AI Researcher

28/08 - Greyzone Decisions

• Discovered Arthur Brooks' via videos: You Need to Be Bored. Here's Why. and Harvard Professor reveals the Science of Happiness in 15 minutes. "Real friends are useless, deal friends are useful"

• Read The Second Half (of AI)*

• Experienced the most emotional/social fatigue i've ever had in the past 4-5 days. I couldn't do anything. It was a combination of exhaustion from having basically back-to-back podcast calls every few days and needing to prepare for them -- I kept offering podcasts to new guests because they were opportunities that I didn't want to risk losing. So I paid the price of emotional/social local burnout for global gain.
  
  On top of the social podcast drainage, I also was overanalysing/thinking, trying to logically reason about the interplay of emotions, feelings, and objective logic, which really took a giant toll of me. it all came to me when i was able to just be socially alone, i.e., no texts/calls for podcasts, friends, etc. journaling i think really helped, otherwise there wasnt a way of being able to get my thoughts out of my mind and spatially reason over time.

  • This emotional fatigue is also a big reason why i haven't been keeping tabs on this properly. I think ive wanted to talk about a lot of things but couldnt because it would create some unnecessary vulnerabilities for me. But a lot of the things i could of just omitted the info, so its mb. I know this is important long term, especially when trying to capture how i feel, perceive, and think in the moment bc they're the really important details looking back.

  • So TLDR; I've been thinking about grey-zone decision making. Learned about information bias from talking to Wolf Alexanyan and how to reason about very tough decisions for the past 4 days, trying to logically reason while account for subjective feeling and objective logic. it has been extremely hard to come to a conclusion bc my brain keeps on trying to pull back to the other action, like a perpetual pendulumn seasawing and resetting whenever i play devils advocate or my brain tries to defend / be considerate of the other side, which spiraled me even more into "am i being reasonable and sound here?". the end result just became trying to answer some very (at first glace) simple questions that ultaimtely ended up in a similar arena but a bit better -- focusing on the bigger picture, what i believe in, my non-negotiable global objectives, what has changed since the gensis of the problem, what is contributing to my feelings, the opportunity cost of actions (including the time spent into thinking about it), and what is best for me given all of these aspects. And ultimately, the decision is quite easy but very painful. However, just because a decision is painful does not mean it is the wrong one.

  • I really hated the past 4 days. I mostly slept for 10hrs+, getting up late, going to bed at 1-2am, knowingly distracting myself with pointless youtube videos (i couldnt get myself to do any form of education progress), and really not wanting to go to the gym because my body was exhausted because of my mental fatigue. I hated the thought of simply physically talking and focusing on conversation -- it was really bad...And because i don't want to feel any of this again and know the cause, flaws in my emotional intelligence (EQ), i decided to invest some time into reflecting, understanding where i went wrong (it was small things compounding over time and not addressing them properly), and now wanting to invest a bit more of time into EQ understanding. I started with looking into what inner child i have bc i noticed some actions from being mindful of the present and past -- i think i have a primarily anxious attachment style because i really excel at logically deducing reasons for absence, am weirdly compulsive at checking social media for things i know don't exist (bc i have notifications on to try and avoid this exact thing), and am hypervigilant of actions -- however, i noticed i dont trust myself enough to act on these observations (and later feeling like i have no spine/backbone) which led to this downfall.

  • Yesterday, I had around ~12k steps end of day from just walking so much outside on the busy city streets, which helped a lot mentally i believe. I was able to make a bit of progress career-wise during the day, forcing myself to watch a video on GPU architecture (including CUDA) and some lecture on FHE i kept pause-start'ing.
    
    Today, I felt like a blank canvas after 10 hours of the most realistic, vivid dreams Ive had in quite some time -- i woke up and began googling the events that just happened like i was about to sign up for them bc i thought i just did it irl. But, today I decided to try do some creative work regarding math ideas for my architecture, giving permisison to myself to stop trying to surf the non-existant curiosity tide of hardware that crashed weeks ago (after my RAID 6 development). I think the emotional fatigue was also largely impacted from falling off my curiosity wave for something i was focused on for some weeks, and not jumping off earlier to find another one. So i had some dread and felt a sense of hopelessness bc i was so unmotivated to beat the dead horse.
    
    Im really thankful that i feel better today. I truly was in a bad place for the past few days and never wish to sacrifice my stability again. Next time i will be more mindful to take action with these new found ways of handling such situations. Nonetheless im grateful for the depressive episode bc i feel ive grown a lot from it, EQ-wise. Knowing myself better is never a bad thing, and becoming more resilient is only gained through experiences such as these

• Ran 3km in ~20min again, twice, since my lower calf injury a while ago where i did weighted calf-raises for recovery. felt really good. been focusing purely on back and legs to prioritise posture. i dont train push, front/side delts, triceps, chest at all now. been purely focusing on long term functionity and posture bc i barely move from my desk and even home, lol.

• been getting consistently good sleep ~76-82 sleep score each night because i try to wake up at 8am and go to sleep before 12 everyday for the past few weeeks. been quite good results. melatonin and magnesium glycinate have been very useful. i use pre-washed plastic-bagged spinnage in all my meals now too instead of kale (bc they ruined that packaging) and so its been really easy to be consistently healthy with it. get some minced meat, kidney beans, tomato sauce, turmeric + black pepper (to active the turmeric), sushi rice and onion with the spinnage and thats basically my everyday meal.

• i was writing a shit ton of articles but never really polished or finished them beyond 60% bc i ended up writing a "past experience learnings" heading and ended up spiraling so far down that and into all areas of life, lol. so today i migrated all of those bullet points into a "brain dump" file so i can declutter to focus on specific topics TO ACTUALLY FINISH THE USEFUL ARTICLE DAMNIT.

• Quit vyvanse like 4 days in and am now back on the flexible, practical and consistently predictable dexamfetamine (dexies)! I notice i typically have 4 hours spurts 2-3 times a day at different times so it works sooo much better for my chaotic schedule. i dont use them if im not already focused on something though.

As for interesting progress:

• learned im attracted to using sparse point cloud to approximately infer/construct a fully functioning manifold.
• today, have been focusing a lot on multi-objective RL vector goal-rewards, verifiable rewards, modeling (s,a) spaces, multi-step actions, and finally understand what "evals"/evaluations mean (env design; define problems and how to measure). which has been really useful because have my first offsensive ML podcasts lined up for this month with @shncldwll, @0xKei, and @moyix (waiting for booking)!
• ive done a ton of incredible podcasts that i didn't mention. To say a few: Mathile Papillon, Bastian Rieck (part 2), Alex Terenin, and so many others. Each podcast i come out of it with a new potentially breakthrough idea or understanding that really reinforces why i keep grasping opportunities at the cost of my mental health. I also have some really great ones lined up with @rballeba and colleagues of Mathilde from @geometric_intel !
• I bought a suitcase for the purpsoe of deconstructing my essential tech to transport it when i inevitably fly/move to another country as a result of my (current and future) progress with AI. I got it because i felt really anxious from sacrificing my freedom of one-bag travel bc of this heavy ass dual 5090 GPU PC im building for my experimental phase. and now i feel better. ive adapted and evolved to still do one-bag but now accounting for an entire workstation rig, WITH ALL PARTS -- this is why i got the 3d printer, to custom print a modularised PC case to optimise for portability!!