Post-summer blues

Feeling off

This month was kind of odd. I think I identified it as coming off of an amazing summer and then suddenly having to just sit at a desk again not really knowing what to do or start working on. That came with lots of room and time to doubt myself and the project as a whole, which aligned with the realization that a whole year has passed (out of three!) since starting the project. That realization made me feel a bit uneasy to be honest. Have I done enough? Should I have done more? Am I on track to be a good PhD student? What is a good PhD student? And a whole lot more questions like that. I’m not sure there are good answers to many of those but the first two weeks of september was filled with doubt.

However, when thoughts like that have room and time to roam freely in your mind I think it’s important to talk to people. Doesn’t really matter about what or who but the more you can vent about your situation a bit and take the edge off the better I have found that it helps. Luckily, I have a very experienced co-supervisor that can spot patterns like this from a mile away and assured me that it is almost a comically normal situation to be in. I have learned that I should trust his advice on stuff like this and so I just kept showing up even though I honestly just wanted to not have to think about the project. It turned out to be a really good idea to just keep going though. More on that later.

As a side note, one thing that contributed to me feeling bummed out was that I planned on applying as a volunteer for NeurIPS Europe. I thought the opportunity sounded fantastic so I noted down the deadline and had the tab open for a few days only to discover that when I actually decided to send an application the form had closed. They had gotten too many applicants and closed nearly a week early. In the moment I was really dissapointed. It would have been amazing for networking opportunities now that I have to plan an external stay/extended visit. Being able to talk to people in person would have been great.

AI Tinkerers Meetup

I was invited to this September Demo Night by AI Tinkerers Copenhagen. Initially I didn’t really want to go. As I mentioned I was feeling a bit down and engaging with AI stuff in my free time wasn’t on the top of things I would like to do. But I eventually decided to show up, in large part because the organizer of the event asked me to, so thanks for being persistent. It ended up giving me a lot of energy and motivation to work on my project. I could almost feel my “project batteries” recharging in real time. Realizing this I made the connection that even if I’m very much an introvert I need to engage with people that are deeply passionate or motivated for it to rub off on my during those slump times. I suspect that’ll be an invaluable trick to have in the books for later on.

Setting up local hardware for agentic coding

I consider this as kind of a spin-off project: Showcasing that we, in the company, can host coding agent on local hardware in order to increase control, ownership and cost. We ended up ordering a machine with an Nvidia RTX Pro 4000 which has 24GB of VRAM. Mentioning this to people at the AI Tinkerers meetup sparked enthusiasm in most people which isn’t too surprising - those people are enthusiasts in the space that willingly spend an afternoon with strangers to talk about their interest in AI. However, it was still nice to feel that we’re onto something that other people find highly intersting.

Part of this work also spun out enough material for me to put together a poster proposal for the D3A conference.