It's been years since our whole family (my parents, my brother, and I) lived under the same roof. To an extent I do feel some yearning for the past, so maybe now's a good time to write about them.

My Mom

The first thing that comes to mind is a memory of my 18th birthday. I was stuffing myself with loads of delicious homemade hotpot, and I remember telling my mom that I had this sudden urge to be "mature", and that I looked at life, for the first time, with a purpose. My mom doubted me immediately, and she was right to do so because right after hotpot I went back to playing video games. Funny enough, my mom clowned me on WeChat with her friends about this, and I didn't find out about it until recently.

That sense of doubt was a common theme from my mom. Maturity wasn't a feeling I suddenly got, but rather a product of the experiences I collect. It was way too hard to make a kid comprehend that, and so she spent the last 20 years humbling me to the ground instead. Her most notorious statement was that I was "slightly good at everything, but not really good at any of them".

A 16 year old me often didn't appreciate these comments. However, now I look back with nothing but gratitude.

Why?

Because I realized that those humbling words weren't just off-handed jabs to my ego, but actually deep truths rooted in the past. When she was a little less than my age, China had just undergone the Cultural Revolution, and for the first time in a while the nation opened up entries to academic institutions. My mom wrote the second ever Gaokao, and was one of very very few women to pursue engineering. At the time, China was pushing for modernization, and Engineering was extremely competitive as a result. Equality was recognized on paper, but existing cultural pressure and disruptions from the Cultural Revolution meant that my mom had to prove her worth to the world through nothing but sheer grit. At a time when all anyone could think of was putting food on the table, employers and teachers saw my Mom as nothing more than a risk. She pushed on nevertheless.

So that doubt was well deserved. The only way my mom could see me as "mature" would be if I go through the same prove-the-world-wrong exercise that she did.

My Dad

On that same 18th birthday, my dad got me drunk with his Infamous Liquor Table (18 is the Legal drinking age in Alberta). It was a tiny foldable wood table covered with famous whiskeys, brandies, rice wines, and tequilas. It was infamous because my dad loved bringing it out during parties, and around 1 hour later everyone would be singing karaoke in the basement. That day, my dad taught me the wonders of alcohol (I don't drink anymore btw), and the various flavour ranges that different liquors had. My dad is more flamboyant and adventurous in nature, and I believe that my outlook on life, and the notes I leave for myself, are probably inherited from him.

It was my dad who decided to move to Canada, dragging my mom and my brother with him in the process. He wanted to immigrate for a number of reasons, but my hunch is that the biggest reason was for the sake of adventure. The only way he could persuade my mom to do so was because Canadian jobs paid WAY more than Thai and Chinese jobs at the time.

The story of immigrating to Canada is probably one of my dad's proudest moments. He'd always preface the story with the fact that he had a cushy promotion in China lined up, and that he declined the offer thinking that Canada was the place he truly wanted to be. There, everyone felt like they controlled their own destiny. He'd end off the story with him proudly looking at my mom, my brother, and I, and saying something along the lines of "I'd say we've done pretty well for ourselves".

My mom would quickly rebuke the claim, citing the "Three greatest family blunders". They were as follows:

• Moving to Canada
• Investing a considerable sum of money into an Oil and Gas Company that would later tank
• Buying land on the outskirts of a town in the middle of nowhere thinking it would skyrocket in value

These three blunders are what my mom would use to humble my dad, and tell him that we could be so much better off if we didn't do them.

It was probably in Canada where he coined the phrase "Drive yourself". That single phrase was drilled into my head since birth. Every conversation my dad and I had, every time I cried, and every time I got a bad grade, my dad's 1 hour lecture would always start and end with the phrase "Drive yourself".

Why?

Because my dad wanted me to embody the spirit of the West. To internalize the idea of controlling my own destiny.

My Brother

By the time I turned 18, my brother had already moved out of the house. He and I are around 15 years apart, so our lives barely overlapped.

That being said, during the time my brother was around, he tried to make the most of it. He helped host my birthday parties, tickled me too hard, gave me noogies, and played Halo with me on the Xbox 360. The thing I'm most grateful for was that he saved money painting fences, working at Old Navy, and cashiering at Pizza 73 to pay for a backpacking trip to Europe for just the two of us. There we hopped hostels exploring Rome, Berlin, Paris, and London. In the measly 12 years we lived together, he wanted to be the coolest brother anyone could have. And he did really well at that.

There was one very important moment with my brother that he probably doesn't remember. It was the time he came back during the summer of 2019 and our family went out to eat. At the time, I was applying to universities, and my brother offered to help.

His first question to me was this: "What do you want to do for the rest of your life?"

I didn't know. Up until then, I spent all my life playing Minecraft and CSGO. How am I supposed to know?

At first, I started making some things up.

"I want to be a doctor." "Why?" "They make money." "Try again."

That same exchange roughly unfolded for lawyer, neurosurgeon, petroleum engineer, and many more. I was getting fed up. Mostly because none of my answers seemed to hit the mark my brother was looking for, and I didn't know what that mark was. It was only when I got to this:

"I want to open a robot cafe."

At first my brother asked a flurry of questions.

"How are you going to make money?" "What's the market appeal?" "How are you going to persuade VCs?" "Give me your elevator pitch." "How are you going to get your first customers?" ~ it is important to note that, at this point in time, my brother did full-time consulting ~

Foreign word after foreign word flew over my head. I had no answer. But something in me didn't want to move on. After trying my absolute hardest to answer my brother, I paused, took a deep breath, and simply said, "because it's cool. And maybe I don't know right now how I'll make it into a business, but I don't want to give up on it just yet."

My brother paused. He probably thought that if I had started such a business with such horrid fundamentals, that I would fail immediately. However, there was probably a part of him that thought that maybe for now, a dream is enough.

"That's what I was looking for. Now let's center your applications around that. Your passion for your little robot cafe. :)"

My brother may not know it. But right there. In that restaurant. I decided how I wanted to live my life. Perhaps not for the sake of making a robot cafe, but instead for sake of pursuing things that were cool. For the sake of making dreams reality.

A Product of the Zhou Family

So I sit here, writing this blog post at 1AM (burnt out from 24/7 coding), wondering why I wrote all this.

I wrote all this because I am a product of the household I live in. A brother who taught me to dream, a father who taught me to embrace adventure and my destiny, and a mother who reminds me how much hard work and effort I need to put in.

I wrote all this because I think my family deserves a tiny digital footprint for what they have done for me.

An answer to myself: You were right.

Its just that the way you want to live takes time. More time than you ever imagined. More dedication than you ever imagined. But what the hell. It sure was fun :)

Something very exciting happened today. Anyone who is reading this will most likely not know what. Except maybe a handful of you who can connect the dots together. :)

Sorry for wasting your time, here's a fun fact as payment: humans are psychologically more inclined to follow certain behaviours if we view them as social norms.

Lately there's been a growing tension inside of me. Specifically, the tension between knowing my own path and feeling the sting when others don't see its value.

I delayed my graduation by a year to live in Japan. I put all my effort into propping up an Autonomous Vehicle team, giving me less time to Leetcode, less time to prepare for interviews, and less time to optimize myself for what the market wants. I see others my age getting into FAANG, and I think to myself: perhaps I've made the wrong choices over these past few years?

It's natural to think that way I guess. I'm human after all.

However, despite this, I always end up asking myself whether I regret anything that I did. And every time the answer is always no.

So let me answer my doubts once and for all.

I chose to live in Japan because I knew the experience would shape me. I chose to revive an entire Autonomous Vehicle team, and continued to build a self-driving car from scratch NOT because it was the right career move, but because I wanted to build something bigger than myself.

These aren't misguided choices, they're the choices of someone who is living deliberately. Someone who chose depth over optimization.

Do I hope to prove my critics wrong someday? No way. My deepest satisfaction won't come from proving them wrong. It'll come from looking back at my 20s and knowing that I took on challenges that mattered, that I didn't shrink myself to fit someone else's scorecard, that I always took opportunities that called me.

So to anyone who tells me my choices are misguided, my answer to you is this:

I took the scenic route :)

Dead internet is coming... I wonder what we'll all do instead?

One interesting thing: Dead Internet Theory stems from the idea that there are secret organizational bodies coordinating a curated internet meant to brainwash the population. In reality, the real dead internet will come from a decentralized hivemind of people imagining up crazy scenarios for some useless reasons, brain-rotting the population instead.

Not a coordinated brainwash, but an uncoordinated brainrot, aha.

AI Art is not real art... at least in its current form.

For the sake of keeping this brief, let's stick to visual art. I often hear claims that current diffusion models, trained on a large corpus of captioned text, has the ability to generate artistic pieces that rival that of many, if not a large majority, of artists, today. To that, I say no way.

A friend once asked me how I could tell a piece of art was AI-generated. Two words: expression and intention. Art is not as simple as just a basket of different lines and colors that come together to resemble patterns. Instead, every stroke, every color choice was intentional. An artist doesn't simply combine patterns together for the sake of making something look appealing. They add patterns with intention, an intention to express their thoughts, their experiences, their opinions... their way of seeing the world.

An AI model today cannot make art out of intention. It fundamentally does not think of creating art the same way we do. An AI model views the world as a multi-dimensional "line of best fit" on our understanding of reality translated into linguistics. It's way of reasoning is fundamentally pinned on thinking in language, but we as humans don't think like that. Some of us might have an internal monologue, but how can you explain the feeling of not having the words to explain something? Better yet, how do you tell an AI model to express its feelings in art if it has none?

The way I see AI Art today is the same way I say its usage in coding: it is a good tool to get a project going and overcoming my anxiety when I succumb to blank page syndrome. AI art also raises the bar for artists. If you are concerned that AI will replace your job because it can draw lines, color, and shade faster, just remember this: art was never about drawing straight lines, it was about expressing something. Use AI to help you express your intentions in a more effective manner.

Yes, there will probably be a large cut of the population who could care less about art, and I guess AI art would fool most of them. But I believe that fundamentally we all view art not just as it is, but at a meta-physical level as well. To have AI art replace all art in this world would be synonymous with removing this world's emotional capabilities of expression, and the fundamental structure of the human psyche probably won't let that happen.

I am not shutting down the idea that perhaps AI could create art in the future. If a future AI model is fundamentally built to have the ability of expression, experience, intention, imagination, and emotion, then perhaps I will consider its generated art as real art. At that point, I would probably start considering it as an actual being...

PS: My art is not AI generated. For those who are not artists, that's like giving us the finger.

I don't know. But for now I'm going to live my life for the sake of adventure.

And one way to seek adventure is by learning new things. Developing myself. Keeping up the grit. Why? Well so far that's led me to meet some pretty awesome people. People that can make my life even more adventurous.

There are two types of robotics people. Those who believe Wall-E is just around the corner, and those who will tell you we're no where close.

They both have merit.

One sees the the newest papers coming out of Gemini Robotics, or the latest models from OpenAI, and says, "Sooner or later these models are going to be in all our robots! They're going to fold our laundry, wash our dishes, make food... The future is here!", forgetting that it takes time to deploy robots to consumers -- that just showing results is only 30% of the way there and the rest is about making it repeatable. The result, a unicorn startup turned into history's biggest fraud case.

Meanwhile, the other sees the graveyard of robotic startups and the empty wallets of irresponsible VCs, and says, "Wake up. Robots aren't going to take over our lives anytime soon. They still struggle with driving on highways, talking to humans, and climbing stairs!", forgetting that there are dozens of very smart, competent people working to solve these struggles day-in-day-out -- that everyday there's always a chance that all of sudden they go from pragmatic realists to forgotten veterans being left behind.

First post... It's weird considering the fact that I always wanted to write about random things to random people, but now that I've forced myself into this position, my mind has gone pretty blank. Must be something a lot of people feel when they first start off their blog.

Today marks my 23rd birthday. Back when I turned 20 I wrote a reoccurring calendar event on my phone titled "Your Beginning". It's a motivational note to myself that would spam as an alert on my phone whenever it was my birthday. I will not share the exact details of what I wrote to myself (it's too embarrassing), but here's some lines that sum it up pretty well:

• "On this day you decided to throw away your overwhelming humility. In place of it, a flame. A flame of arrogance, confidence, and dreaminess"

• "On the days following, I hope to still see you meticulously planning your every move, utilizing the nooks and crannies of tech to craft your dreams. We want to be an architect of the future, right?"

Looking at the messages I wrote, I can't help but look at what I wrote with the same feeling my mom must've felt when I told her I felt "mature". Words were one thing, but did I really think that just saying/writing things was really going to get me anywhere?

In the three years since, I'd say I've done pretty well for myself. I took on the challenge of leading a team of students to build an autonomous vehicle, growing the team from 5 to 80 people (job's not finished), I did a crazy number of internships, with one of them unexpectedly sending me to Tokyo for 8 months, exposing me to a whole different culture and lifestyle, and I took a whole month off to explore Japan/China with some close friends of mine from High School. No, I am not trying to tell you I am better, do not take it that way PLEASE. I'm just trying to say that after all that, I realized that words weren't the secret sauce to my adventurous life, getting out of my bed was.

So here I am, writing more words to introspect myself. Not just words this time, but a whole blog page to keep writing about myself for years to come. Why do I want to write so badly?

Perhaps no matter how much I tell myself there's no point in writing my thoughts down, there exists an urge deep down in my unconscious to write. Only time will tell why I truly wanted to write a blog, but until then, I have some words for myself:

• You intend to document what you think, I hope that this blog will never evolve into anything other than that.
• You are not a philosopher, and you have no right to tell others how they should think.
• Please please please stop with having your head in the clouds. Don't write about what you're about to do, just do it!!!

I hope that my future self will forever standby these principles. I do not want to become a know-it-all. I do not want to become narcissistic. And above all, I do not want to be chronically bed-ridden.

Funny enough, the first post being about me judging myself for writing in the first place sounds like the most cliche way to start off a blog. I guess no matter how much you want to be different, you will always converge back to the mean.