Year in Review - Hawaii, Health, and Projects
Thoughts on living in Hawaii for the past year and recent projects
It’s been an interesting year living in one of the most isolated places on Earth.
After living in San Francisco for over 7 years, my partner and I were ready to try something new. We had a few places in mind, but Hawaii really excited us. It wasn’t easy moving our lives here, it took many sleepless nights packing up our Bay Area apartment and fitting everything we’d take with us in just a few suitcases.
Now a year later, we’re settled in and have gotten into our new routines and exploring Oahu as well as a few neighboring islands like Big Island, and Maui. Living here has been great for many reasons.
Living in Hawaii
My favorite thing about being here is the overall positivity in how people interact. I’ve consistently experienced general pleasantness and random acts of goodwill in a variety of situations. The good vibe is noticeable when meeting people and in day-to-day interactions like grocery shopping and running errands. All different types of people are outside enjoying life.
One of my goals is to be more social, and I’ve had many positive interactions. I have pleasant chats with neighbors and people around town. I’m getting used to strangers saying hi, recognizing me, and positively engaging. I’ve enjoyed meeting a variety of people and hearing their stories.
The change in environment has had a noticeable positive effect on my overall well-being.
I’ve gotten more physically fit after reconnecting with some hobbies like lifting weights and paddleboarding. My favorite activity overall is going on long swims down Waikiki Beach. I see something amazing every time I go swimming, like sea turtles or schools of fish.
One of my main goals was to get more physically healthy and I’ve made some progress. Spending more time outside, waking up around sunrise, and starting my day with a nice walk has reset my sleep cycle, whereas before I used to stay up pretty late.
Another favorite activity has been meal prepping. I’ve been improving my cooking skills and learning how to cook better healthy meals for myself. Grilled meats and veggies on the outdoor grill have been a great meal prep hack since it’s so tasty and healthy. Plus it’s really nice to be outside and hang out while cooking.
Highlights
My other favorite hobby is exploring the islands and learning about the places, their history, legends, and creatures. I have a bucket list of locations and seek out new spots often. Even after a year of exploring, there are still so many more places to see.
Projects and AI
My intellectual and professional pursuits are also going well. I’m working on some exciting projects for work and on the side. Thanks to everyone who reached out with work and collaboration around mutual interests. I’ve had some very interesting video calls with people from all over the world.
My main technical interest right now is AI, and I’ve been studying fundamentals and building product prototypes around it. AI gives me the same feeling as developing for the early iPhone, where every new capability opened up many possibilities. Every few months, a new AI model or capability is announced, and many new features, products, or companies could be built around them. Combining current breakthroughs in valuable ways has a lot of potential.
GPT-3 was the first model that amazed me, but the release of GPT-4 last year was the first model that could reliably do useful work. It’s funny looking back on some of the tools I was amazed with when I first started this newsletter and how far they’ve come since then.
Last year, I launched version 2 of my Logseq OpenAI plugin, which got ~60k downloads and some positive feedback. This year, I’ll improve it and add some additional features I had in mind that have been requested. I’m still actively exploring the space of “Second Brain” + AI.
I worked on a few other AI tools and products but didn’t release them but I plan to incorporate some of these experiments into future projects.
Another new hobby is data science, and I have been working on some mini projects around interesting datasets I’ve collected. I have published a few on my blog, like Wikipedia embeddings and coffee ratings, and I’m working on a few others. AI tools make data science much faster and more enjoyable since they can automate some of the data cleaning and graphing aspects.
For learning the fundamentals of AI, my favorite resources have been:
Karpathy’s Videos, Sebastian Raschka’s Machine Learning Book, and Andrew Ng’s machine learning courses.
It’s been interesting, fun, and humbling to revisit some long-lost math.
I was nervous moving out here, and there have been some challenges, but so far, everything has been manageable and gone better than expected. Overall, it’s been a great year prioritizing my health, working on interesting projects, and exploring an amazing place.