[Epistemic Status: This is an artifact of my self study. I am using help manage my focus. As such, I don't expect anyone to fully read it. If you have particular interest or expertise, skip to the relevant sections, and please leave a comment, even just to say "good work/good luck". I'm hoping for a feeling of accountability and would like input from peers and mentors. This may also help to serve as a guide for others who wish to study in a similar way to me. ]

Highlights

I once again got off track and am now starting up again. This time I'm hoping to focus on job searching and consistent maintainable effort.

Review of 5th Sprint

My goals for the 5th sprint were:

Every day spend some time on each of the following:
- Read some LW post or other relevant material. (SSJ--2)
- Spend some time writing or developing ideas to write (SSJ--1)
- Work on Transformers from Scratch course (SSJ--2&4)
By the end of the sprint:
- Have clarified my SSJ--6, social networking, goals and strategy, and write a post describing them.

Daily Worklog

Date	Progress
Mo, Dec 15	Read and reacted to some comments in open thread winter (Because Steven Byrnes commented on my use of reacts.) Wrote OIS Explainer. It took about 7 hours! So didn't get to TfS today...
Tu, Dec 16	Got poor sleep because of hyperactivity from 7 hours of straight typing. Then failed to get focused on anything all day.
Wd, Dec 17	Responded to a few comments. Reviewed TfS notes and started on 1.1 Skimmed Shallow review of technical AI safety, 2025 An Ambitious Vision for Interpretability (ambitious mechanistic interpretability) https://topos.institute/ (collective sense making focused on socio-technical systems) I'm generally interested in everything in "White-box" and "Theory"
Th, Dec 18	Attended FLI zoom call: CARMA Fellows presented STAMP/STPA framework applied to AI loss of control. Did TfS 1.1-1 (2h) Clarified understanding of tokenizing with "byte-pair encoding". Got curious about histograms of output distributions. Realized I'm uncertain about shape of residual stream and attention heads. Read some of Deep Utopia. I'm on "Friday" in discussion of "interestingness, fulfillment, richness, purpose, and meaning". Ideation for edits to OIS Explainer.
Fr, Dec 19 - Wd, Feb 4	Got distracted with Christmas and New Years and all sorts of things. It feels like I blink and a whole month has gone by. I feel weary but I'm not going to give up. Just gotta start bac

...

Tony McMannis

Tony McMannis

Tony McMannis

Tony McMannis