Computer Science and the Big Daydream [computer-science-daydream]

    Translated from the Chinese version by Claude. The original was written in 2020, on the blog I kept as a sophomore.

    Written in 2020 Canarypwn. Was born, studying CS, will die someday.

    Dreams or the Rat Race

    Study-abroad application season had just ended. The school got a big harvest of offers, and it started running study-abroad workshops for the new students. Of course I went, and afterward I was even more confused. GPA, standardized English tests, connections: I had nothing to show for any of them. Still, I figured I had three years left, and with a complete strategy and plan, plus hard work, a little cleverness and a few shortcuts, it would all get sorted out in the end.

    So I went to ask Vizna, and to my surprise a couple of her questions stumped me. She asked, “Why do you want to go abroad? And what are you working toward in your career?” As someone who slacks off all day on V2EX and Zhihu, I had that one ready. I answered right away: “I’m going to be the next vczh and go to Microsoft.” (vczh, 轮子哥 or “Brother Wheel” on Zhihu, is a celebrity programmer at Microsoft. The two parts of my answer don’t have much to do with each other.)

    Yes. Go to places like V2EX or Zhihu, which bill themselves as a “knowledge-sharing platform” or a “community for creative workers”, and read the career threads. The first thing you notice is the criticism of how schools teach and of how work hours are run. On one hand they talk people out of biology, chemistry, environmental science, materials and electronics (no offense); on the other they fight 996. A company like Microsoft is the model employer there. Netizens wave the banner of advanced productivity and go after whatever is “backward” and “ignorant”. Here, reality beats ideals. To me, Microsoft meant high pay and lots of freedom, a place where you can make money standing up. And a master’s, besides catching me up on the latest in computing, meant bargaining power when job hunting. Everything had turned utilitarian.

    But Vizna pushed back: that’s the process, not the goal. “So what are your career ideals, your life ideals?” I was lost. So I set off looking for purpose and meaning.

    When I Grow Up I Want to Be…

    When I grow up I’ll be a world champion, and Mom and Dad will be so happy they’ll give me my favorite Xizhilang; I’ll be an astronaut, and Grandpa and Grandma will be so happy they’ll give me my favorite Xizhilang jelly.

    We had a computer at home very early. According to Mom, my dad took his first few months of pay, asked my grandparents for some more money, and bought a “Hong Yibai” (红一百) computer. By the time I can remember, though, it had broken down and wouldn’t boot.

    In primary school I used Xunlei to download flash games from 7k7k, so I could secretly play on the computer whenever I was home alone. Mom was a primary school teacher, and she taught me how to make PowerPoints; for a while she was taking a computer course, and I picked up a bit of the Adobe suite along the way (though it never got her to like computers). That was when I became the class computer whiz, and computers started bringing me fun and praise.

    From then on I made up my mind: when I grow up I’ll do something with computers. And it all started with 7k7k.

    Then I went to middle school. Earlier, while playing CS Portable, I had made a few friends on Tieba, and Rin was one of them. She is probably one of the people who influenced me most in my life. Rin is a little older than me, knows an enormous amount about computers and loves to share it. Ever since I met her I have been following her tech stack and her footsteps.

    This was when I started following everything computer-related, and probably also when I chased the dream hardest. The Steve Jobs biography we read in reading class fired up a lot of my classmates. During this time I kept hanging around Tieba, downloaded and installed all kinds of cracked software, joined a few “haxx0r groups”, and tried writing a few bits of code with C4Droid (it went nowhere). What I remember best is borrowing the library’s only copy of Easy Language from Beginner to Master (易语言, a programming language with Chinese keywords) over a school break, and reading a few pages now and then, on the break and back at school.

    If the first chapter of every other programming book hadn’t gone on so much about history, maybe I’d have read more.

    It was also my purest, simplest and most naive period. I kept looking for new things and trying new things. To me, computers were something sweet, like chocolate. I was like the kid in the Xizhilang ad, with unrealistic hopes for the future.

    High School and the Gaokao

    Thanks to a school recommendation and some luck, I got out of the high school entrance exam and into the honors class of one of the city’s key high schools. That put me on a bigger stage, and I met my high school deskmate ysc. It happened by chance: in the freshman group chat I saw a classmate say something like “isn’t VB something you should know by primary school?” and it turned out he really did, he’s way too good, so I got in touch with him. ysc is truly strong, and he was the best teacher I have met. He brought me into the school’s strongest programming club, the robotics club, and he is also the one who made me decide that I’d become a computer scientist.

    In tenth grade, under ysc and the club teacher, I entered a Future Storm robotics competition and another innovation-focused robotics competition, programmed an Arduino, and won a few prizes. Later I picked up a project an older student had left behind and won first prize at the city innovation contest. Around then I also heard many stories of older students getting into Tongji through independent admission (自主招生, where a university could lower the gaokao cutoff for applicants it picked itself) by way of innovation contests. From then on, what programming meant to me changed.

    In the summer after eleventh grade I entered an innovation contest that could “get you independent admission”. My goal was a national first prize, and the finished project met my expectations; to me, at least, it is one of the best things I have ever made. The next day I got the news: national third prize, a consolation prize. (It did still get me independent admission to BUPT in the end.) I wasn’t satisfied back then. I even wanted the club teacher to file an appeal. I couldn’t let it go, and all the free time I had spent on science projects seemed meaningless. The joy of making things could no longer make up for losing the medal.

    In high school there was a very common pattern. Teachers had us do career planning many times and brought in lots of people, agencies included, to tell us what to do and which awards to win. They were practically telling us to get into university by any means necessary. So making things and programming became something useful to me. In the club I started asking whether a given contest was useful. ysc did the informatics olympiad, so I did it too, because in this weak province, solving the warm-up problem and brute-forcing some partial credit was enough for a prize.

    Luckily, high school still had some people with ideals, like the club teacher. When recruiting he never seemed to tell us how useful joining his club would be, and he kept reminding us to find what’s fun about innovating. One club member was still entering science contests in twelfth grade. Think how much determination and love that takes.

    In the end, independent admission got stricter, and the contest kids’ moods rose and fell with the policy. But for them, contests were “this is fun to learn, and it helps me get into university too”, while for me it had become “I heard this is an easy way into university”. ysc went to HUST, and I think he deserved more; another went to BIT through independent admission; and I, maybe because in high school I still made a few small things out of my dreams, also ended up at a school I’m happy with.

    The Answer

    Looking for purpose and meaning, I kept asking people questions. I asked about their ideals, their pasts, what they were doing.

    Zhuo’er at HKU answered me like this: “The process itself is a kind of goal.” “Choosing what kind of life to live isn’t a moment where we suddenly see everything clearly and life opens up, the way we imagine. It’s a road we slowly wear into the ground ourselves, by feeling our way, succeeding and failing over and over.”

    Rereading Lunyu (轮语), a collection of vczh’s sayings, I found something new:

    Brother Wheel is the kind of person who, given a wheel, can play with it alone for a whole afternoon and love every minute.

    How much influence does my open source project have in the community? How many people take part? Someone has already done what I’m doing, so what’s the point of me doing it? My resources are thin, my skills are outdated, my ideas are naive, my tactics flop; how could I ever pull this off? Professor He was making several hundred thousand dollars a year right after graduating, Kratos’s son got to be the God of War, Dante rides a motorcycle and becomes the Lich King without grinding problem sets…

    I hesitate and overthink, maybe still with nothing to show for it, and I’m already close to 30, to 40. The original heart is gone: treating learning as pleasure, doing one thing with total focus, whatever the cost, without counting the time, ignoring the gossip…

    Brother Wheel is looking for people like that.

    Maybe people today are all more or less anxious and restless. So am I. My parents pinned too many hopes on me, to the point of “failure is not allowed”, and left me nowhere to retreat. The marks high school and the gaokao left on me are still there today. I think a human life is a life of alienation, and your parents’ expectations and the chase after usefulness make you run toward death faster: once all of that is done, what is left to do? What keeps people truly alive is love and hate, ideals and achieving them, and not desire and the things desire leads you to do. A life driven by desire never reaches authentic existence.

    In high school I was always drawn to “free and useless” (自由而无用), and to “the use of the useless is the real use”. I had done too many useful things and too few useless ones, so I felt I couldn’t be free. Like “Go-ToDo”: every item in life is scheduled, and then you speed toward the end of the list. When every task on the list is done, what is left of life?

    For computer science and my life, I want to say “stay Simple, stay naive.” As Chen Mengmeng said, keep a childlike heart like vczh’s. I no longer spend all day figuring out shortcuts to a master’s offer three years from now, which group is useful to join, how much I’ll make a year, which language is trendy, and so on. Admissions offices, evangelizing, top-end keyboards and cameras, where to eat and where to have fun, all kinds of grand narratives. These have nothing to do with my dream and are far away from me; what good does throwing myself into them do for my ideals? It only makes you look like a hysterical paranoiac. When I first learned C and microcontrollers I never thought they would help me get into No. 393 Middle Huaxia Road, and I didn’t learn C and microcontrollers to get into No. 393.

    Instead, I’ll quote a cringey line from Doctor-X:

    A surgeon’s skill is decided in the earliest training: by how much passion you bring to learning surgery, how many fine techniques of good surgeons you watch, and by doing the basic drills over and over, like flowing water, until you can do a perfect operation. That is the ideal surgery. And most important of all, however hard the operation, you never give up on the patient.

    Computer science is the same.

    I was born, I’m studying CS, I will die. I can pretty much guess I won’t do anything grand that changes the world. Living each day like a kid is probably the best description of my future.

    From now on, I hope I’ll say to all the “useful” things:

    Fuck off

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