Maybe Spring
Spring, or something that feels creepily like it, is poking it’s way in. The days are an hour and a half longer than they were at the beginning of February. By the end of March they’ll be two hours longer again. After the government lockdown exit roadmap announcement, and the continued amazing work of the vaccine roll-out, I’m letting myself have a good square bit of hope.
I actually had a really tough time at the beginning of the week. I was struggling to stay sane and motivated, which I feel is pretty understandable at the moment. Picked up on part of the cause of it thanks to the last Blindboy podcast. One of the points he made was that everyone at the moment is in essence living with the symptoms of depression, if not the actual feeling. We’re not able to make our career goals, or go out and socialise, or leave the house that much. I realised this was hitting me most whenever I had a bad day with getting my MSc work done, since that’s in essence the biggest thing tying my self-worth down day to day. It’s deeply linked to my career progression, since it’s the basis of any job I hope to get after, and indirectly a lynch pin of my personal life, since I’m hoping to get a visa to move to Canada off the back of the Express Entry points I’ll gain from completing the degree, and I’m planning to move to Canada to be with my partner Dani.
So essentially whenever I have a bad day with my courses, struggling to get through material, the knock on feeling is that all of the other things in my life are struggling or impacted too. And I am incredibly lucky to have the support of friends and family, and to be in a great position financially, but it helps a lot to put a name to those feelings when they come up. I don’t have many competing ways to positively fill my time at the moment. That’s partly the circumstances, and maybe partly something I can work on.
Exercising
In other news just to feel something I bought an Apple watch SE this month, and that’s been slowly negging me into exercising daily with little taps and many numbers. It’s quite good, this is the first time I’ve kept consistently active maybe ever? Definitely a big step up from parts of the past year where my daily movement could best be described as a crawl. In April of 2020 my daily average walking distance was under half a mile. While I was definitely playing my part with not going outside, it definitely wasn’t good for my health in other ways. I stopped smoking all of 280 days ago, so this is now my attempt to do the next best thing I can for my health and be more active.
Uni progress
On the MSc front, I’m starting to get a bit bewildered by some of the material coming at me. Still treading water for now, and the workload is relatively light, but it’s great to have some challenging topics to work through.
With regards to Reinforcement Learning, we’ve turned to take a square look at Temporal Difference methods, so really getting to what makes the field unique. We have a tricky-ish coursework to implement and improve on a basic Q-Learning agent in a race-track environment. I’ve done all of the easiest parts of that coursework, so now I just have to have a good think for the rest.
On the Functional Programming side we’re now getting into the weeds of the $\lambda$-calculus, and the variable renaming parts of that are slightly melting my brain. The course is really well structured, so getting through the exercises definitely helps with comprehension, it’s just not the easiest going. And that’s fine.
I’m taking my motorbike out a bit more now, just small trips around the villages to build my confidence up (and stay within the lockdown restrictions). I made the most adventurous trip I’ve been on in a month and a half by zipping round to the nearest McDonald’s drive through. After writing this I’m going to go on a sunny Sunday ride, and then see if I can get some reading done in the rest of the afternoon.
Reading list
- What is Huffman Coding
- Best practices for REST API design
- Attended a talk by Davide Zilli, from Mind Foundry, on Machine Learning Commercial Applications
- How I heat my home by mining crypto currencies
- The Feynman Learning Technique
- The Artificial Intelligence of the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence: An Introductory Overview for Law and Regulation, Joanna Bryson (pdf)
- Ethics of AI: Pioneering a New National Security, GCHQ