nixonaddiction

i get that if i have a vpn on. so i keep my vpn off. which is bad. oopsie!

ive found that my claude with my preferences generally gives studies with real numbers cited. BUT if i go in incognito mode it gives me the worst citations imaginable. i once did this and was appalled at how bad the stats were. i worry for people who dont think to double check sources on numbers, or even just demand the ai double checks the validity of the numbers or gives links so the user can check the validity themself.

i think this is good. i miss old forums, and i do want information accessible like it was in the old forum days.

that being said, my internet history from when i was 13 is on some discord servers at risk of going public. ive been letting that stuff remain up for sentimentality reasons, but it seems i will need to do a wipe of some old servers i have been on just in case. been meaning to do this for years, but this is whats making me finally feel the need to do it. (i got lucky and the forums where the rest of my teenage internet activity was have all been wiped for years.)

wow if only the clinton admin hadnt sold off all our helium reserves years ago

this is the first time one of the big labs has published anything related to my field. and i'm actually pretty excited? im more on the applications side of QFD than the theory side of things, but gosh i actually cant wait for the results to be released to see if i can use it for anything! i kinda hope more results come out, in more ways relevant to what i do, its so cool to see any sort of progress! wow!

i dont have kids but have been helping out with a friend who has a 2yo while their spouse is away for a month. its insane how much even just helping out in the morning and evening destroys my schedule flexibility. i am living and dying by this 2yo's schedule. i cant go to work until the kid is fed, clothed, and diaper changed. i cant stay late at work because i gotta help put the kid down for bed. i get woken up in the middle of the night by crying. im lucky i havent had to deal with the kid getting sick, which would disrupt me in the middle of the day. now imagine having multiple kids, all with different schedules, who all need to be driven places and put down for bed and fed and have items purchased for them etc.

i was considering having kids before but after this month of taking care of a 2yo i dont think i want to. the complete lack of schedule flexibility makes it impossible to work overtime when i need to. its a slow period at work rn and im already worried about falling behind. it really is the amount of time they take. ive read a lot of articles on mothers taking worse jobs with shorter commutes and more flexible hours and i totally understand why they would need that.

i did manual labor part time for 6 years during high school and college. i liked it a lot. i had opportunities to move up to management, but i refused them because i preferred the more physical aspects of the job. also it would suck for my team to lose me as i was just faster than everyone else.

my coworkers would always tell me, the youngest, about how much their bodies hurt, how tired they were, how hard it was to make ends meet. they either wanted me to stick around because i made their jobs easier, or wanted me to get my degree and go. ive seen accidents happen, but none terrible. people were always so worried about my safety. i got lucky and was never injured.

i dont know. ive been in my current role for 4 months now. its not bad. i dont dislike it. i cant tell if i miss my old job or if im just lonely in a new place.

i really miss zoning out and working with my hands though. there are moments where you have to lock in, i remember moments where i was working with something dangerous and how acutely aware of the position of my body i was. but there were moments where you did a repetitive task for a while. and i always liked that aspect. the physicality.

i think about going back to it a lot actually. maybe im just nostalgic. should give it a few years to get used to the cubicle life. i really do miss it though. might do what my father did and compulsively renovate his basement to get the high of building something with his hands.

i dont think this works but i do think the patterns look really cool. its like a hawaiian shirt but worse. im lowk obsessed i lowk will be purchasing once i have the funds.

i think financially, frontier labs are going to crash. this is purely from a financial standpoint. the question is when, this article posits 2027/28. i need to better verify the claim. (its easy to be right, its hard to time being right.)

however, when frontier labs become financially insolvent (and they will eventually, the question is when) i think smaller local models will end up taking over. and i think there is a bet to be placed on smaller models here. the demand for ai isnt going away. peoples workflows would be crushed without it. the question actually becomes, who either purchases frontier labs, or what cheaper alternative replaces frontier labs?

ive never been able to use zettelkattsen. i like having daily notes instead of different notes for different ideas. its easier this way. my obsidian vault is a hybrid of diary and research and i am trying to separate the diary and research but its not easy tbh. (i suffer from a crushing urge to note that i "just ate a sandwich, was good" while liveblogging research and debugging.)

that being said, i got a big kick out of feeding my daily notes into my local model. i had some more diary-like entries that i would never share with anyone, but it was extremely funny to have my local model take a 3000 word recap of what i did in a day and summarize it like "writer reflects on their job: they worry about their performance. meals: the writer ate oatmeal, and a sandwich. family: the author contemplates their fathers absence growing up."

ive developed a really large corpus of written work over the years and am hoping to fine tune a model using my diary as the training set. i think this would yield hilarious results. keeping it all local though, i drop my passwords in there at times and i dont want that leaked.

well. to an extent. one always has to sell themselves. view selling as "convincing people to give me money." that i feel is pretty similar regardless of if i am applying for academic grants or applying for vc funding or running political fundraisers. (the latter being my area of experience.) theres kinda no way to avoid "selling" when you have an novel idea you want executed.

what i mean is less the goal being making money, more the goal being getting money to fund research. theres no way to avoid "selling" in life. (alas.) what i would be selling would be my research topic to venture capitalists, instead of a product to people. (obviously making some mentions of "well um this could be a sellable product one day" and like, a halfassed marketing campaign in order to better sell my idea to vcs.)

company failing isnt incompatible with the goal of doing research. if i can get a few years of funding by at least putting up the illusion of a sellable product it could be worth it. maybe i'd even get lucky and end up with an actual product that makes money. but uh, comfort in failure. the process of learning over the promise of success.

sorry i sound so evil and scammy rn ahhhhh promise im not trying to be on forbes 30 under 30. just considering vc funding as an alternate route to academia with regard to getting funding for research. (i will need to dance for dollars either way. but vc funding is seeming like it has less uh, annoying interpersonal academic hoops to jump through.) but id need a few years working under people and gaining experience before i would try at this lol.

can vc money just fund basic research?

im slowly getting confused on what founding a company even is. i am in grad school right now. a lot of funding and opportunities come from guys who are like "we need you to innovate we need you to act like a startup." its honestly kinda annoying. i just want to do basic research. i dont want to sell anything. i just want to build things. but the way this article frames it- is founding a company just getting funding for a research project? but using different words? could i just pull up with a list of my research interests, convince people its a sellable product, and score funding? obviously id need to deal with financial overhead myself (a pain) but hypothetically. lets say i complete my degree, maybe spend a year or three in industry networking and better understanding the problem space. then pitch myself to vcs with hope of funding whatever topics im interested and have my company function like a research group except instead of publishing papers we build products? like no profit no big deal, i never intended to profit. which, is this not what openai is doing?

unethical to lie about my intents (i want to do research not start a company) but i feel the end goal (more funding for research) could be worth it.

i was trying to build llms from scratch at 17. failed miserably because i did not know linear algebra. ended up in a different but adjacent field. when chatgtp got big suddenly there were so many people doing llms and i didnt want to compete like that. so much of what was happening was hype, and that really turned me off. am back to building llms from scratch, but like, its a journey teaching myself all the theory on top of my job. i have decent fundamentals, but i need a better grasp of all the advancements in the field in the past 5 years before i would feel comfortable designing anything. baby steps, essentially. am working on better understanding all the layers of an ai while implementing a rag on my local model as an experiment. 17 year olds should learn whatever theyre interested in but need fundamentals in order to do anything advanced.

people dont hire ambitious young women because theyre afraid theyll fall in love with them???

for a lot of the article i was mentally replacing "ai" with "calculator" and going "yeah we will just need longer education times. more schooling etc."

but the phrasing of "who pays for the increased schooling times?" is a good one. i think "debt" can be a decent way to conceptualize the cost and repayment of training someone. feels evil to say, but viewing people as firms you can invest in and expect returns upon. you know not all loans will be repayed, but hopefully they'll average to a profit. (risk management etc.)

student loans are. a decent example. the government/private enterprise gives money to pay for education, then this is repayed, providing a financial incentive for paying for someone else's longer schooling timelines. firms investing in training can be viewed as an extension of student loans. but then ah, there are countless stories of how debtor/creditor relationships can be exploited. indentured servitude etc. there are a lot of complications coming to mind. also "altruistic" people who give without expectation of repayment. or the divide between like, communal vs individualistic cultures. (individualism, i argue, encourages the formalization of debt, as opposed to a more communal culture where the expectation of repayment is informal.) you could do math on how many people pay vs how many people benefit, who is the biggest stakeholder, etc.

but i am on my lunch break and need to get back to my work. good article tho. good topic to bring up.