Lot's of interesting things during this. Really getting me thinking about really what I am trying to do in my own life. What are my big goals? How to make those a reality. Besides the smaller things I want, what are the big things and how can I chart a path to get there in some way. What will it require? If I want something how can I be there today and start learning to do that the best I can?
What is it that I want in a job anyway?
Well I want to be able to play with code, but not in the capacity of actually building something with it, but using it to make things more efficient. To organize information with it.
Mostly to use code as a tool in my toolbox to make informed decisions, and do it in a way that is effective and helps the planet and human community as a whole.
Really I would like to be in a position of power. I think we know this and have said this many times to myself. To tell the industry to go fuck itself and start working with everyone. To build community and divert away from insular fanatics. There are a lot of problems I think are important and want to work to fix these problems with brilliant minds. To be able to understand a wide range of topics deeply, to have indepth conversations and make informed decisions.
To me this doesn't sound much like code. Code is one avenue of getting here but probably not the only one. In one way it would be something like being president, but also fuck politics. That is even worse. But I do want to be with other people who are thinking about all these complex problems and driven to solve them as best as possible.
I want to effect change at a large scale. But I guess even now I am running into problems of trying to even get change at a small scale. Well rather I think I picked the wrong challenge. Working through the real problem, I think it is becoming more clear to evaluate problems by asking more questions. Coming up with a hypothesis of the problem, then go out into the world to see if that is actually the problem. Turns out computers are not the problem in the US. Is internet access actually a problem around the world? Not totally sure, but education is actually a problem.
Really what is the future of digital learning? I think this is an important question especially after the COVID pandemic. I think there is going to be a greater focus on this. How do we do digitally learning effectively and keep students engaged?
This is one of the fundamental problems facing us right now. Might need to try to find other people who are working in this space. I think the contacts I have are great but might need to explore the Ed-Tech space further. Especially more equal access to good technology. Funding for programs to make education better. Funding to help get students to college. 1-1?
Another question could be. What do I want my fingers in?
Maybe the better question, is what is needed in the next century?
What is the biggest thing that I can possibly achieve?
WORLD PEACE
Where to go to make this a reality is not clear, but I think some of it will come down to being able to speak charismatically about why this is so important and what it will require from all people to do so. I think it requires an evaluation of myself to be more calm and understanding of people.
This is something meditation probably needs help with. However if you are not working towards world peace, you are probably actively the enemy. Just as with those people who are racist. I think again this requires reflection from myself to be as least racist as I can. Of course this in and of itself is monumental, and maybe racism and sexism are the first things we need to overcome before we can overcome other things like world peace. It definitely begs the question for me of religion too. What do to about that? What can be said of religion. I think more writing on this topic is going to be necessary and I think once a week we should practice writing on world peace to see what comes out of it and major overarching themes.
Stepping back from World Peace, which is certainly the most important. I wrote down in my notes having my hands in a lot of things and doing a lot of different roles. That is definitely the most interesting to me. I want to be in a position where I am a facilitator of some sorts. Someone who makes things happen, instead of just sitting around doing simple work. I want to get things done, I want to prove to other people I can do this with ease. I think again this will take some reflection on motivations. Probably better research. Throwing myself into more scenarios where I do have to make some decisions. I think these computers have been eye opening for me since now I have a resource that is desired.
Now the question is how to get the resource into the hands of people who need it the most. How do we find out who needs this the most. I also think that this could have had more thought into it to start. Do some research to find the right questions.
At the same time as all of this I definitely want to work with technology. It's one of my favorite things to use. To play with. It's also very frustrating to me, so I can't imagine how frustrated other people get. I want to make computers so easy to use that they are just there. I hope that too by doing this we can really achieve some higher level of human cooperation, by being able to take a step back from out emotional brains and focus on problem solving. Using the machine to help us more effectively solve problems.
Emotions and other things are very important for guiding us in a direction and making us individuals. That is inescapable and it should be so. It's what drives uniqueness and that is something lovely about humans. Maybe my favorite quality of existing is being able to see the uniqueness of everyone and having diverse perspectives. This is also important, and something a machine may not be able to do (perhaps it can though, cannot be dismissed as a possibility). Basically a bunch of people operating on similar datasets, but looking at the datasets through different lenses of perspective via experience in the world. Absolutely fantastic.
Really this is a thought from yesterday. I don't actually want to organize the data in my brain in a computer system. This is a heinous task to try to do. However I would want to collect a large amount of data that is semi-structured and have the computer be able to operate on this to answer questions. I would love to have this simple markdown text be able to be understood in the greater context of things. I am wondering how to make that possible.
For now I guess I don't mind structuring some data so I can manually query some information, but really eventually I want to write some tiny sentences to describe to a computer what I want and actually get the result out.
I think I will need to understand machine learning in much greater detail. I think I might need to brush up on the fundamentals of the field and basically give myself a crash course in ML. Reading the fundamental research papers and directly playing with the techniques they are talking about. From computer vision research kind of things (labeling) to natural language processing and the latest in transformers. Really the problem I am trying to solve seems like artifical general intelligence. To have a computer be able to reason about the world in a way similar to me, so we can achieve symbiosis. To be able to look at things potentially from an rational point of view. But really I am just a giant sense organ with some directions I want to put myself in. I want to go climb and the AI behind it should be helping me every part of the way. Same thing with everyone I talk to etc. A real personal assistant integrated into the way I live. But this must be built of personal and independent data. It can take data in from other people, but it needs to be 'local'. Whatever that means
Will really need to think about the output of the program, or really if it's a hypernetwork of machine learning models, each which are specific to certain kind of outputs and the top level one is just delegating to smaller subtasks
This is also something Geore Hotz talked about in Comma.ai with Lex Fridman I believe. <- For example that certainly should be linked to the podcast itself which I do have in a database somewhere. It is just a graph with nodes and edges. Can the whole graph just be arbitrary? I think that is how I would like to structure data in a way.
How can a computer organize the data for itself more effectively than I can? Some kind of CDN? Optimizing paths of access? Is this something that you should go and get a PhD for?
After a lot of conversation the bigger problem that I am seeing is not necessarily a lack of access to computers. But really the problem is lack of computer science education in K-12 schools across the nation. Would love to quantify this.
Just so you know. A tag NEED NOT BE A FILE. That seems like a really silly thing to enforce. Somethimes it's just a piece of data goddamnit.
CSE222A/B: Computer Communication Networks CSE 232/B/233: Databases CSE 250-254/256-258