it's brat summer, it's the fall of democracy, it's thirty-five degrees in july in new york city all the time and tonight is the first night since i've been here that i've had absolutely no plans and something about that feels glorious because i haven't had the space to think about anything besides the charli xcx album and half-precision supercomputing and sometimes both of those things at the same time. this week i was listening to gorgeous sad songs at two o'clock in the morning while sitting in front of my computer building containers to ship from santa clara to PDX and—what else?—crying, of course. i just made another playlist and it's just covers of halsey and the chainsmokers's closer??? i love stories about people self-sabotaging their perfectly great lives and no one has ever told a better story about self-sabotage than the characters in closer and i will sing along every time.

people keep asking me what i'm doing in new york and i tell them i have no idea and that's the truth. i saw a tweet in the timeline from a girl i'd never met who was subletting her place with two cats and decided to take it because i thought i might kill myself if i spent one more july in san francisco. not actually—i'm over my california depression phase, i promise—anyway—this apartment has no air conditioning so i took the train into manhattan and hid out in the office in union square avoiding everyone and not answering any text messages but accidentally making friends, and it was really great, actually. the best thing about being in the office is that no one asks you where you work. whenever i meet new people they love asking me about the stock. i think next time a stranger asks me where i work i am simply going to lie. my coworkers are trying to date girls who have never heard of NVIDIA and lol, lmao. well, you can date an NVIDIA engineer or you can be one. people keep asking me if i am going to leave engineering (???) and i'm like, no, being a girl engineer is the job.

the thing about being a girl engineer is that you exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you wait okay you but you kind of do. Grace Hopper was out here in the 1940s picking young women out of her mechanical drawing classes to move to Arlington and enlist in the navy WAVES as codebreakers and then after the war we sent all the women home and didn't let them touch computers for another half century, so they didn't. i love that we named a chip after her; i'm nonsensically emotional about it, actually, even though i had nothing to do with it and this week i was like, where the hell am i going to get an ARM machine to build containers on? i think constantly about how it would be impossible to imagine the women codebreakers of WWII as the engineers and scientists of present day AI labs. when i was hired as a researcher here they said, do you want to evaluate some models? do you want to look at some data? they went easy on me. i said no, i want to work on supercomputing and systems, and they let me??? being a girl engineer means being the role models i never had. i stopped doing community organizing work, but staying in engineering and committing to excellence at it—especially in a subfield where there are no women—is the diversity work. every time a woman's name appears on a research paper i look her up to find out whether she's an engineer or the PM—most of the time i'm disappointed, but sometimes i'm not. when i was twelve years old i said it was fine that the boys were better at math than me because i was a girl, and girls are worse at math. where does a twelve year old even get that idea? i loved puzzles growing up and i love distributed computing now; i feel lucky and grateful to have the coolest job. i’m not sure if i want kids or not but i do want a daughter. it's so confusing sometimes to be a girl.







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