About

Hiiii, hello there, and welcome to my magic kingdom 👋. If you'd like to know more of me — my values and my worldview — have a look at my "Philosophical Reflections" series. I love reading. As a kid I spent most of my afternoons after school in bookshops. As for the life I hope to live later on, I'd like a home full of books and musical instruments, where every day I can do research, play a little music, read and meditate. What I read, and the fields I'm drawn to, are all over the place, from classical literature to modern science fiction; lately I've been reading Complexity: A Guided Tour, a book about the science of complexity. For a long time now I've been studying and practising Taoism, and I've learned a little about Buddhism too. What I hope to be at my best is a Lifelong Meditator 🧘: meditation keeps me clear-headed and lets me feel what is real in the stillness. It is the practice of a lifetime.

For the coming year I'll be doing research at UC Berkeley, mainly in RL and MLSys, the fields I love. Friends, I'd love for you to ask me out for a coffee chat :)

If you're curious about other sides of me, come and browse my library: the books, films and shows I've read and watched lately. Another thing I've always wanted to do is to travel far and wide, practising and writing as I go; words are the trace my life leaves behind. I write travel notes in the places I've been, and my "City Stories" is just such a notebook. The name was inspired by the album of the same name by Sweet John, a band I love. I started writing it when I finished high school, though there are still only a handful of pieces.

Through university I've mostly rented off campus, so I cook for myself. In Berkeley I hardly ever eat out (it's so expensive QAQ), and honestly, my own cooking tastes better and is far healthier. I wanted these days to leave memories I can actually hold on to, and some proof of how much I love life, so I made a cookbook, "Lambert's Kitchen", recording the dishes I've been exploring in America :)

The life I live is one built on principles, iterating and growing as it goes. I want to keep learning and growing. Over the years I've come to see that willpower and focus start out very limited and fragile — a physiological limit. So rather than forcing myself into a self-discipline that goes against human nature, I'd rather get the Environment Design right, practise minimalism and cut the cost of decisions, so that attention flows to what matters. That is what my Principles System does: it holds the beliefs I live by and the principles I put into practice.

I love photography and cosplay — I've done Kaworu Nagisa and Quanxi — and I'll be putting together a portfolio of both. Bringing a character I love to life, even adding a few touches of my own, makes me truly, wonderfully happy. I also play quite a few instruments (none of them especially well) and am curious about many more. From middle school I played bass in the school band, and back then I learned a lot of fingerstyle guitar pieces; through high school and university I gradually moved to electric guitar and played a number of shows with school bands. This year I'm learning the violin, and later I'll take up the guqin and the guzheng. Instruments are friends who can stay with me for life. The ancients cultivated the Way through the arts — something I deeply believe in.

My days in America have given me a lot to think about. I'm clearer now about what I truly love and the life I want, and I'll go and do the things I believe are meaningful. I remember that in my last year of high school I wrote a line on a lucky card hung on a tree: "Treat life as a work of art." I think that's the best footnote to my life :)

(24th day of the eighth lunar month, year of Bingwu — my apartment in Berkeley)

(Updated on the 8th day of the ninth lunar month, year of Bingwu — Berkeley)