Fell asleep while meditating in the morning, wasted ~1h 30min though this is an alarm bell for not getting enough sleep. Finished my routine at 11am and only started work then.
A few days ago I wrote the Actual Stuff I want (TM) on my whiteboard, main things I want to work on
- General knowledge (Chemistry, Biology, Physics)
- Make my website something I'm proud of
Improving at machine learning is still important, just not enough to warrant a single-minded dedication. In retrospect the three days I spent single-mindedly on ML were out of fear. Fear of goal complexity. I need to flow through my tasks in order of priority. Escaping into single-minded simplicity isn't a good option.
Anyway, things I did for my website
- Published ELK Research Lessons
- Wrote and published KL divergence made easy
- Added a bunch of tags to my old journal post
For Biology I spent an hour reading The Cartoon Guide to Biology. I'm happy I could understand the chemistry relatively easily, I want to get better at chemistry too though. The intersection between ML and sciences like Bio and Chem will only get bigger, and I need to be able to understand the risks posed from new research, like all the implications of solving protein folding.
I also want improved general knowledge to avoid embarrassing myself when conversations move away from Math, Coding and AI...
Things I could do better:
- Sleep more, reading my past journal posts I'm tired way too much
- This mainly means go to bed earlier and don't use an alarm clock. Trust my body to know when to wake up.
- Read more, lots of engaging nonfiction books to read, and reading doesn't take much effort.
- I can read during dinner instead of watching YouTube if I prop up my ereader nicely. I've done it before.
- Do morning routine faster. Meditation takes ~40mins, Run takes ~15mins, Other exercise takes ~15mins, Anki maybe ~15mins. I should finish in 1h 30min max; allowing 2h is excessive. My love for round numbers is silly!
- Stop putting off reviewing my GitHub pull requests, it's bad not to maintain a project people are using, and I could do to practice my analysis.
- Do it first-thing tomorrow morning
- Gotta keep up with the functional analysis reading group I started! Tomorrow I'll spend a few hours on that too. Writing a post on my favorite parts of functional analysis is a good idea.
- Use a simple TODO.txt system, todoist isn't working for me. Task prioritization and deadlines aren't helpful, keeping track of things-to-do is the only helpful thing I need—and that's best served by a plain-text file.