2023年8月

I trust this email finds you well. I feel sorry for not contacting you the last week. Apologies for my radio silence last week - Amazon's projects have taken all my bandwidth. I am wrapping up my Spark task and giving them a presentation next week. I also got my internship extended. Because there's a new task for me: swimming in an ocean (16 PetaBytes) of log files. It reminds me of the Venus dataset, but it's equally, if not more, challenging and intellectually stimulating.

...

On hearing this task, my synapses are firing. Of course, they won't entrust an intern to conduct this scan. I still get lucky to be the person who drives the design, albeit only do some investigations on the existing solutions inside Amazon. It's still a precious chance for me to wave my hammer! But to be honest, I don't feel Amazon it's the right place for me.

I'm not sure if you remember my musings on button-up imperative state machine v.s. top-down Alonzo Church view. Let me regurgitate it again:

Some random thoughts: I got a very strange harmonious feeling these days: in the daytime, I work on Amazon and I have to be a bottom-up finite automaton focusing on prioritizing tasks to get my jobs done; but in the nighttime, I have to turn off that imperative state machine -- switching to the top-down Alonzo Church view -- to keep up with those scholars. These two qualia don't seem to be that incompatible as I previously thought.

It turns out, this harmony is actually a privilege, only achievable when everything aligns perfectly -- It's not fault-tolerance; It's no fault at all. And I'm skeptical about the sustainability of this fault-free state. The current market conditions are challenging, and Amazon is not immune. I can sense the pressure from my manager. Amazon, like any company, needs to innovate and move fast to attract customers, gain market share, and, most importantly, generate revenue. If speed doesn't necessitate understanding, even of their own systems, then understanding is deemed a waste of time. There seems to be a lack of direct respect for knowledge and truth. And their Leadership Principles, in my view, often serve more as rhetoric for controlling their workforce than as genuine guiding values.

So if I got to choose, I would still opt for the top-down Alonzo Church view. I am not necessarily saying I like it. But it's only through this perspective that I can hear the runes – I'm not sure what these runes are, perhaps they're what is referred to as l'Auguste Syllabe. I came across this French phrase from Marguerite Yourcenar's L'Oeuvre au noir. Of course, I read the Chinese translation, but I must commend DUAN Yinghong for an excellent translation job. And I believe a particular passage from this book accurately captures a cynical feeling in my head:

(il regardait de haut...); et les étudiants bruyants et rustauds, bien décidés à ne s'instruire qu'autant qu'il le faut pour décrocher une sinécure, pauvres hères dont la fermentation d'esprit n'était qu'une poussée de sang qui passerait avec la jeunesse.

(he looked down on ...); and the noisy and uncouth students, determined only to educate themselves as much as necessary to land a sinecure, poor wretches whose mental fermentation was merely a rush of blood that would pass with youth.

As always, I'm glad to have your guidance as your disciple and looking forward to the journey.