2026-06-15 Retrospective

Today was an okay day. I finished my ICS3U CCA, did some of my photography CCA, and did some math review. Tomorrow I have a math rewrite for exponentials. I feel like I’m sort of being crushed by work because I had a french and photography CCA both due yesterday that I did not do, so I’m sort of screwed, there are three days left before exams “start” (my first exam is next monday though) so I must work. {{REDACTED FOR LEGAL REASONS}}. {{REDACTED FOR CAREERIST REASONS}}. I also read some of good sleep, good learning, good life by Piotr Wozniak. I only read the summary and the part about the clock and the hourglass but basically: ...

June 16, 2026 · Amitav Krishna

2026-06-12 Retrospective

{{REDACTED FOR CAREERIST REASONS}} I did a little bit of work on my ICS3U culminating interpreter and on my IEEE qCCL poster, but not a whole lot. I wrote my MCR3U sequences and series test today. I was tired because yesterday I slept at 23.00 PDT, and had to wake up at 04.00 PDT for school, it’s technically 21.29 PDT right now but I probably won’t get up until 06.00 - 07.00 PDT tomorrow, so I’m good. Crunch time. This weekend I have to do: ...

June 13, 2026 · Amitav Krishna

2026-06-10 Retrospective

I didn’t do a lot for most of the day, then in an hour I did a lot. Tomorrow I must work more.

June 11, 2026 · Amitav Krishna

2026-06-09 Retrospective

I slept in today, spent a while in the bathtub, missed the bus, my dad drove me to school and I missed announcements. I took some photos for my photography CCA in the rain, got really wet, finished most of last night’s math homework, went to math class, then went to computer science, goofed off and did no work, went to French, goofed off some more, came home, {{REDACTED FOR LEGAL REASONS}}, {{REDACTED FOR LEGAL REASONS}}, {{REDACTED FOR LEGAL REASONS}}, {{REDACTED FOR LEGAL REASONS}}, {{REDACTED FOR LEGAL REASONS}} then wrote my philo bac response, and then this. I didn’t work out today or work on my poster. Priorities for tomorrow in order: ...

June 10, 2026 · Amitav Krishna

2026-06-08 Retrospective

Hello guys! I worked out today (Upper B) for the first time since last week, had two meetings, and then goofed off for pretty much the rest of the night. Today I also started my computer science culminating assignmetn. Here’s Claude’s summary of my night from my browser history (all times in EDT): ~19:30–19:45 — Podcast / Reddit wind-down Started on Reddit reading about indie podcasts — CGP Grey’s “State of the Workflow,” the Unmade Podcast, Hello Internet, Cortex, 99% Invisible. Poked at 8090’s Software Factory / {{REDACTED FOR LEGAL REASONS}}, briefly and checked your 8090 Google Calendar (week of June 8). Looked up Jeff Dujon (Unmade host). ~19:45–20:10 — Admin & paperwork ...

June 9, 2026 · Amitav Krishna

2026-06-07 Reflection

Hello! I have not posted for the past couple of days. To be completely honest, I forget a lot of what I have done for the past four days, yesterday I had a graduation party for my friend, Krishiv Thakuria, at which I was MC. I have not been keeping up with the Philo Bac prompts. {{REDACTED FOR CAREERIST REASONS}} I also figured out the logistics for how I will print my conference poster, my next steps are to figure out what my biggest / highlight figure will be and then adapt the prose around that. ...

June 8, 2026 · Amitav Krishna

2026-06-03 Reflection

Retrospective Today I did some work for 8090. I wrote an introduction as a response to one of the philo bac prompts as I had intended. I did some work for my computer science assignment. I did quite a bit of bicycling, and I also worked out today. Today was leg day, and around half way through I had seated leg curls, and I couldn’t find a leg curl machine, and I asked somebody and he pointed me to the leg extension machine, and I sort of nodded and thanked him, and then went on my phone to see if I could substitute the leg curls for something else, but I guess he thought I didn’t know how to use the machine, and so started showing me, so I got in the machine and started doing the workout, and after like 8 reps (probably reasonable for a set), I got up to fill up my water, and then just left the building. I probably shouldn’t have done that. Tomorrow I will rewrite the workout to remove the leg curls. ...

June 4, 2026 · Amitav Krishna

2026-06-01 Retrospective

The year is over halfway over! That is sad. To the best of my knowledge, I have not accomplished much yet, mainly just finishing my paper and grant application to emergent ventures. I have also done some school work I believe. Hopefully after another 6 months, there will be less guessing because I will have these entries!

June 2, 2026 · Amitav Krishna

2026-05-20 Retrospective

Hello! My name is Amitav! Today I did little work. This is bad. I read a lot of random things. I practiced competitive programming, completing question 2 from the 2011 CCC Senior division and getting stuck on question 4 before spending some time learning about max flow graphs, though tomorrow I must continue learning about them further. I finished listening to David Senra’s podcast on Claude Shannon, and began listening to his podcast on Phil Knight (Nike man). In addition, I began listening to a podcast from Machine Learning Street Talk with Llion Jones and Luke Darlow on a stagnating machine learning research landscape. They also discussed their own model, Continuous Thought Machines, though I don’t have too many thoughts on it as I didn’t read the paper in much detail. I completed none of the tasks I set out for myself yesterday. It’s also late. One thing I will try for tomorrow is restricting the set of media I am allowed to consume. In particular, tomorrow I will only consume my work Slack, work email, school email, school brightspace page, and “The Death of Ivan Ilyich”, along with my music. Another thing I began tracking today was how much profanity I used, which came to 140, +/- 10-15. That includes also times I had profane thoughts, with the number of times I spoke what I consider curse words probably in the single digits. I am attempting to cut down my profanity usage as it’s unprofessional and I would not like to accidentally curse in front of coworkers. My goal by next Monday is to bring that number down to at most 70/day, with at most one spoken instance per day. I believe this may not be ambitious enough, as I suspect beginning tracking caused me to curse more out of awareness of my tracking. My tasks for tomorrow are: ...

May 21, 2026 · Amitav Krishna

2026-05-19 Retrospective

Hello! My name is Amitav! A good summary of today is that I did some work that then was invalidated, so I’m feeling a bit deflated. I did quite a bit of work for 8090, but wasted quite a bit of time on setting up some infrastructure that was then nullified when my boss and I decided that it would make more sense for the system I’m working with to work with lighter-weight tools that would allow me to iterate faster as the system I’m working on will likely never see absurd levels of traffic. That’s good for future Amitav, however it is somewhat saddening for current Amitav as quite a bit of work will be redone, but it is what it is I suppose. In addition to that, today I read this article which was interesting (it was shared with me yesterday and I did read it yesterday, but did not share it on this blog). There are a couple of action items there that I will not act on right now due to greater priorities, but that I defer instead to the 28th (the day after final paper submissions are due for qCCL). In particular, I lack mathematical maturity, which is bad and must be solved. Another interesting thing I read today was this slideshow by my boss from a few years ago (not recommended to me by him, found it on my own), though I lack a lot of prerequisites in distributed systems and so it’s mostly gibberish to me. One thing I’d like to do eventually is learn more about distributed systems. Today, I also listened to the podcast by David Senra on Claude Shannon. Overall it was interesting, I think my biggest takeaway is that you shouldn’t take things too seriously. Now, back to Amitav, the tasks I set out for myself yesterday are as follows: ...

May 20, 2026 · Amitav Krishna