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"Emotional Rollercoaster of Coding: Seeking Advice and the Thrill of Progress"

Jan 11, 2024 - 10:55pmSummary: The writer expresses how their emotional state fluctuates with the successes and failures of their coding efforts, experiencing a marked improvement when their code shows promise. They note the importance of persisting through challenging times and mention that consulting others with more expertise is extremely beneficial for progress. The writer admits to having only a conceptual understanding of machine learning and expresses a strong desire to deepen their knowledge, particularly in areas like transformer models and mixed experts architectures. The main takeaway from their experience is the value of seeking advice from knowledgeable people, which highlights both the benefits of recognizing one's limitations and the learning that comes from direct engagement with challenges and expert guidance.

Transcript: It's so interesting to me how my mood changes as a result of how my code is working. If my code is not working very well, my internal state gets very depressed and I think I don't know what I'm talking about. And oftentimes that is the case. But when the code is showing promise and is at least working to some degree, it is remarkable the improvement in my mood, how excited I am, how the ideas begin to flow when things are working. And I guess it's needing to push through the pit of despair where you find that things are not working and just to keep going against it and keep finding the breakthroughs and hitting the wall and finding the breakthrough. And one lesson for myself from this is reaching out to someone who has a bit more domain expertise is really remarkably helpful. It's amazing how just having a conversation with someone else who has some knowledge makes things move faster. And I really do wish to surround myself with people who know more about AI than I do. I don't know anything. I legitimately don't know anything. Effectively, I'm like an okay prompt engineer and I've read some papers. But do I really understand the foundations of machine learning? No. I have a kind of conceptual understanding, but I really wish to develop that much more. I really, really do. It is fascinating to me. And I am also curious to probably implement my own transformer models and try to understand how they fundamentally work. And so when I read a paper, I know what it means when they're doing certain things. So I can understand the mixture of experts, architecture at a fairly deep level. And maybe this understanding is for not, but I'm still curious about it. And boy, yeah, like I said, just what an amazing lesson to learn. What an incredible lesson to learn to just go talk to someone. And it's so much easier to talk to someone who knows what you're talking about and can at least offer something like being dumber. Being dumber is amazing. I love being dumber because the other person can just say something that makes so much more sense. And as a result, I can learn from that. And I learned through experience by bashing my head into a fucking wall for like days. And what did I learn out of that experience? I learned two great things that I should talk to people. Well, really, actually, it's just that that I should talk to people and I guess be around more of those people if possible.

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