I’m writing this the day afterward – you’ll see why.

Yesterday I woke up on time and took the normal route (R -> D) to Hacker School. There was a lady on the train writing what I could only describe as indecipherable scribbles on a page of paper, but she seemed to know what it said. I thought that was interesting and tried to figure out if I could decipher her code, but I think it was actually just really loopy cursive handwriting.

Hacker School started a bit slow after morning meeting, and I went to Jazzy’s for lunch, the usual egg cheese and ham sandwich, this time on a toasted roll, which was even more delicious than a bagel.

I had a short meeting with Mary around noon – the facilitators had requested that we all sign up for short meetings with them to just chat about how hacker school is going, etc.. I basically said that Hacker School is being amazing, but I’m finding it hard to be social since normally it takes me a while to come out of my shell (about 6 months) in a new social situation, but I’m “cramming” socially since I only have 3 months of Hacker School, and one of those is gone! Still, it’s being an extremely positive experience for me.

On that note: they’re accepting applications for the next batch! https://www.hackerschool.com/apply?r=top

At 2pm I met with a rather large group of people to start building an AI system for the game Risk. Rather, an AI competition for anyone interested. Essentially, there will be a central server which will run the games, and people can register a URL which points to an AI server which the game server will poll on each turn. Erik and I are the main leaders for the project, which is in python. I’m super excited about it. Ian, Matt, and Alex are the other main contributors to the project so far.

I ended up staying late with Ian, Travis, and Alex, and someone bought a bottle of Makers Mark, so we sat around and drank whisky out of the coffee mugs that are at the office for a few hours, watching bad Youtube videos and working on the Risk AI.

Eventually I took the subway home, and found that Levi had a guest from Boulder – Ian – over at the apartment, who will be staying with us for about three weeks. Levi’s girlfriend Broghanne (who is from somewhere British), Levi, Ian, Imogen, and I all hung out in the living room chatting about American history, science, and astrophysics until about 3am – hence the waking up late and not writing this blog post on time. It was very enjoyable to sit and chat with people about whatever topics came to mind.

From Brooklyn,

–Erty