ICLR in Rio

First meal in Brazil: tapioca tradicional and café carioca. I came prepared for something exotic, but the tapioca pancake surprised me with a texture and taste somewhat like chewy paper, while the coffee was rather sour. Still worth trying for the experience.

My luckiest day, and arguably my favorite booth (#JaneStreet is the other strong contender). A colleague introduced me to this game at #Susquehanna booth 10 minutes before the day ended, and somehow voilà I made it to the 2nd and 6th place on the leaderboard and won a Keychron K2 Max keyboard! They mailed it to Singapore and it now sits on my office desk, bribing me to work from office.

Taken on our paper’s poster day. We repeatedly attempted a full group photo and repeatedly failed. Every time someone said “let’s take one now,” one person was found missing either in a plane, a solo tour, or a workshop session.

Bryan loved our paper avatars enough to pose with them properly, finger-point and all.
Rachael calls them “little creatures”, which is admittedly accurate: tiny, academic, and slightly too pleased with themselves.

Side mission at the conference: solve #JaneStreet daily and grand puzzles. We were so obsessed with the grand puzzle that we ended up each taking approx 10 copies due to lack of sketch papers. We figured that the passcode is converged or converge or converging or something along the line, but didn’t have time to go back to the booth to test it. Turned out the answer was indeed converge.

I was mildly terrified before the motorcycle ride, thanks to online tourist reviews describing it as fast, chaotic, and spiritually adjacent to being launched into the sky. It was in fact gentler than the motorbike I took in Bali. Almost enjoyable, even.

Learning capoeira from a local kid, with drumbeats and cheering. I also tried the berimbau and, shockingly, I was pretty gifted at it. A new career path was briefly considered.

Smiling happily under His arms. This was probably our last proper group photo in Brazil, because the next day four of us kena food poisoning from the local cocktail, caipirinha. Delicious, iconic, and apparently deadly.

Zoom in to see the GLOW.AI written besides Singapore. We visited this local coffee shop and tried some Brazilian beans. I was surprised that they have sugarcane flavored coffee. I bought SGD140 worth of coffee beans, and I guess I am qualified to be a coffee lover.