Review - Son of Saul

Saul Fia is the debut film of László Nemes. It stars Géza Röhrig as Ausländer Saul and won the Oscar for the Best Foreign Language Film in 2016. It has also received numerous critical acclaims among other prestigious awards.

Note to Self.

I came across this piece of advice from non other than Scott Aaronson, in this lecture:

We'll have a few problem sets -- they're useful for you, and also they give me feedback about how much you're understanding. But here's the rule: you won't have to solve all the problems. You're allowed to write down, "yeah, Problem 4's a real stumper. I thought about it, I don't know the answer. Here are some easier problems that I can solve." I'll evaluate that the same way I'd evaluate a research paper that said a similar thing. On the other hand, if you have no idea how to solve the problem but you pretend to know -- for example, if you write gibberish that goes on and on and on, hoping that something vaguely resembling an answer will be buried in there just by chance -- that counts negatively. You'd do much better by leaving the question blank.

I plan to implement this in my life from now on. Everything I question shall be filled with honesty. Everything I do will have a backbone and a real passion behind it.

The Four Years

These four years remain the most influential, difficult and interesting part of my life. It gave me an insight into the world like never before. The most important thing I learnt here was:

Computer science is not glorified programming. Edsger Dijkstra, Turing Award winner and extremely opinionated man, famously said that computer science has as much to do with computers as astronomy has to do with telescopes. We claim that computer science is a mathematical set of tools, or body of ideas, for understanding just about any system—brain, universe, living organism, or, yes, computer.

-- Scott Aaronson, Great Ideas in Theoretical Computer Science, MIT.