Recurse Center - Batch 2 - Cycle 20241105-20241107 - Reflection

Reflection

This was another contemplative, introspective cycle. I think I needed a little distance from ARENA and some time to work leisurely on Audrey, while thinking towards my larger goals for my time at RC, with half of batch to go.

I decided to work on a library called Zora, which will be an automatic speech recognition (ASR) library and platform focused on interpretability, openness, and personalization.

I also had some time to think about my relationship to RC's self directives. In short, I've been feeling the tension between working at the edge of your abilities and building your volitional muscles. I think that sometimes at certain moments, or over long, sustained periods of time, working at the edge of your abilities may not be the thing you necessary want to do, in service of staying at that edge. It often may no longer be grounded in curiosity nor joy. I think I've been motivated mostly through curiosity, but at times not felt joy as much as I would like, especially when working on really hard things. I'm working on re-finding that balance between the two... I think spending some time this cycle on reminding myself of the why is helping re-energize and re-motivate me in the what* that I'm doing.

Day 1

• Today I worked on organizing the first Heap Computer Club meeting.

• Afterawrd I shared my demo video of Audrey to Recursers, and I've been getting some great responses. Here's the video below:

• Finally I spent some time thinking about this ASR library that I want to make.

Day 2

• I had some more tasks to do with Heap, including cleaning up some unused disk space and figure out our meeting time.

• I also had a wonderful chat with a faculty member at Recurse, who helped me unpack my thoughts about the self-directives above, as well as helped me articulate outloud my why and decide to make this library.

• I also did some retraining on Audrey, cleaning up some code and using a larger (generated) dataset.

Day 3:

• I went to an AI Safety presentation by a fellow Recurser that helped oe appreciate more some of the implications of rapid AI progress and why AI safety is important.

• I did some research on feature visualization in CNNs

• I wrote the README for Zora!

Things for next cycle

I'm going to spend some time working while preparing for my upcoming Just Tech retreat to Puerto Rico!