10 things I'm grateful for this Thanksgiving

00:00:00.000 | Instead of saying some big things I'm grateful for this Thanksgiving, like family, friends,

00:00:06.040 | and life itself, let me give a list of seemingly insignificant things that popped into my head

00:00:13.800 | - I wrote them down - that make me smile or just make me think.

00:00:18.840 | I think life is amazing because of such a collection of little things, so I thought

00:00:24.920 | it'd be fun to list a few.

00:00:26.480 | I'm thankful for the horse, Boxer, in the book Animal Farm by George Orwell, who had

00:00:33.520 | the motto "I will work harder" until his very last days.

00:00:39.360 | To me there's always been a kind of quiet heroism to the simplicity of that motto in

00:00:45.760 | the face of a fundamentally cruel world.

00:00:49.720 | I'm also thankful for love songs that are subtle, that look at the mundane, like Wonderful

00:00:59.560 | Tonight by Eric Clapton.

00:01:01.720 | I think a lot of great love songs are kind of over-the-top dramatic, and Wonderful Tonight

00:01:08.320 | is not.

00:01:09.320 | It's just admiring a moment of someone you love being beautiful once again in ways that

00:01:16.360 | have been many times before, and beautiful in a way that, to me, so this is from my perspective,

00:01:23.680 | only a woman can be.

00:01:25.840 | Sort of admiring a beautiful dress and how glowing a person looks on a particular night.

00:01:33.600 | I'm also thankful for neural networks and deep learning for reigniting the big dream

00:01:40.440 | of artificial intelligence for me and I think for much of the world.

00:01:45.880 | Neural networks as they are, are probably not enough to achieve super intelligence,

00:01:51.240 | but I think the magic that's already there in neural networks, I think will be there

00:01:57.640 | in future AGI systems, whatever they end up looking like.

00:02:01.720 | Let's see.

00:02:03.280 | I'm also thankful for Granny Smith apples for being a source of happiness for me throughout

00:02:10.000 | my life, especially on some of the hard weight cuts I had to do for wrestling, for judo,

00:02:18.080 | for Jiu-Jitsu tournaments.

00:02:19.920 | And now that I'm on a keto diet, it's a source of rare cheat meals where I just sneak

00:02:27.160 | in carbs.

00:02:28.800 | When you're on keto, carbs taste even better, and apples is one of my favorite sources of

00:02:33.920 | carbs.

00:02:34.920 | I also probably have a bit of a love-hate relationship with apples because I don't know

00:02:37.960 | how to moderate them.

00:02:39.040 | I don't know how to eat just one apple.

00:02:41.280 | Okay, I'm also thankful for regular expressions, for being both powerful and painful, giving

00:02:48.800 | my sometimes OCD brain a chance to unlock the secret code behind language, if only for

00:02:58.320 | a brief moment of some seemingly insignificant task of parsing a file, a data file of some

00:03:04.920 | sort.

00:03:06.200 | I'm also thankful, as I probably said way too many times, for Mr. Fyodor Dostoevsky,

00:03:13.640 | and especially for Prince Mishkin, or the main character from The Idiot, which is a

00:03:18.080 | book by Dostoevsky.

00:03:20.520 | I think in particular what I've learned from Prince Mishkin is that loving the world simply

00:03:26.280 | is worth whatever trouble such an approach may, let's say, throw your way.

00:03:32.760 | Okay, this list is all over the place.

00:03:36.000 | I'm also thankful for, in general, the research process that's been part of my life for many

00:03:42.040 | years, many painful but glorious years.

00:03:45.720 | So the idea of going from the initial idea with colleagues to doing the different kinds

00:03:51.560 | of experiments, to then writing it up with the elegant typography of LaTeX, submitting

00:04:00.440 | it to a conference or a journal, but conference is my favorite, especially in computer science,

00:04:07.880 | going through the revisions, and then finally attending the conference and presenting your

00:04:13.560 | work and having all the discussions over the work, and then spurring on future ideas that

00:04:20.040 | you work on.

00:04:21.560 | I think the entirety of that process is magical, and I've grown a lot from it.

00:04:26.520 | I'm truly thankful for having the opportunity to do it, and I still, it's one of the reasons

00:04:33.000 | I'm maintaining an affiliation and a position at MIT.

00:04:37.400 | I have regular conversations with friends and colleagues there, working on two papers

00:04:42.680 | currently still, even with all the things that are going on.

00:04:45.880 | I have so much love for this process and for MIT in general that I can't let it go.

00:04:52.640 | It's a big part of me, and MIT is truly a special place.

00:04:56.960 | So it's a source of joy, and I don't want to let go easily of things that bring me joy,

00:05:06.240 | even though so many things in this world do.

00:05:08.640 | Okay, I'm thankful for Mr. Dan Carlin's Hardcore History, and to be specific, the most memorable

00:05:16.380 | for me, there's a lot of great episodes, but the one that really got me was Painfultainment,

00:05:22.240 | which is a single standalone episode.

00:05:25.080 | It's so dark, it's so truly dark that more than the other episodes, I think it truly

00:05:31.640 | changed my view of human nature.

00:05:34.160 | And as is true with dark episodes of that kind, or dark stories or philosophical ideas,

00:05:40.680 | it somehow empowered me, gave me more power to forgive my fellow human beings and forgive

00:05:47.640 | myself for the flaws that I have.

00:05:53.160 | This is a weird one.

00:05:54.280 | This list is just terrible.

00:05:56.080 | I'm thankful for mathematics and theoretical computer science in general.

00:06:01.280 | Speaking of things that bring me a lot of joy, it's just a constant source of unexpected

00:06:07.160 | beauty, both in algorithms or theorems.

00:06:13.200 | It's just, I don't know why, maybe it's the way my brain is.

00:06:16.760 | Maybe it's just human nature, is something about the elegant beauty that can be only

00:06:23.160 | revealed through numbers is a source of happiness, and I'm thankful for having the brain and

00:06:29.520 | the opportunity to experience the beauty that's inherent to me in mathematics.

00:06:36.360 | Finally, I'm thankful for vodka, whiskey, and the worst of it, which is tequila, for

00:06:48.080 | being a catalyst for some wild adventures.

00:06:51.480 | Some that I regretted at the time, but now truly can look back at with a big stupid smile

00:06:59.640 | on my face.

00:07:01.560 | I think that's 10.

00:07:03.720 | I gotta say, I appreciate all the love I've gotten over the past couple years, and I send

00:07:10.800 | it right back at you, many more fold.

00:07:14.520 | Happy Thanksgiving.

00:07:15.520 | I hope you have a good one.

00:07:16.400 | Bye.

00:07:16.900 | [silence]

00:07:26.900 | [silence]

10 things I'm grateful for this Thanksgiving

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