All alone, I have cried

Silent tears full of pride

In a world made of steel

Made of stone

Saturdays are spent at uni, and whenever I'm at uni I think of a particular person who has nothing whatsoever to even do with uni. At one critical 3 hour paper last semester, I spent maybe one and a half hours desperately stuck in an alternate reality in which we were more than just casual acquaintances.

Uni takes a heavy toll on my brain as well. Just today, within a couple of minutes of each other, I had to grapple with Hopfield Nets, Boltzmann Machines (and energy functions and my old friend - Bayes' theorem), Convolutional Neural Networks and their various stages of convolution and max pooling, and - in a totally unrelated class - flow networks, max-flow min-cut, to graph colouring and its many fascinating applications (all the way from scheduling to Sudoku). The only prior exposure I had to any of this was knowing that 4 colours are enough to colour any map, because I'm a cartonerd.

Anyway, geekery isn't the only reason I enjoy Saturdays. I get to speak to 3 peers (who are older and wiser, so not really peers) who give me a fresh perspective on a lot of things. This week's installment was on dealing with bosses and criticism, and how you need to put your head down and accept things as they are and not pick fights. I listened, and pondered, but I don't really agree - being the socialist and troublemaker that I am. I think bosses need to be smarter at this whole game (and more diplomatic) than their charges, and maybe get rid of the whole boss/employee thing altogether and see each other as partners (like that'll ever happen in our deeply hierarchical society).

Finally, an observation my aforementioned peers made a few weeks ago, and I can anecdotally confirm because a lot of my batch-mates who graduated with me ended up so, is that a significant segment of female Sri Lankan graduates never work in that field - or work at all. Even in a highly lucrative area like Software Engineering. They end up married, and apparently that piece of paper is a prerequisite. IDK. So the next time someone asks you why there are so few female programmers...