The heating hasn’t been working today, and it’s suspiciously cold in the East Bay. You realize how much you take warmth for granted when you don’t have it. I’m typing this under a comforter on the couch, with the dog flopped over my left leg and my body awkwardly twisted so that I can still type. She was curled up under this same comforter today.
I’m reading about machine learning, so that I can read about deep learning, so that I can read about language models, so that I can build a language model. I both love learning new things and wish that I could learn everything I need to know immediately. I just love making stuff, but I’m in the stage of this journey where I mostly feel really dumb.
I’m thinking of getting a printer that’s more geared towards printing lots of pages as quickly and cheaply as possible. I suspect I’m going to be reading a lot of research papers over the next few months, and I sort of hate the pinching and panning of PDFs on screens. People swear by large e-ink readers for this, but I’m not totally sold. Paper is just… nice.
One of the benefits of reading them on some sort of screen today, of course, is that you can ask the magic internet brain about them. For that reason I’ll probably end up back on a screen, but maybe I’ll intentionally try a first pass without a computer in sight. I think learning happens when your brain hurts, and you actually let it. Embrace it, even.