--- date: '2025-01-04' description: a year of non-linearity. id: '2024' layout: reflection modified: 2026-10-11 17:57:39 GMT-04:00 signature: Your present self socials: facebook: https://www.facebook.com/share/18SBQ6LgXY/ substack: https://open.substack.com/pub/livingalone/p/2024-dasein?r=1z8i4s&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true twitter: https://x.com/aarnphm/status/1876083332351689070 tags: - personal - evergreen title: '2024: dasein' created: '2025-01-04' published: '2025-01-04' pageLayout: reflection slug: posts/2024 permalink: https://aarnphm.xyz/posts/2024.md generator: quartz: v4.6.0 hostedProvider: Cloudflare baseUrl: aarnphm.xyz full: https://aarnphm.xyz/llms-full.txt --- ![[posts/images/2024-car-nora-s-unwin.webp|Two Too Many by Nora S. Unwin]] Hey [[posts/2023]] you, I know that 2023 has been a tumultuous year, albeit a lot of things happened. You planned out steps by steps what needs to be done in ‘24. You worried about maintaining friendship by hosting [[thoughts/atelier with friends|functions]], meeting new people. Rest assured, we have kept up the tradition writing a “year-review” similar to previous years. tl/dr: You achieve most of the things you set out to do for last year, with the main theme of “being-there”. Lemme tell you the lore of twenty four. ![[posts/images/2024-collage-1.webp|enjoying Toronto, poker, and carr]] Heidegger’s Dasein underscores that we are [[thoughts/being#Heidegger's Being and Time|beings]] in the world, with others, searching for meaning. Dasein exists in relations to other being, as “the ‘essence’ of Dasein lies in its existence.”[^dasein] We wake up each day, startled by our own presence. We spend our nights harboring dreams that might startle us awake. [^dasein]: Heidegger, _Being and Time_ (1927), §9, Macquarrie and Robinson translation. > But what does it mean to truly be there in an age when “there” has become everywhere and nowhere? > When presence splits between pixels and flesh, between midnight texts and morning coffee? You send signals out into the void, a tweet here, a reply there, never sure if they’ll reach anything solid. Most bounce back empty. But sometimes, rarely, you hear an answering horn. That’s how T and I found each other. “T from Twitter,” I’d think, as if that digital marker could contain a person. Strange how you can sense authenticity even through a screen. It’s in the way someone signals back: something rougher, realer, like someone speaking in their real voice after hours of small talk. Enough to find your way to a coffee shop where someone you met through screens becomes flesh and blood, becomes real in a way that surprises you both. We’re both busy, but we find these pockets of time. The conversations pick up like they never paused. Walking through Toronto’s glass canyons one day, T said something that stuck: ![[/quotes#^tommy|from tommy]] _That’s how it goes these days. You put yourself out there in bits and bytes, then occasionally, it reciprocates._ I went to T’s co-working hours, a ritual [[thoughts/play#Create spaces not product|space]] to chase our unfinished dreams. Went to high school friend parties too. Smiled until my face ached. They call it networking, but really it’s just people trying not to be alone. You start to recognise the [[thoughts/Agency|driven]] ones: they move differently, go-getters vibe, like they know time is running out. Your birthday came around. We flinched. Birthday felt like accusations, after a certain age: each candle a small indictment of time spent, reminder of the [[thoughts/Camus#Absurd and suicide|absurdity]] of life. Most years, I’d dodge the day entirely, treat it like any other Thursday. Yet, this one felt, full, somehow. This was the kind of fullness Montaigne wrote about, when he couldn’t explain why he loved his friend except to say “Because it was him, because it was me” (_Of Friendship_, on Étienne de La Boétie). They showed up at [your usual spot](https://www.instagram.com/cimaenoteca): N in her cream vest catching light, S fresh from a capstone meeting, M bringing that energy that fills rooms. Nobody was performing. We talked about nothing important. Failed projects. Post grad. Plans. Dreams. The way the city changes you when you’re not looking. No one checked their phone. No one had somewhere better to be. In a world of endless “sorry, been swamped, let’s catch up soon,” here was [[thoughts/Attention|attention]] freely given. Later, walking home through streets gone quiet, I thought about how opening yourself to [[thoughts/desire]] and attachment, accepting the love you feel and permitting yourself to receive the love you’re given, builds a kind of strength. > I used to think getting older meant accumulating armor. Now I wonder if it’s about learning when to let it fall. --- Someone once called me a cactus. Thorny exterior, life-giving inside. Maybe that’s true. Maybe that’s why you decided to cook for [[thoughts/atelier with friends/orangeville|twenty]] people at the Orangeville retreat. Not because it made sense (it didn’t), but because something in you recognised something in them. Not smarter people, as the old advice goes, but [differently free](https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2014/11/05/dont-surround-yourself-with-smarter-people/) people, in Venkatesh Rao’s phrase. Each one moving through the world in ways you couldn’t predict, carrying stories you couldn’t write. The kitchen became an assembly line of chaos. Pasta station, prep station, voices calling for more salt. V and C cutting vegetables. You were on pasta duties. F was on photos duties. K telling stories between stirring the sauce. Nf arranging plates like she was painting with food. That night, attention was in the way Nf noticed when the garlic was about to burn. How W remembered everyone’s dietary restrictions without being reminded. To feed people is to practice a particular kind of attention. Next year, I’ll try again. Smaller scale. Ten people, maybe twelve. ![[posts/images/2024-collage-orangeville.webp|grams stories of the prep and cook]] In the end, everyone helped clean up. No one had to ask. We moved around each other in the kitchen’s tight space, putting things right. Someone hummed. Someone else joined in. That’s the thing about being a cactus. You learn to store these moments for the dry seasons ahead. --- ![[posts/images/2024-collage-2.webp|brat summer but word-maxxing]] The June air hung still in Hamilton. Each morning I wake to find the city has transformed into something both familiar and foreign. Bird calls pierce the silence. The houses stand empty, their inhabitants fled to summer cottages and coastal retreats. I tell myself I’ve chosen to stay, muttering about stability and the virtue of mundane [experience](https://www.uncomfycorner.com/p/yearning-for-permanence) like a man trying to convince himself of his own sanity. But in truth, I’ve become both the prisoner and the warden of my own isolation. K and I reconnect sporadically through screens and occasional New Office Hour, our minimum viable friendship , sustained through authentic moments rather than constant contact. We orbit each other from afar, catching glimpses through social media, our conversations picking up right where it left. The existential weight of friends graduating, moving away, settles like dust on everything. They leave one by one. A lunch, a hug, promises to keep in touch. At work, I perform competence with mechanical efficiency. My calendar fills with meetings I attend in body only, my mind elsewhere, calculating the growing distance between here and everywhere else. I find myself failing to show up for meetings. Jung wrote about the shadow, those parts of ourselves we prefer not to see. Mine lives in browser tabs: flight prices to NYC, London, Cancun; ML papers I haven’t read; messages I haven’t answered. I track it like I track my GitHub contributions: green squares of productivity that correlate inversely with hours of sleep. At 2 AM, I catch myself with sixteen browser tabs open: four documentation pages, three ML papers, six apartment listings in different cities, two flight searches, and somehow, inevitably, a tab about burnout. Your Strava shows longer runs, not because I’m training for anything, but because I’m running away from something I can’t name. My calendar is a perfect grid of meetings and deadlines, while my Notes app fills with half-written resignation letters. The body keeps score: caffeine intake up 800%, sleep quality down 60%, productivity maintaining at an unsustainable line. The [[thoughts/Machine learning|ML]] industry doesn’t wait for resolution. Each week brings new papers, new benchmarks, new proofs of my increasing obsolescence. The anxiety is in the achievements that feel like accidents, the successes that seem to belong to someone else. Star repositories, approved PRs, deployment metrics: pebbles collected from a beach I no longer want to visit. I’m afraid of becoming obsolete [^ai-job], fully knowing that I have acquired enough engineering fluency to prove otherwise. Every time I open Twitter, someone younger has built something better. Every time I close it, I’ve lost another hour I could have spent building. At 3 AM, debugging someone else’s code, I wonder if this is what Jung meant by individuation: learning to hold these contradictions without breaking. [^ai-job]: maybe I would write about this one day from a perspective of an engineer, but found this thread from [Chris Olah](https://x.com/ch402/status/1874990808539275687) that captures the essence of what’s happening with the job market SS notices; they’re understanding, thankfully. But understanding doesn’t fill the spaces left by departed friends, doesn’t answer the question that haunts me: why am I still here in Hamilton? Why not Toronto? NYC? I run. Cook. Meet KS and Ki at bars (they work there, awesome human being). Build routines like walls against loneliness. But you can’t dam an ocean with clay. Eventually, everything leaks through. One day, everything stops. Not dramatically, but in the way summer heat can suddenly make you aware of your own breathing. I let myself feel it all. Cry, actually, a lot. There’s something Heideggerian about it, this raw being-in-the-world, this Dasein moment of confronting one’s own existence without pretense. > The bird calls still echo. But now they sound less like absence and more like presence. My presence, here, choosing to stay. --- ![[posts/images/2024-collage-3.webp|first semester mood board]] I run at dawn now. The Canadian mornings carry a particular chill that takes me back to San Francisco nights with J. The way memory works: a temperature, a certain slant of light, and suddenly you’re transported to the shape they left behind. The ghost of J appears in strange moments. Like how I still instinctively reach for my phone at 10 PM, the time we used to talk. Or how I order coffee for two before catching myself. Freud would call these slips revelatory. Not just of J, but of what J represented: certainty, future, _home_. When we lose something valuable, we seek replacements: approximations that might fill the same shape. Each new connection risks comparison to what was lost. I find myself performing cost-benefit analyses of vulnerability. Opening up to N feels different: there’s no sunk cost fallacy here, no emotional debt to repay. But there’s also this nagging awareness that I might be responding to market forces rather than genuine desire. Am I attracted to her, or to the idea of not being alone? Sometimes a void isn’t meant to be filled. N isn’t a replacement for J. She’s something entirely new. Yet these Freudian slips persist: calling her by J’s name in my head, catching myself planning futures I have no right to imagine. But N deserves better than to be a hedge against loneliness. ![[posts/24/Nicky#^nicky-job|N got a job!]] There’s something about N I can’t quite name. It sits still in that undefined space between friendship and something else, like a word caught at the tip of your tongue. We’ve developed our own grammar of care: photos I found randomly on Reddit, that wig N wore for Halloween, dating stories, shared silences that feel like conversations, a gentle smile across the hall. Sometimes you would come across something (a particular piece of code, an elegant proof) and your first thought is how N would see it differently. With N, I’m learning about the quiet accumulation of shared understanding, the slow building of trust through consistent presence: a continuous choosing to remain in each other’s orbit. The way she remembers small details about my life, how she’ll reference conversations from months ago as if they just happened. Yet there’s an edge to this undefined space we inhabit. I find myself wondering if this careful equilibrium we’ve built might one day shift into something else. The thought both thrills and terrifies me. > Finding tranquility in looking at each other, peace in the quiet ping of a message arriving. We send each other papers about attention mechanisms while paying attention to each other’s subtle shifts in mood. 
It's a peculiar intimacy, born of our time.
--- The school term settled into patterns. You negotiated fewer hours with S: school was demanding more of you. You called it “pseudobalance,” though that wasn’t quite right. It was more like redistribution of hunger. The capstone became your gateway into [[thoughts/mechanistic interpretability|mechanistic interpretability]]. At work, you found yourself among the working group, including the likes from Berkeley, RedHat, Anyscale, Neural Magic, etc., on the [[thoughts/vllm|vLLM]] inference engine. The mathematics of inference provided its own kind of clarity. You found yourself caught in this current of constant learning: expanding context windows, diving deeper into transformer architectures, discussing optimization strategies over Zoom that stretched into evening. It wasn’t exactly balance. But it felt authentic, this way of being present in the work. The days blurred together. You were becoming something: not better necessarily, just more defined. --- ![[thoughts/images/45D2F7A2-EA62-4B91-B681-6D71329142DC_1_105_c.webp|by Tinnei, or @localmaxim on twitter]] I find myself taking more photos lately. Not the carefully composed kind, just quick captures of ordinary moments: a coffee cup catching morning light, her profile turned away in conversation, shadows stretching long across park benches. Leaving breadcrumbs for my future self, proof that these moments existed. Through the lens, I’m teaching myself to notice: the slight downturn of her mouth when she’s thinking hard, the particular way afternoon sun hits the kitchen wall. These photos pile up in my phone like fallen leaves. Most I’ll never look at again. But taking them has become its own form of prayer, a way of saying: _I was here, I noticed, this mattered_. --- 2024 unfolded like one of those long poems I keep bookmarked: [[posts/Chaos|chaotic]] in its rhythms yet somehow peaceful in its completeness. I filled journals not meant for anyone else, letting thoughts spill onto pages without trying to make them presentable. Each month brought its own particular shade of uncertainty, yet I moved through them with a steadiness that surprised me. > The year closes like a book with dog-eared pages and coffee stains, messy but well-loved. Regardless, a quick recap of what 2024’s Aaron did/get, an unstructured streams of thoughts: - I splurged on this [bag](https://www.mansurgavriel.com/products/maxi-candy-bag-black) and to be honest it is the best purchases I made this year. There are something comfortable, yet familiarity I found wearing this bag. It made me feel so grand :smile: - Started capstone, working on [[thoughts/vllm|vLLM]] [[posts/structured decoding|structured decoding]] (more to come). To be honest, this year I’m very happy that I dive first into these technical topics. Maybe, you can just learn and do things. - Tend to your garden, I’m pretty happy with the current state of this website. It demonstrate the real me, the inner child that was always too afraid to ask, to talk, simply for the fact of maintaining peace and quiet. - You made great friends, for life. Just make sure you tend to them, treat them the same way you want to be treated. This year marks the creation of a lot of seeding, next year are important in a sense you should navigate this labyrinth of relationship with care, and self. - Finished around [[books#2024|18]] books this year, definitely happy with the amount of content per book. - Attend one-of-its-[[posts/new|kind]] hackathon. - This playlist on repeats (you should also use YouTube Music) ![[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLsRPzRsbp3lCxe4gXH4S4Zf38X_45Oj6N]] Some rituals I would like to keep: - seeing friends (I’m moving to Toronto soon!) - be happy. (knowing me, yet keep trying to smile) Kindly, \[^sign\]