2025-01-20 13:00:04
2025-01-20 03:47:22
2025-01-20 03:47:22
344571
Miscellaneous life updates
- I'm noticing myself have less energy in my spare time now that the MATS cohort has started. The main way I notice this is that I feel too tired to do much Latin reading or study in the evening (and consequently my rate of going thru the textbook is much down, from 2 days per chapter to like 5 - altho that's partly due to the chapters growing longer and having more supplementary reading material).
- I'm also starting to feel the AGI more. My biggest L of 2024 was that I didn't really think inference-time compute was going to be such a thing - my guess was that rumours from scaling labs were just hype, and noted that we didn't have strong scientific evidence that tons of CoT would work. It's hard for me to tell how this figures into my career - at the moment I think I fit pretty well into MATS+AXRP, but it's plausible that my balance should shift (and for sure both MATS's and AXRP's focuses will shift), and it's very plausible that I'm missing some impactful stuff to do. Things that make this tricky: I'm weirdly un-specialized at specific things (e.g. I'm not fantastic at engineering, research, or plumbing or whatever), and also I have less time+energy to prioritize stuff as would be good (see the previous point).
- On a more positive note, after a few weeks of our house's central heating not working, it works again!
- Also on a more positive note: I decided to learn Latin because I was annoyed I couldn't read some inscriptions around Princeton. Anyway yesterday I was walking around Berkeley campus and saw a Latin inscription over a bridge, and I could basically read it. So that's pretty cool.
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