4: 太晚

London to Taipei to London.

• Spent the month with the Arb crew. Less productive and relaxing than I wanted: ICLR once again getting in the way. I have lost my appetite for fruitless academic hazing / am too neurotic for it.
  

• Unplanned stop in Shanghai. Do not use Air China.

  • Me and Juan got waylaid by Typhoon Kongrey. Stranded in Shanghai airport. The state airline had no idea what to do with us. Their website is totally inoperable. We waited 10 hours after the flight was cancelled before we got out: 4 hours of being led around in circles skyside, 4 hours totally abandoned next to immigration, 2 hours waiting to be rebooked.

  • Told nothing at any stage, probably just because of language barrier. Put on a bus "to a hotel" without being told where it was. Not told when the rebooked flight was. Air China lady was I suppose doing her best, but ended up making us violate our visa. We were thus detained in a little glass cell for an hour on the way out.

  • The thing is that the processes aren't even efficiently authoritarian. No one wrote anything down. No one passed a list of names to the hotel; whoever was in the bus at the right time got a room. They locked me out of my room after one night; I told them I was entitled to two and they shrugged and unlocked it.

  • The hotel took our passports. They seemed confused why we thought this was a problem; they seemed to think this was a safekeeping service.

  • It ended up taking me 86 hours to get from door to door, Bristol to Taipei.

  • Shanghai. It's been 14 years.

    • driving is much, much safer than before. I only feared for my life once. Didi is amazing, slightly better than Uber.

    • More sterile and less crappy than before. Still plenty of both (old hotel power outlets spark every time they are used)

    • very few foreigners despite the recent kaifang. About 30 times less than Taipei per eyeblink.

    • failed to pay at a restaurant; no card reader, only WePay. ATM rejected 4 Visa cards. Walked two miles to a bureau de change. They had no cash register so they put it in their apron.

    • That said, they let me walk out without collateral. I am deeply glad and proud. We were grinning at each other afterwards.

    • The food was insane.

    • my Chinese is coming back quite quick.

    • If you don’t know about instant OCR on Android, open camera, long press the circle button and swipe what you want to translate. Game changer.
      

• Taipei cemented as my favourite city.

  • Best food per dollar is Laixin noodles. Handmade in the corner, 10 dumplings for $2.

  • Serenity isn’t cheap but is the rare ideal Sichuan spice level here.

  • Yache is delightfully trashy Korean food

  • Moon Moon Food shockingly good and cheap, you would never guess (unless you saw the queue)

  • I kept making the mistake of going for fancy places. Interestingness and novelty is not what I need at this point in my life. I need flavour.

  • You can get buy happily on 7-11 microwave fare, including veggie nuggs.

  • $15 massages

  • Sounds Good

  • We watched a bunch of John Woo and Hou Hsiao-Hsien. A Better Tomorrow 2 is bonkers and essential.

  • Voluntarily went for a 9k run for maybe the first time ever. (Brought my inhaler for once.)

  • Three of my friends visited Taiwan for me!! and for themselves. We made a menace of ourselves by misunderstanding many things, which is a top 5 activity when you’re in good-humoured company.

  • We went up into the real mountains on a tea expedition. T bought 5 kilos for like $200.

  • Museums uniformly disappointing, though I am glad that the 228 museum exists and it uses art well to express the horror and repression.
    

• Only really productive thing I did was the shallow review 2024 and the ICLR rebuttals. The review was overfunded after OpenPhil and a Jane Streeter threw money at it, to my surprise. A new client gave me a fun quant screening test before onboarding Arb.

• Lichtenberg is the most useful and additive book I have read all year. He does not age.

• This was fun to make.

• I was a reviewer for the MINT workshop. The organisers assigned me one AI-generated paper as part of an interesting test-of-peer-review challenge.

  • I rejected it but didn't notice it was AI-generated. It was a bad paper: no code, no method description, misunderstood the Lottery Ticket Hypothesis it was supposedly testing and extending

  • Its scores were 2/4/4/6/6. Peer review is terrible
    

• I made a nice carousel for my strongest playlists. I spent a while distilling the essence of the town I did my phd in.
  

• I'm fellowmaxxing rn

  • Cambridge

  • Chatham

  • Foresight

  • OSV

  • Constellation

• new words:

  • nothing-buttery

  • justaism

  • anthropectomy
    

• In case I don’t see you, merry xmas.

Gav