Birthday

On a certain day this week, it was the 20th anniversary of my existence on Earth.

I don’t really know when it started, but at some point, I stopped liking birthdays. I don’t even know why we celebrate them, so I usually never tell people when my birthday is. Maybe it’s because singing the Happy Birthday song feels a bit awkward — it has always felt clunky to me since I was little. Or maybe it’s because every year I’m supposed to come up with three wishes, yet none of them ever really come true, and I never remember what I wished for anyway.

And saying the wishes out loud feels pretentious. The easiest part for me is always the third wish. People say that if you say it out loud it won’t come true, but honestly, they never come true whether spoken or not. So the third wish is basically my spacing-out time — I usually just think about wanting to eat cake. At least that one has the highest chance of coming true, and the response time is short.
At this point, birthdays to me are basically a day to eat cake and exchange gifts, which isn’t too bad.

Guitar Club

We taught Planet in class this week. I’ve realized that I still don’t really know how to teach guitar. After all, I didn’t learn through any structured system. Ever since I learned how to read tabs, I just played along with them. Now that I suddenly have to teach with a tab sheet, it’s actually pretty hard.

Last time I taught something too easy, so this time I decided to teach something more difficult so it would last longer — so we wouldn’t finish before the class ended. But of course, things went wrong anyway. Even teaching something this difficult, we still ended 15 minutes early. Normally, for a song of this difficulty, the only problem should be not having enough time to finish teaching.

Here’s the tab.You’ll see what I mean — normally, you’d never finish teaching this within two hours.

Tech

3D Printing

This week I finally remembered to make a reservation for printing. I planned to print a Master Sword, Kirby, a Hylian Shield, and the Eye of Truth. The whole model looked like this:

Basically I’m printing as much as possible since printing is free for this course. But the height limit is two and a half hours, so I had to pack everything tightly.
The result… was that only the supports printed. The rest of the model was submerged in resin.

It feels like there weren’t enough supports, so the model didn’t stay on. I hope it works next time.

Reinstalling My Computer

I broke my system while trying to install Nvidia drivers. Right after installing, the screen went black and wouldn’t boot anymore. I probably should’ve run the repair tool first — maybe it would’ve fixed everything. Reinstalling was definitely impulsive… but honestly, I’ve been wanting to try Kubuntu, especially after noticing how Mint automates a lot of things behind the scenes.

Setting up the new system took quite a while. I basically used the two days I was supposed to spend studying to reinstall and configure everything.

Reinstalling: Bad. But I’ll still reinstall next time.

LLM Prompt Injection Attack

Last week in Intro to Information Security, the TA introduced something interesting — LLM Prompt Injection Attacks.

Simply put, it means using the user prompt to bypass the developer’s preset prompt. Developer prompts are always prepended to what we write, usually containing moral guidelines so the model won’t teach you things like how to make a bomb.

Our goal is straightforward: make it teach what it’s not supposed to teach you. But if you want to try this, definitely don’t use your main account — you might get banned. I haven’t played around with this yet, but I’ll dig into it during winter break.

Winter Camp

A few days ago, I saw this camp in Each’s article — even though it’s very obvious the article wasn’t meant to promote the event.But since I don’t have any development experience, I thought it’d be fun to try a hackathon. Most of the activities are web-related, and it just so happens I don’t know anything about web — good chance to learn.It’s an event co-organized by NCTU CS and NTHU CS. I trust that the quality won’t be bad. If anyone’s joining, we can sign up together.