In early November I went to Iquique, Chile with our paragliding community to fly, under the lead of our instructor. It’s my first time flying outside of the US.

It’s possible to use the brokerage money to invest with some interest i.e. margin trading. Some brokerage offers really low rate, like Robinhood’s 5.75%. With the annualized return of VOO being 14.56%, it may seem like a no brainer to use margin to buy VOO, but if factoring the risk, is it really worth it?

2024 is a year of evolution for me. This year, I

• moved to the US
• got my own place
• started my first (and second) full-time job
• became a car owner
• received a decent Bay Area big tech SWE offer
• became a cat owner (of 2)
• started to ski black diamonds

I moved from Taiwan, a densely populated eastern Asian country, to Phoenix, Arizona, at the start of the year, and then to San Jose, California close to the end of the year. Here are some of my observations.

Got reached out from a TikTok recruiter in the middle of the year and ended up joining despite the uncertainty about the ban. Here’s my experience about the whole process, NDA-safe version.

I had my first nihilism at high school / college.

Being raised in a protective and rather wholesome environment, I naturally became full of morality and ethics as a child. This obviously changed when I experienced my late teen existential crisis, questioning the essence of life, the universe, and everything.

As a rational person, I came to the conclusion that the universe is materialistic. There’s no God, no creator, we just happened to exist. We this kind of premise, the obvious deduction is that morality is a social construct, and there’s not any intrinsic meaning to life. Morality is just the general consensus of a specific group of people in a specific time & space. Without a higher being, a creator, or a God, it’s impossible for absolute morality and an intrinsic meaning of life to exist. We view many practices that were common in the past to be immoral, and at some point in the future, we’ll be viewed as criminals for exercising something that we do every day as well.

Holding this kind of view, I continue my life as an ethical and hard-working absurdist.

There are so many kinds of commercial cat food out there, from kibbles to canned wet food to freeze-dried raw to frozen raw. At first glance, raw food seems to be very pricey, but is it really the case?

I’ll use the food that my cats eat to do a price comparison, by weight and by calories, for each type of food.

Made my first ever Fettuccine Alfredo today, and it was so good.