Day 63: Dear Diary…

Business as Usual

Today was another long day crunching through work topics. I’m still behind on my inbox, so I get constant bump reminders. It honestly helps bring things to my attention quickly. I had another zombie-like start to my day. For some reason, whenever I lay down flat on my bed, my lungs decide that it’s time to torment me and block me from falling asleep. It’s like clock-work at this point. Hopefully, my body is able to fight off this remaining symptom from my infection soon.

Chatting with a GPT

I’m slowly but surely making my way through Stephen Wolfram’s entry on ChatGPT. Yesterday’s articles helped to frame this post really well, particularly on the challenge of training such large LLMs. Libraries like LangChain will make it so much easier to extend and develop without needing to go through the hassle of re-training such massive networks. Stephen Wolfram goes into depth on the nuances of training such models, and I think he provides real insight into some of the open questions major corporations and institutions are asking when it comes to harnessing the power of such technology in a cost effective way.

In other news, I got a notification from The Batch newsletter by Andrew Ng at DeepLearning.ai that 3 more short courses are dropping. Professor Ng is one of my personal heroes. Anything he produces is guaranteed to be incredibly instructive and valuable. I’ll carve out some time this weekend to view these courses in more detail. I’m looking forward to having some time put aside to continue building. One more workday till the weekend.

Evening

Finishing my last call at 9:45PM, I decided to go for a stroll around the block. It’s so nice and warm outside there’s no need at all to wear a jacket whatsoever. I took a few turns around the block, and eventually took a seat on a bench near the Marienplatz central square. There was a big drum circle in the center and lots of people movin’ and groovin’ to the beat. I grabbed a beer from a nearby bar, and took the bottle with me to go. It’s legal to drink publicly. There’s no need to hide it in a brown paper bag. I’ll definitely miss that about Germany.

Frieden und Liebe ❤️ (translation: peace and love)