted yet. I’ll note here my response, which also has to do with the schedule shift. Essentially, I find that I am content provided that I am able to adhere to a sort of spatiotemporal routine, by which I mean the sequential ordering of activities throughout the day (irrespective of clock time) and the functional zoning of space (a consistent place for sleeping, a consistent place for working, a consistent place for eating, and so on). So long as my environment meets some basic standards of privacy, health, and comfort, the particular “clothes it wears” does not matter to me so much. What matters to me is the structure. As a consequence of this, I find that I adapt quite quickly to new environments so long as it isn’t significantly disruptive to my preferred routines and rhythms. But all tenable circumstances are effectively the same in the end, so I don’t feel an exaggerated sense of “home”. It felt no different to me that I was in the new house compared to our previous apartment, or compared to my apartment in California.

Water intrusion. I flew back to California earlier this week. That very night, I was unpleasantly treated to some major water intrusions. The dishwasher of the unit next to ours began to leak and water seeped its way into my bedroom and along the wall into the bathroom. At the same time, the unit above ours had an issue with the bathtub’s plumbing, and water began raining from our bathroom ceiling (out of the panel to the AC unit) and the light fixture in our laundry room.

This is a terrible situation, of course, but I was considerably impressed by the response from maintenance. They responded instantly, spent at least until midnight drying off the floors and identifying the source of the water. They left blowers to dry out the walls overnight, and the next day they called before I was even awake to ask when was the earliest they could follow up on the matter. That morning, they replaced our neighbor’s dishwasher, repaired whatever had caused the upstairs leak; in the afternoon, they visited our unit with a thermal camera and moisture meter and checked all the hot spots for moisture.³ Only the bathroom showed any residual moisture, so we moved the blowers to the bathroom.

I was nevertheless worried about mold growth, but I learned from maintenance some things about the construction of our apartment.

• In compliance with state and local fire codes, units in the apartment are almost entirely surrounded by concrete and brick veneer. Only some of the internal walls the partition the rooms in our unit are made of drywall, and they are framed with steel studs. Furthermore, the drywall ceilings are drop ceilings that simply conceal the ductwork and wiring. (In fact, to dry out the laundry room ceiling, maintenance opened up a panel in the ceiling and it revealed a void with some plumbing and wiring, but there was no insulation and the ceiling above it was concrete.)
• Whatever insulation is present in the walls and ceilings (which is surprisingly quite minimal) is inorganic fiberglass, and it’s elevated by the steel bottom track, so doesn’t ground moisture.
• The baseboards are held slightly off the floor, which creates and air gap that prevents water from being trapped against and wicking up the wall. It also allows space to ventilate air with blowers if a water intrusion occurs (as did occur).
• The AC unit is encased in a giant shell which has an impossibly small chance of water intrusion, and any moisture that may somehow end up inside of the shell is quickly dried by the powerful fans. The leak we were seeing from the AC panel was because condensation (presumably from leaked water that evaporated from the ground or walls) was overflowing the pan faster than our (apparently somewhat slow) line could drain it.

All considered, I feel much more at ease. This experience contrasts starkly with the water intrusion incident that I experienced in the undergraduate dorms at Stanford, but perhaps that’s a story for another day. (This post is already egregiously long.)

Current research

The research that I was doing before break, as described briefly in a previous now post, has seen a bit of a direction shift. It turns out that the idea we were considering has already seen really thorough examinations in the literature, and even our idea of developing a software package to automate the analysis was done. We’ve shifted focus to an abstraction of the problem, and we’re now working on this strange kind of project that intersects control theory and some things like SMT solvers and QCQPs. I am still not quite sure if this direction is even novel, but it’s also not my only project, so I do not care so much if this fizzles out.

Books and music

Reading. I am still reading Human Action by Ludwig von Mises. I may have to put a pause on this since it’s proved to be a bit challenging for me to meaningfully engage with the audiobook version. This happens from time to time, and I’ll have to switch to the print version.

In the meantime, I’ve started reading Reasons Why by Bradford Skow, which is one of the course textbooks for PHIL 288A (Explanation), which I mentioned I’d be auditing in the previous now post. I’ve got some thoughts on this already, but I think I’ll abstain from making these remarks here until later in the course, particularly just in case I feel compelled to write a proper post about this topic.

Listening. This past month, a number of songs have been reverberating in my skull, for better or for worse. The offenders, arranged in decreasing order of persistence, include

• Shut Down Everything by the Quick Brown Fox;
• Rainbow Tylenol by Kitsune^2;
• Unwelcome School by Mitsukiyo; and (I can’t believe I am publicly admitting this),
• this nightcore version of We Are Charlie Kirk (Agartha Hardstyle remix).

This morning, cromch by solare took root, but it’s too early to tell how long it will stay.

See past updates.