Naruto should have dated more before settling!
🐈⬛ Life
Hi friend! How’s the week going for you?
I feel like I can finally breathe this week! Oh gosh - you ever feel take a break/vacation, come back, and then realize that it takes you 1.5 - 2x the amount of effort and time just to catch up with everything. Well, I’m really happy to say that I’ve finally caught up with everything!!
(๑*ᗜ*) Anime
Yay anime! I watched a lot of anime this week. 😶 I finished Ascendance of a Bookworm and am in the middle of Laid-Back Camp. Let’s talk more about Ascendance of a Bookworm!
It’s an ongoing series about this woman who loves books and almost fulfills her dream job of becoming a librarian… But ALAS she dies from being crushed by a huge pile of books. How ironic.
Luckily, she reincarnates as Myne, who is this sickly and frail 5-year-old girl from an alternative universe with technology equivalent to that of the medieval era. There’s also magic. 🪄 She wakes up and immediately wants to read books, but to her dismay discovers that books are very expensive and peasants like her could never afford one. So she then goes and introduces the world to a bunch of different technologies that are required for her to make books for herself.
It definitely follows the reincarnation isekai trope but is quite refreshing given the unique premise. Not a lot of character development but the plot development is quite interesting. Also, you get to learn about how ancient technologies work! I would say 8/10 for me - recommend it if you don’t have anything spectacular to watch.
📖 Books
I’m done reading Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin’s Most Dangerous Hackers, got paranoid about the state of the world, hoarded some cash (jk maybe), and am going to take some time to let it all get into my brain cells. 🤯
In the meantime, I’m halfway through Algorithms to Live By, which is a very interesting book about how computer algorithms can be applied to solve issues and answer questions in our day-to-day lives. We often perceive our ‘human’ issues to be beyond what computers and math can help us with, but that is not the case at all!
For example, there is actually an optimal way to prioritize already existing work with new work that is coming in. Also, apparently you should never try to organize your email inbox - search ftw!
Overall, I would say that you would probably appreciate this book more with some understanding of computer science/math/data science. For example, several applications they talk about are based on big O, caching, and overfitting. I do think you’ll get a lot from this book even if you’re not familiar with these fields because the author does a good job of explaining the takeaways.
Let’s talk more in-depth about these applications in the next section!
🌻 Learning & Productivity
Here are a couple of my favourite takeaways from Algorithms to Live By:
💕 You want to date 37% of your total number of estimated people you will date, then choose the person after who is better than anyone you previously dated. For example, if you think the maximum number of people you date is 11 in your lifetime, you should date 4 and then choose the person afterwards who is better than any of the previous ones.
Of course, there are caveats to this if you happen to date really amazing or really shit people in the beginning. One way of derisking is by dating more people in total!
😋 How do you decide if you want to try a new restaurant or stick with an old favourite? Well, it’s all dependent on the amount of time you’re going to be around in that city. The value of exploration decreases and the value of exploiting existing things increases over time.
From an intuitive perspective, if you just moved to a place you probably have not tried some really good places. But if you’ve already been around for a while, the likelihood of you finding a place that is better than what you’ve already encountered is lower PLUS even if you do find a good place, the amount of time you will have access to it is not that long since you are moving soon.
👨💻 What I’m Learning
Still personal finance stuff! I started re-balancing my investments in precious metals, stocks, bonds, and crypto. I do still have some money in my forex trading account and a small amount of yolo stuff. 😛
Tbh I still feel quite resistant to taking out a mortgage just from watching family members and other people carry the burden of having one. One thing that keeps playing back in my mind is a conversation I had with one of my co-workers. We were talking about dividing up work for a project and I asked him if there’s anything in particular that he’s most interested in working on. And he said I’m only interested in paying off my mortgage. 😭
JUST TO BE CLEAR THIS ENTIRE SECTION IS #notfinancialadvice!!! I’m just sharing what I’m doing and my thoughts as I work on the plan that caters to my very specific vision for myself. I’m a big proponent of iterative learning and having a strong bias toward action. I’m sure my plan will change as I iterate but I’m just proud that I’m at least actively working on getting my shit together!
💻 Today’s coding challenge (SQL/Python)
💼 This is an active google interview question!
For each unique user in the dataset, find the latest date when their flags got reviewed. Then, find how many distinct videos were removed on that date. Output the first and last name of the user (in two columns), the date and the number of removed videos. Only include these users who had at least one of their flags reviewed. If no videos got removed on a certain date, output 0.
user_flags:
flag_review:
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 ❤️
PS: Reply to this email about what you’d like to see in future editions of Boop’s Keyboard! I’m super new to writing a newsletter and I know there’s a lot for me to learn. ALL constructive feedback is greatly appreciated :)
-Tina
Another good one! :D
This is good writing, Tina. I enjoyed your perspective on the mortgage post.