Woke up and wrote morning pages, which is actually sort of rare lately. I’d fallen into a habit of writing them later and later, and had started to “try to get through them” when I wrote late at night. That brought me no joy whatsoever (almost resentment), so I’m trying to get back into the habit of writing them first thing. Felt great. Started the day off right.
Made a flat white and got stuck into work. I love starting day with a home-made coffee, but I’ve also been appreciating tea more lately. We ran out recently and went maybe 36 hours without a cup, and it felt strangely… terrible? Or maybe strangely nice when we picked some up. I say “we” but it was Aneesah—she missed it enough to drive to the store at 10pm.
After work, went for a relatively pathetic 1-mile run whilst my knee recovers. Probably overcautious, but I’ve had knee injuries in the past that lingered for weeks, and I’d rather skip that pain if I can. It’s always so tempting to jump right back into things and run through the pain, but I’ve (just about) learned my lesson (narrator: he will learn it again).
Now I’m sat here late at night setting up a Python environment so that I can start tokenizing a short story by Edith Wharton—the first step of many steps on the way to building a large language model from scratch. Once you’ve been programming for a few years, most programmings book tend to feel a bit painful for the first couple chapters.
I should enjoy this part, really, because I’ll quickly get into things that I’ve never touched before, and I’m sure there’s going to be a lot more math than I typically bother myself with. Lots of programming requires so little math. Machine learning will not be so kind to me. Oh well, at least I studied it… decades ago. I’m sure it won’t be diabolically painful.