Home.

🐈‍⬛ Life

Hi friend! How’s the week going for you?

I’m finally home in Beijing! House tour?? I’d been wandering around the world for 2 months and when it was finally time to board the plane, it felt so bittersweet. I realize I’d been living day to day with this distant goal of going home. Now that I’m back, it feels both familiar and foreign and it’s like oh shit…I guess I need to adapt to this life now. It’s so different from life in the US.

Speaking of getting used to stuff, some of y’all probably know that China has a 0 Covid Policy. The way they regulate it is this QR code system.

The color of your QR code determines your Covid status.

You get an Individual QR Code that changes color depending on your proximity to Covid and the risk level of where you physically are. Green is good. Yellow is medium risk where you’re not allowed to travel and have to quarantine yourself for 7 days. Red is you’re fucked 😱 (got Covid and have to quarantine for 14 days).

So how do they determine your code color? Well, everywhere you go - and I mean everywhere - you need to scan a location code to update that you’ve been there. You also get Covid tested whenever you go to public places which would update the system. Since you have your code scanned everywhere you go, if you’ve been somewhere where there is a case, they can determine your proximity to a case and update your code accordingly.

You scan this code to register that you’ve been to this location.

There are some more technicalities like if you travel across cities you have to reapply for another QR code. If you travel from one place to another, current city risk <= destination city risk, etc. Btw if you’re interested in a vlog with this experience lmk!

Things I Watched

I started watching House of the Dragon. Just finished Episode 2. If you haven’t watched it already - highly recommend!

badass main character.

📖 Books

I’m still reading Sapiens - tis a fat book. Yuval talks about this concept of imagined order.

Imagined Order: A power structure that doesn't exist in nature, but is, rather, one we invented as homo sapiens in order to maintain structure on Earth. eg. capitalism, democracy.

He explains that we collectively need to buy into these imagined orders to maintain widespread stability. Imagine if we don’t collectively believe in the value of money anymore. Chaos would ensue. 😱

One of the interesting imagined orders he talks about is romantic consumerism. Romanticism tells us that in order to make the most of our human potential we must have as many different experiences as we can eg. travel, and meet new people. Consumerism tells us that in order to be happy we must consume as many products and services as possible - that if we don’t feel right about something, we just need to buy the right product or service.

I think buying souvenirs on vacation is a good example.

I’m quite aware of the consumerism part and do try to be cognizant about what I buy. The romanticism part though made me think “oh wow, I’m totally bought into this idea and I just thought it was a fact.” Perhaps it’s something that I should think about more too. 🤔

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🌻 Learning & Productivity

I’m so excited to get back to doing the Study with Tina livestreams! Since I’d been traveling and sometimes couldn’t maintain a steady stream, my productivity PLUMMITED. I feel like I did nothing for the past 3 days…

I have had trouble with streaming using VPNs though, so please lmk if you have any recommendations besides Astrill, Expres, NordVPN, and SurfShark. 🥺

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👨‍💻 What I’m Working On

I’m going through the Lonely Octopus applications now! I know some of y’all have been asking when you’ll get notified if you got accepted into the beta. We’ll start rolling out acceptances from the last week of September. If you have any questions, please free to drop me a line at tina@hellotinah.com!

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💻 Today’s coding challenge (SQL/Python)

🎥 So you can sit next to your friends (totally cool if you don’t either lol - I go to theaters by myself sometimes)

A movie theater gave you two tables: seats that are available for an upcoming screening and neighboring seats for each seat listed. You are asked to find all pairs of seats that are both adjacent and available. Output only distinct pairs of seats in two columns such that the seat with the lower number is always in the first column and the one with the higher number is in the second column.

theater_availability

theater_seatmap

Head on over here to answer the question!

*Btw if you’re prepping for data science interviews or just want to keep yourself sharp, Stratascratch is a great platform with 10k+ real interview questions on SQL and python coding, probability, product sense etc. You can use my code ‘tinahuang’ at checkout for 20% off ❤️

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PS: Thank you to everyone who comments and responds to the newsletters. I read every single one and REALLY appreciate them so much. Unfortunately, there’s not enough time in a day to answer everyone, but I just want to say that the stories people have shared have helped me so much.

-Tina