The Summer
Spent a good, restful summer back home. Worked on a research project into how women who suffer from chronic and idiopathic conditions1 talk about their health with conversational agents2. This involved speaking to over fifteen people for close to forty hours of interviews. I was simply in awe of their resilience and openness to discuss difficult personal experiences for the sake of Science.
I was also thick and slow as molasses with trying to comb through a total of 400,000 words for any new insights into this human-agent negotiation/collaboration. This was the qualitiative research portion of our paper and easily the most tedious and difficult thing I’ve attempted so far here. I’m glad I had a research compatriot, the primary author, who was way more experienced at this sort of thing than I was 😳 🫠 A lot of things did ‘click’ about this kind of research and I’m grateful to have learned as much as I did.
The Finish Line
I am taking just two classes and will be engaged in two research projects for a practicum I hope to complete by May next year. One involves T-Cell therapy and the other adolescent mental health. Not writing a thesis for I don’t care to put out yet another pointless and perfunctory document nobody will read3. I hope to make enough progress this term to start and finish another project the next: classes are great but not really how you learn things in this field.
I am paying no attention to the state of the job market and the news in general for my own sanity. I do know that I’ll have to “spray and pray” early and deferring this to February. “Our engineers don’t code anymore” is (a) absolutely not the flex dumb people think it is and (b) not uttered at a place I hope to work at; and I use Coding Agents extensively. I am super-excited about local LLMs for personal and work-related tasks4.
I have also fully embraced my old person phase and now try and go to bed before 10PM and wake up no later than 5AM. Truly the most magical time of the day for work and reflection. My wife, who’s maintained this schedule for decades as a writer, would like you to know that she told me so and that I should listen to her more.
My goals for the rest of the year are to walk a lot more, meditate regularly5, take a lot more photos, and continue learning perspective drawing. I am really hoping to do a 7-10 day meditation retreat very soon.
Fancy medical speak for “We don’t know what causes this.”↩︎
Colloquial LLMs. But we called them Conversational Agents since it is both technically correct and in vogue to do so.↩︎
Except for the actual ‘readers’ at my department for whom I would feel terrible. Reminds me of when my dad looked at this demo I’d painstakingly put together and waited a few austere seconds before asking “Why are you wasting everybody’s time like this?”↩︎
I run this little guy with llama.cpp on my MacBook Air for tiny things I’d script or Google for and it’s mostly fine.↩︎
Even the 5 minutes once per day that I started with a few months ago seems indispensable now.↩︎