Excitingly Ambitious Journal

A compilation of the top few “excitingly ambitious” things I’ve done every day as a sort of accountability measure to find the magic.

7/10 - 8/10/2024

Kind of a lame first month of summer break. I wasted way too much time reading random blog posts and learning things in highly unprincipled ways. Overall I think my well-being and fulfillment has probably been lowest this past month out of all the months this year because a) too much procrastination reading random blog posts b) it was an almost entirely input month (usually writing blog posts and these notes help me feel like I’m producing something, but I’ve done very little of either this month) c) I’ve had a vague uneasy feeling that I’ve wasted a lot of the time I’ve spent this month (this is pretty normal for times of high-input/low-output months, but this month was worse than normal because I didn’t write more to make up for it).

• Finished the Karpathy course and used ARENA to go deeper
• Passed a self-designed USACO Silver practice contest (and proceeded to flunk on 2 others)
• Wrote a blog post on Social Infrastructure for Sparkly People that a bunch of people liked
• Learnt 3 new guitar solos

7/6-7/10/2024

• I’ve started the Game Theory course with Elijah
• I was originally planning to start building a neural net from scratch project like this by now, but then I realized that I want to learn a little more first, so I’ve started Andrej Karpathy’s course on neural nets. They’re so good that I’m wondering why I wasted so much time on fast.ai.
• Polishing two old substack drafts that have been sitting around for a while. Hopefully will release them by the end of the week.

6/22/2024-7/6/2024

Forgot to keep track again.

• Met with people about the education blog post!
• Learnt all the basic probability, calculus, linear algebra I think I need right now for where I’m at with AI
• Lowkey in my guitar rock era
• Road trip!

6/4/2024 - 6/21/2024

I forgot to keep track for a while, so this is a general update.

• Finished fast.ai
  • Now learning more of the background math before learning about transformers
• Published the education blog post! It ended up being ~20 minutes long.
• Learnt 3 new guitar solos (While My Guitar Gently Weeps, Fade to Black, Plug In Baby)

6/3/2024

• Editing education post based on feedback
• Learning Comfortably Numb Solo 1

6/2/2024

• Numpy and Pytorch done for now!
• Learning about random forests

6/1/2024

• Pytorch + Numpy continued

5/31/2024

• Learning Numpy + Pytorch

5/29/2024

• Finished a first draft the education blog post

5/28/2024

• Started writing the education blog post

5/24-5/27

• Finally starting to understand a lot of the actual code and implementation in fast.ai

5/24/2024

• Not much :( Did a lot of school work

5/23/2024

• Finished brushing up on Python
• Began learning PyTorch and Pandas
• Wrote John Locke Quick Answers

5/22/2024

• Tried (and failed) to re-build some of the fast.ai models from scratch
  • Brushing up on some more “advanced” Python.

5/21/2024

• Updated this website a ton and added a ton of notes that I hadn’t found the time to add

5/20/2024

• Improvised a couple of guitar solos!

5/16/2024-5/19/2024

• More website work + road trip

5/15/2024

• GOT UNSTUMPED! I love 3blue1brown

5/14/2024

• Getting stumped by some of the math in fast.ai lecture 3

5/13/2024

• Turns out I wasn’t finished with the soccer website :(

5/12/2024

• Finished the soccer website!

5/7/2024-5/11/2024

• Forgot to keep track

5/6/2024

• Talked with Elijah for an hour and a half

5/5/2024

• Allergies were brutal, but I watched 3b1bs video on attention

5/4/2024

• Had a devestating headache, but still managed to get a ton of competitive programming done

5/3/2024

• Held a meeting with gather
• Continue fast.ai

5/2/2024

• Probably the worst day of allergies I’ve ever had so nothing much (excuses, excuses)

5/1/2024

• Jazz Festival at CBA!
  • There was a guitarist there who was absolutely insane. Motivated me a lot to get better at raw shredding

4/30/2024

• Tried (and failed) to “find my style” in guitar

4/29/2024

• Deployed a small tool to HuggingFace! with fast.ai

4/28/2024

• Basically read GEB the entire day and did nothing else

4/27/2024 (ridiculously excitingly ambitious)

• Discovered Nicky Case
• Drafted out a website for Hack Club (CNHS)
• Continued listening to the podcast episode
• Tons of guitar
• Continued reading GEB

4/26/2024

• Started listening to Dwarkesh Patel’s podcast episode with Trenton Bricken and Sholto Douglas. So far it’s been really really cool (although I have to pause to search things up 80% of the time).
• Had a THLI meeting on https://www.gather.town/. It was super awesome! Also had a great idea about potentially hosting monthly hackathons using it.

4/24/2024

• Continued reading GEB
• Worked a lot on the notes

4/23/2024

• Started reading GEB
• fast.ai!

4/22/2024

• fast.ai!

4/21/2024

• Finished practicing Jupyter notebook and Python
• Re-started fast.ai!

4/20/2024

• Worked on spaced everything

4/19/2024

• Picked up work on the Spaced everything project again. Long weekend coming up, so hopefully I’ll get that done + all the websites for school (that I haven’t started yet)

4/18/2024

• I couldn’t really get beyond just school :(

4/17/2024

• Practicing Jupyter notebook with small projects
• Doing a few exercises on exercism with Python to refresh on that

4/16/2024

• Paused fast.ai to spend to time learning how to use Jupyter notebook
• Created a comprehensive roadmap of THLI for this upcoming event

4/15/2024

• Started Fast.AI!!!!!!!!

4/14/2024

• Finished the template!
• Did a ton of USACO

4/13/2024

• Worked on a next js template for the club

4/12/2024

• Wanted the club to practice our web dev skills, so I sent out a form for the school and now we have two teachers who want us to build websites for them!

4/11/2024

• Not much, I was kind of dead today because of no sleep from yesterday lol

4/10/2024

• Had a lot of ideas, and turned that into Open Questions + Project Ideas

4/9/2024

• I spent a full day working on the Spaced everything app

4/8/2024

• Kind of grokked React and Next JS???
• Started rebuilding my AI core fundamentals with https://www.3blue1brown.com/topics/neural-networks
• Prototyped and hacked on the Spaced everything project with Elijah

4/7/2024

• Learnt a lot about the idea of Network States
• Began learning React and Next JS

4/6/2024

• More road trip

4/5/2024

• Road trip

4/4/2024

• Tried out a new writing style for a blog and got some nice feedback
• Tried a few hard USACO problems and failed to solve them lol

4/3/2024

• Worked through my blog backlog a TON
• Cleaned up these notes a bit
• Trying (and failing) to integrate the semantic search to this website

4/2/2024

• Started work on a blog post
• Built a quick custom search engine powered by google to proof of concept malleable search

4/1/2024

• Not really ambitious but I got back to reading fiction by spending the entire day reading Dune lol

3/31/2024

• Learned how to play guitar without a pick

3/30/2024

• Learned a lot about how search works
• Planned out a semantic search project
• Started to plan out a social network project for hack ttc