https://yiding.rocks RSS feed of Yiding's writings, outdoors experiences, and projects https://yiding.rocks/writings/villanelle-for-the-in-between For faces that linger in the in-between. Mon, 20 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://yiding.rocks/writings/traveller I am haunted by railways. At the beginning, two steel tracks race into a distant mass of meadow and masonry. Then whistles blare. There is a gap in the platform, some hurried gaits, lamp posts. The space between sleepers begin to shrink inside the steady beat of a metronome. The station speeds away and the gap and throng and posts disappear, replaced by a gushing current of emerald and burgundy. Tue, 07 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://yiding.rocks/writings/visions-of-kentucky A second day of snow in the Gorge. Its green canopy betrayed spring, but on the treetops and valley floor, a rare accumulation of snow had carved out a winter paradise. Perched near clifftop, we gazed into the eroded landscape around Indian Staircase. Faraway valleys alternated in mist and murmur. In sporadic intervals, our shy sun pierced through the clouds so that the shaded vegetation, clinging under rock cracks and caverns, appeared lavender against the brilliant snow. Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://yiding.rocks/writings/chasing-snow The most beautiful kind of snow is subtle. It caresses the eyelash and melts against the lip. It lightly tingles but does not settle. It whispers past trees, cars, and deserted promenades, overlaying its gargantuan arrival against the immovability of its surroundings so that everything, still or stirring, seemed at once strung together by the synchronised twirling of its feathers. Sat, 07 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://yiding.rocks/projects/predicting-grokking The onset of grokking correlates strongly with the intersecting of model memorisation and generalisation speeds for modular arithmetic datasets. Wed, 04 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://yiding.rocks/writings/south-of-lantau Life does not get much better than this. Winter in Hong Kong is frequented by dense haze that shrouds the ocean like a veil. But today the skies were pristine. A strong breeze blew down from the ridges of Lantau Peak, the second tallest point in Hong Kong, just shy of a vertical kilometre. For hundreds of years, we have referred to it as 爛頭 (Lan-Tau), the 'broken head', after the tiny saddle that separates Lantau's subsidiary peak from its southern summit. Tue, 06 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://yiding.rocks/writings/timezones The clock widget on my Mac displays four timezones. GMT +8 (Hong Kong), GMT (London), GMT -5 (Boston), and GMT -8 (San Fran). In October, I wrote about the Presi Traverse. It felt like home, something more to do with a feeling than a place. Home carries this immutable status as a self-justifying fact, a boulder that just is. Staring at the blank desktop on my Mac, I realised I've found home in each of these timezones. Mon, 29 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://yiding.rocks/writings/wit-lang Wit Lang means 'the Summit of Mt Whitney' in Wit-Lang. The journey from SFO to Lone Pine Campground was hard on the hindquarters. All through the night we were tessellated inside Watson, Ampere's sister's vintage Ford Ranger that claims to seat five people (it fits two and a half). Watson was a spiritual fit. Riding on a holiday high, we bartered 10 suffocating hours each way on the road for the sun and snow of the eastern Sierra Nevadas. Sun, 30 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://yiding.rocks/writings/on-cal I sped through the last pages of East of Eden on Saturday, after a delirious night running 'orientation' for new Mountaineering Club members with Prezi and Freefall. Caleb Trask is one of my favourite literary figures yet. He is a paragon of fullness. As Lee remarks to Abra, Cal is 'crammed full to the top with every good thing and every bad thing.' Tue, 11 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://yiding.rocks/writings/answers I wish I'd always have an answer. On Sunday, for the second time this semester, I made the sojourn west to Farley Ledges. The changing of seasons was unmistakable. Winds plucked gilded leaves off hanging branches, and on opposing hills the slopes were specked with blobs of jasmine and mauve and crimson, like some pointillist's vision of fall. I've always been enamoured of the road. On the way back, Cypress was driving with Fleetwood Mac in the background. I watched the sun set and guardrails flash by. For an instant I was eleven again, in the backseat behind my parents on the road from Anchorage to Valdez. It was a cosy kind of ignorance. I had no idea what the map looked like or where we were going to stop, so the only thing I could do was to relax and take everything in. That feeling has always clung to me. When you stumble into a landscape without any answers, the unfurling of beauty is pure magic. Tue, 28 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://yiding.rocks/writings/fall-presi-2025 Traversing the Presidential Range of the White Mountains, NH, in one day. Smoke in the cabin was a thick slosh of butane and firewood and cooked pasta. Outside were stacks of log and draped moss. The air of the Whites was cold enough to warrant fall, but sufficiently warm that the ice axe I had strapped to my pack would not find good use. We huddled in, a throng of listeners as the stereo Wonderbooms blasted through my mix of 70s and 80s folk and rock. Sun, 12 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://github.com/PerceptronV/wuyu-lang A statically-typed, dynamically-compiled language for esoteric Chinese. Sun, 05 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://yiding.rocks/writings/backpack-imperfection There are two types of perfection. The prelapsarian model of innocent undifferentiated virtue, and the mature closure of something having served their duty well. I was pretty obsessed with the prelapsarian model growing up. I always tried to keep things in their most pristine condition. But as I became older, mature closure had aged better. I was prompted into this cot (chain of thought) because I had noticed, Sun, 10 Aug 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://yiding.rocks/projects/orderedness-by-pruning Appropriate pruning techniques may encourage greater orderedness in recurrent neural network computation. Sat, 19 Jul 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://yiding.rocks/writings/two-harvard-poems These pieces are mostly written on campus and remind me of my memories here. I hope you'll find them interesting. The first one was written on a crispy Thursday afternoon after class in Freshman year. I'd biked over to Herter Park, where my first taste of a New England fall compelled me to enjoy the company of the dying light. Thu, 10 Jul 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://yiding.rocks/writings/on-loneliness I think loneliness is a powerful thing. Throughout my life, I've been fortunate enough to be fulfilled (mostly), although not always happy. In our flat back in hong kong, as the night sets in, I could always feel a visceral sense of singularity. The adults are out in the living room, and me in my crib — the room I know every inch of — wondering about the big lights outside across the harbour. Tue, 13 May 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://github.com/PerceptronV/delgrada A lightweight, scalar-based autograd engine. Sun, 11 Feb 2024 00:00:00 GMT https://yiding.rocks/projects/wikipedia Map the entirety of Wikipedia. Fri, 04 Aug 2023 00:00:00 GMT