Two years! Ariana’s Blog quietly turns another page today. Another anniversary, another orbit around this little sun of words. Small but meaningful changes have crept in. I’ve been trying to write more independently, to keep AI assistance at some distance except grammar debugs. There’s a certain procrastination settling in — perhaps next year I’ll shake it off a bit. My taste in classical music has evolved, too — reshaped by evenings spent in concert halls instead of restaurants, my shopping and dining budgets willingly surrendered to (a lot of) Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov and Chopin. ...

What a joy it is to stumble upon a seminal paper—then realizing it’s by someone you’ll get to know in the future. Moments like these make research feel like a small, interconnected world: The Combinatorial Assignment Problem: Approximate Competitive Equilibrium from Equal Incomes Eric Budish link This paper proposes a new mechanism for combinatorial assignment—for example, assigning schedules of courses to students—based on an approximation to competitive equilibrium from equal incomes (CEEI) in which incomes are unequal but arbitrarily close together. The main technical result is an existence theorem for approximate CEEI. The mechanism is approximately efficient, satisfies two new criteria of outcome fairness, and is strategyproof in large markets. Its performance is explored on real data, and it is compared to alternatives from theory and practice: all other known mechanisms are either unfair ex post or manipulable even in large markets, and most are both manipulable and unfair. ...

Five minutes before boarding I picked up a book at the airport bookstore — flash shopping. Only later did I realize it was Gabriel García Márquez’s final work — the Nobel Prize-winning author of One Hundred Years of Solitude. En agosto nos vemos (Until August) (amazon link) turned out to be a light companion for the flight home, and perfectly timed for late August. The novella follows a woman who returns each year on August 16 to a lonely island where her mother is buried. Each visit also an affair, a fleeting grasp at vitality amid solitude. ...

The CCF EconCS annual gathering is taking place at Nanjing University this year. The Associate Head of Jing’an District delivered an opening talk on how big data and related technologies are driving economic growth. About Jing’an District 静安 JingAn district is in central Shanghai. It is the most fancy commercial area — aka shopping heaven. Like, it is the place I take my friends to if they’re visiting Shanghai everytime (like I’ve been there too many times during my undergrad). Population around 250k, Annual GDP 248603000000 RMB (2023) ...

Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty is one of the few works he was genuinely proud of — which is remarkable, considering his famously self-critic personality. The score is so stunningly good that, at times, the ballet choreography seems boring compared to the music. Tchaikovsky was notorious for writing ballet music so difficult that dancers struggled to find tempo and balance on stage. (Of course, critics in 1890 hadn’t yet met Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring — that riot was still 40 years away.) ...

Bizet’s Carmen has always held a special place in my heart. As a young flutist in the orchestra, I was enchanted by its endless flute solos — each line carrying those unforgettable melodies. Among them, the “Intermezzo II” from the suite remains one of the most charming pieces I’ve ever played: And when our orchestra performed Fantaisie Brillante sur Carmen, I watched from the second flute chair as the principal soared through the piece. To me, it felt like the ultimate dream — dazzling, playful, and endlessly expressive: ...

A Bilibili influencer recently posted a scathing critique of a major Chinese streaming app’s advertising practices — calling out the flood of ads, shady tactics, and outright ad fraud. Takeaways Ads on logos — yes, really Some apps even slap ads directly on their logos just to squeeze out more exposure. Ewww. These logo-banner ads even show up in the App Store. Imagine Apple spending decades perfecting its ecosystem, only to have Chinese apps free-riding on their storefront real estate. Tim Cook probably couldn’t have imagined this level of “creativity.” ...

There’s a lovely scene at the end of Étoile (2025) (Amazon’s TV about ballet), when the boy went to watched the first ballet show and then waited backstage for the ballerina for a date: ‘There were a lot of feathers up there… And I (almost) didn’t fall asleep! The boy said after his first ballet, probably swan lake ...

Visualization of the Mitosis algorithm. Here’s a poster for the (preliminary version of) the paper Contextual Budget Bandit for Food Rescue. Still working on some last 20% works that takes 80% of the time before pushing it to ArXiv.

I remember once going on a date when my friend casually said, “I love opera. Someday, I want to go to London and watch The Phantom of the Opera live.” At that moment, I was honestly terrified — what an ignorant, pretentious idiot?! But then… I stumbled across a live concert by The 3 Tenors — Plácido Domingo, José Carreras, and Luciano Pavarotti — accompanied by the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by the legendary Zubin Mehta. They performed Andrew Lloyd Webber’s All I Ask of You from The Phantom of the Opera. ...