Another year has come to an end. I had planned to write the year-end summary on December 31, but yesterday I had an interview in the morning and another in the afternoon. After the interviews I went to my girlfriend's place, had dinner at her family's home, and then went to meet up with friends to ring in the new year together — there was really no time. Today I sat down and quickly started writing.
I found my post from early '25 on fedi, pulling time back to January 2025. At the end of '24 I watched a lot of anime and manga: Cowboy Bebop, rewatching EVA, Fire Punch, rewatching Chainsaw Man, rewatching Look Back. In early '25 I kept watching films and anime.
'25 was my zodiac year. My family wanted to hold a ritual to ward off Tai Sui for me and gave me an amulet; I wore it for less than half a month before leaving it in my dorm for good. On one hand I don't believe in that, on the other hand I didn't like that fortune-telling master. Looking back on all of '25, I don't think there were any so-called strokes of luck or misfortune caused by fate. More often, for everything that happens, as long as you observe carefully, you can find the cause that led to it. So from now on I should also cultivate the habit of careful observation, and continue to connect the dots.
I tried doing things with my own hands, but experienced some failures, hahaha.
Some dreams.
In January I tried cosplay for the first time, together with my roommate. I cosplayed Ikari Shinji, and he did Nagisa Kaworu. We wandered around all day — exhausting but very happy — and then an Asuka asked for a photo with me.
After we expanded our contact lists, I learned that this cosplayer is called Ansa.
I also went to the convention on the 17th. Partly because I had bought the ticket long ago and it would have been a pity not to go. On the other hand, I wanted to see Ansa again (x
After that we kept in touch on QQ, and after I returned to school we continued to arrange meetups.
She had told me that a friend of hers did a fortune-telling saying she would definitely get out of singlehood in February. So I went along with this prophecy: on the last day of February, I confessed to her, and we got together.
As The Tatami Galaxy says: “There is nothing less worth mentioning than a pair of lovers finally ending up together.”
This year my life changed a lot compared with previous years: from having almost no life and no sense of ritual, to needing to plan two people's schedules, needing to think about holiday arrangements, needing to think about problems from more angles. I went through many subjects — the subject of how to trust others, the subject of how to view growth, the subject of how to handle an intimate relationship, and so on... From suddenly losing ten jin to ending up ten jin heavier than before, I believe that although an intimate relationship involves two people, you are always facing yourself.
So this was a year of growth in many respects.
My English improved somewhat this year, but it's not enough... As for Japanese, I only studied a bit at the beginning of the year and then stopped...
In Beijing I met shrik3, the site admin, and chatted with him over a meal for two or three hours. A very nice admin! Thank you for the gift!
In April my thinking was still like this, but in the second half of the year I dove headfirst into agents and consensus protocols...
So what should I do?
I didn't watch much anime this year; gquuuuuux counts as one both my girlfriend and I quite liked. However, I was immersed in research over the summer and had no time to cosplay, and after my girlfriend changed jobs, due to the nature of her work (no weekends off), we rarely went to conventions anymore.
The stock market fluctuations around April gave me a little taste of sweetness. From then until the end of the year, the market basically grew steadily. As a loyal disciple of value investing, I will continue to hold.
Whenever I get anxious, I apply for internships to test the waters, and it was the same at the end of this year — applying got me interviews at three small companies. On the last day of December I interviewed with two of them, and I understood my problems. It's still algorithms and the interview eight-part essays; project experience also needs to fit the position. I found that no matter how nervous I am before an interview, once I'm facing the interviewer, I no longer feel nervous at all. It's as if I enter an interview flow state, only focused on answering questions, completely free of other considerations. It's just that interviews leave me very tired afterward.
I largely fulfilled the above plan. The paper work is mostly done; only refining the experiments and writing the paper remain. Since the workload is smaller, I can also prepare for internships in parallel.
hhhhhh... I forgot to mention — after getting together, my girlfriend and I also went cosplaying together. Once she cosplayed Rei and I cosplayed Togata. Another time we went to the EVA trend-and-art exhibition event at Chaoyang Joy City: I cosplayed Ikari Shinji and she cosplayed Asuka.
Do I have such talent?
Where is my dream?
I still want to ask this question: would Aaron Swartz be happy about today's LLMs? On one hand, people can access knowledge more easily; but on the other hand, as Rob Pike said, open source code being taken for training in turn creates technology monopolies — that surely isn't what Aaron would have wanted to see.
At the end of May and beginning of June, my advisor arranged a dinner for me with two seniors. One of them is doing his PhD at NUS. He's a particularly outgoing senior; over dinner we talked about so many things, from his travel plans to academic gossip, and so on and so forth... His energy is also extraordinary — he said that at his physical peak, he could pull an all-nighter and still run 1000 meters in under three and a half minutes... His memory is also very good: he remembers many details of gossip, and when I mentioned that I sometimes go to the movies near school, he immediately named the two cinemas. These are the two things that impressed me most, and also the two areas where I feel a big gap with him. My own energy is not that abundant, and my memory is not great either — I often remember only the rough framework of things and forget the specific details.
The senior also went through a painful period. What he is willing to tell, I listen to; but I also know that there must be places that none of us bystanders can reach, except him.
Not long after that dinner, I started doing research on agents and consensus protocols with my senior, and I was busy all the way until recently before things finally started to take shape. I don't want to dwell on the work I did in this year-end summary; in short, I hope this year can also bring a good result in research.
A little funny story from my time with my girlfriend, hahaha.
Then I still want to talk about vibe coding, or AI-assisted programming. Back in '24, I completed my Open Source Summer task with the help of Cursor's autocomplete. But honestly, I didn't pay much attention to AI-assisted programming after that. Before May, I always believed code should still be written by hand — with AI assistance, many details in programming would be missed.
But when I was doing an industry project for my advisor, I tentatively used Trae to let AI generate the project's code, and it wrote over ten thousand lines in one go — I was shocked. Regardless of whether its code is right or wrong (there are definitely bugs, of course), the very fact that it can generate ten thousand lines in one breath deserves attention, I think.
What happened after that, everyone knows. By the end of the year, in the general software domain (when it comes to the Linux kernel and consensus protocols, AI's role is still very limited), no one would claim to write code purely by hand anymore.
But I think what distinguishes a programmer from a vibe coder is still a deep mastery of programming. Good tools can make a programmer ten times more efficient, but first, one must have the qualities of a programmer.
Hama Sushi should be this year's restaurant of the year — I went many times. I went to Sushiro once later, spent over three hundred, and didn't dare eat there again.
My childhood friend interned in Beijing in July; we had a brief month of reunion, after which he went back to Australia for school. I probably can't truly feel the loneliness deep in a foreign land that he describes, but what I can do is really limited — I can't be everywhere at once, I can only respond to him as much as possible.
Where the talent lies:
Still anxiety... but I'm already moving in the right direction, so let's keep pushing.
I saw Hawstein's article, and from then on, something began to sprout.
In August I only went home for a little over a week. I spent a few days in Weihai, looking at the sea and eating Weihai's good food.
Anyway, no matter which path you choose, you'll end up becoming who you are now.
In September, my niece also started kindergarten. Also, when I went home for Qingming to attend my cousin's wedding, I learned that my sister was pregnant again. Later she told me it should be a boy, and at the end of December the baby was born smoothly. Congratulations to my sister and brother-in-law.
In September and October I focused on grinding algorithm problems, but later I got busy with research and it got delayed again — to the point that I couldn't solve the algorithm problem in yesterday's interview. Once I have free time, I'll start grinding algorithm problems again.
You can also look at the other side of vibe coding.
Because my phone was too laggy, I thought about getting my mom a new one. In the end I bought her a 17 Pro Max, and I'm using her OPPO. The OPPO comes with the Google framework built in, which I find really great.
At the end of October I finally finished the Hot 100...
In December I did my thesis proposal defense, and in the end it passed smoothly without real danger. Next up is the mid-term defense in December '26; as long as the paper gets published before then, the reviewing professors won't give me a hard time.
Some thoughts.
At the end of December, my senior came to Beijing. We had a meal together and talked very happily, hahaha — I got to know him more deeply, and also glimpsed some of their ways of socializing and handling things.
A big change this year is that a lot of the time I'm together with my girlfriend — spending Christmas together, celebrating New Year's Eve together with friends, doing facial cleansing together, and so on and so forth. Then let's keep walking together next year too!
And I hope that in '26 I can publish a paper and find a good internship — let's get through this hurdle first before talking about anything else. I need to lay a solid foundation.
In the new year, keep observing carefully with my eyes, keep listening carefully with my ears, miss not a single tiny detail, and keep thinking.