Happy 40th Birthday Dana!
The following is what I read at Dana’s 40th birthday party last night. Don’t worry, it’s being posted with her approval. –SA
I’d like to propose a toast to Dana, my wife and mother of my two kids. My dad, a former speechwriter, would advise me to just crack a few jokes and then sit down … but my dad’s not here.
So instead I’ll tell you a bit about Dana. She grew up in Tel Aviv, finishing her undergraduate CS degree at age 17—before she joined the army. I met her when I was a new professor at MIT and she was a postdoc in Princeton, and we’d go to many of the same conferences. At one of those conferences, in Princeton, she finally figured out that my weird, creepy, awkward attempts to make conversation with her were, in actuality, me asking her out … at least in my mind! So, after I’d returned to Boston, she then emailed me for days, just one email after the next, explaining everything that was wrong with me and all the reasons why we could never date. Despite my general obliviousness in such matters, at some point I wrote back, “Dana, the absolute value of your feelings for me seems perfect. Now all I need to do is flip the sign!”
Anyway, the very next weekend, I took the Amtrak back to Princeton at her invitation. That weekend is when we started dating, and it’s also when I introduced her to my family, and when she and I planned out the logistics of getting married.
Dana and her family had been sure that she’d return to Israel after her postdoc. She made a huge sacrifice in staying here in the US for me. And that’s not even mentioning the sacrifice to her career that came with two very difficult pregnancies that produced our two very diffic … I mean, our two perfect and beautiful children.
Truth be told, I haven’t always been the best husband, or the most patient or the most grateful. I’ve constantly gotten frustrated and upset, extremely so, about all the things in our life that aren’t going well. But preparing the slideshow tonight, I had a little epiphany. I had a few photos from the first two-thirds of Dana’s life, but of course, I mostly had the last third. But what’s even happened in that last third? She today feels like she might be close to a breakthrough on the Unique Games Conjecture. But 13 years ago, she felt exactly the same way. She even looks the same!
So, what even happened?
Well OK, fine, there was my and Dana’s first trip to California, a month after we started dating. Our first conference together. Our trip to Vegas and the Grand Canyon. Our first trip to Israel to meet her parents, who I think are finally now close to accepting me. Her parents’ trip to New Hope, Pennsylvania to meet my parents. Our wedding in Tel Aviv—the rabbi rushing through the entire ceremony in 7 minutes because he needed to get home to his kids. Our honeymoon safari in Kenya. Lily’s birth. Our trip to Israel with baby Lily, where we introduced Lily to Dana’s grandmother Rivka, an Auschwitz survivor, just a few months before Rivka passed away. Taking Lily to run around Harvard Yard with our Boston friends, Lily losing her beloved doll Tuza there, then finding Tuza the next day after multiple Harvard staff had been engaged in the quest. There’s me and Dana eating acai bowls in Rio de Janeiro, getting a personal tour of the LHC in Switzerland, with kangaroos and koalas in Australia. There’s our house here in Austin. Oh, and here are all our Austin friends! Our trip to Disney World with Lily, while Dana was pregnant with Daniel (she did ride one rollercoaster). Daniel’s birth, which to my relief, went well despite the rollercoaster. Our sabbatical year in Israel. The birth of our nephews.
I confess I teared up a little going through all this. Because it’s like: if you showed all these photos to some third party, they’d probably be like, wow, that looks like a pretty good life. Even if you showed the photos to my 17-year-old self, I’d be like, OK, no need to roll the dice again, I’ll take that life. I’m not talking about what’s happened with the world—climate change or COVID or the insurrection or anything like that. But the part with the beautiful Israeli complexity theorist wife, who’s also caring and unbreakable in her moral convictions? Yes.
So, thank you and a very happy birthday to the one who’s given me all this!
And lastly, because it seems almost obligatory: I did feed everything I said just now into GPT (I won’t specify which version), and asked it to write Dana a special GPT birthday poem. Here’s what it came up with:
From Tel Aviv to Princeton,
You’ve traveled near and far,
A brilliant computer scientist,
A shining, guiding star.
You’ve made so many sacrifices,
For family and for love,
But your light shines through the darkness,
And fits me like a glove.
We’ve shared so many moments,
Too many to recount,
But each one is a treasure,
Each memory paramount.
So happy birthday, Dana,
You deserve the very best,
I’m grateful for your presence,
And feel so truly blessed.
Addendum: Speaking of GPT, should it and other Large Language Models be connected to the Internet and your computer’s filesystem and empowered to take actions directly, with reinforcement learning pushing it to achieve the user’s goals?
On the negative side, some of my friends worry that this sort of thing might help an unaligned superintelligence to destroy the world.
But on the positive side, at Dana’s birthday party, I could’ve just told the computer, “please display these photos in a slideshow rotation while also rotating among these songs,” and not wasted part of the night messing around with media apps that befuddle and defeat me as a mere CS PhD.
I find it extremely hard to balance these considerations.
Anyway, happy birthday Dana!