My three-month sabbatical

~ Veselin ~ 8 Comments

I spent three months not working. Today is the last day of AFK, already mentally preparing to get back to work, starting tomorrow.

Automattic has this fantastic benefit that for every five years of tenure, you get a 3 month vacation that you can take all at once. You can’t split it, and you can’t work while taking it. Just sign off from everything and do whatever.

I had big plans for the sabbatical. You know, stuff I want to do, can do, busy things that would’ve eaten up most of the AFK. Thankfully, I didn’t share the big plans here, as that would’ve committed me to following up. I did a little bit of planned activities but mostly had a vacation.

My grand plan was that I’m going to master experimentation. I was under the growing feeling that something about my understanding of how experiments should run is wrong, and built myself a study plan with six books. I read four, though not four of the original six because I changed what I want to read next twice.

So, if not doing the grand plan, what did I do?

First two weeks were pure unwinding. It’s a feeling that’s really difficult to explain, I’ve had one sabbatical before and didn’t experience it. Doing any type of work is stressful and each morning, your body wakes up thinking about it, and willing to face that stress, and expend energy there. This stress accumulates and puts some permanent weight on you. Remove that and it leaves a void of some kind. The body still wakes up, ready to face the challenges of the day, but there are no challenges. So, two weeks of slowly adjusting to the feeling I don’t need to worry today. Around the end of these two weeks, I understood that my grand plan won’t happen.

What I did instead

  • Played football with my kids.
  • Went to Musala (twice) and Vihren with my family, three successful summits.
  • Had joint reading sessions with the kids. As a result, the little one read six books about the Ninja boy, and is at the end of Alice. The big one read the Dungeon Crawler Carl 1 & 2, and most of the Three Musketeers.
  • Did math classes with the kids. Little one understood some of the second and third grade math and got stuck with text problems. Big one went over most of the material for his next grade. Not sure how much he understood, but I feel like we both improved.
  • Kept walking, kept doing pull ups almost daily.
  • Watched lots of YouTube. I now know how engines are disassembled, how to solve higher degree polynomial math problems, and a lot more about local AI setups. I watched a guy repair a Bugatti, and another one waste endless hours to online scammers, and a third guy fix broken video cards.
  • Visited my parents more often.

I think the reading with kids was probably the most impactful thing I did. I feel the AI revolution is negatively affecting them, lowering the quality of the text and video they’re exposed to. Learning and improving still requires reading and understanding advanced text. Books don’t come naturally to their lives, like they did in my, when I was their age. So I’m happy that they read some books and will be a bit more prepared for their next grades.

I’m very thankful to Automattic for the Sabbatical benefit. I feel I used it well.

Experimentation for Engineers: From A/B testing to Bayesian optimization by David Sweet

~ Veselin ~ 8 Comments

I managed to complete this book, which is quite an achievement. Unlike the last two I read on the subject, this was not an easy read. Lots of abbreviations, terminology, python functions, charts that represent hypothetical scenarios I couldn’t relate to, and more questions than answers. Why does that work? How does it work?

I’m not sure if this is necessarily a bad book. Probably isn’t. The author clearly has experience in his line of work, which is very different than mine. So what this book showed me was that other methods exist and online controlled experiments is a broader topic than I assumed. Will I try using any of the python functions or the methods inside? Not likely. However, knowing what can be done is still valuable and may come in handy one day.

I think I wasn’t the right audience for it, which lead to some disappointment. However, I want to learn more about multi-armed bandits and contextual bandits and may check what’s available on Amazon in the area.

YouTube shorts should be forbidden

~ Veselin ~ 6 Comments

I spent some of my sabbatical watching YouTube. I know, this is not the best activity of all and I did other things that were more meaningful. I’ll post about it later.

So, here’s my problem with YouTube, after a few months of embarrassingly high usage. I don’t like their recommendations algorithm. I see what they do, I see why, it is very clever, it just feels like it turns the users into victims, and some of their users are my kids. Here’s what I think the algorithm does.

You are into science but I don’t really have much else to offer here. Maybe you’ll like an investment video by similarly looking creators? Oh great, you watched 30 minutes of that. Let me now fill your feed with similar videos, all full of reasons why we are all going to suffer imminent apocalypse from at least 10 different sources. AI is taking over. Data centers destroy communities and don’t pay taxes. We are running out of water. A tanker was hit in the Strait of Hormuz. The petrol will go up, prices will inflate, the electronic tickets spy on you, so do the Flock cameras. The Chinese cars are coming and that’s awful for the industry but the industry is also awful because modern cars are bad and expensive. Choose your own doom and I’ll show you 100 videos telling exactly the same but with more drama.

It’s the same story of productive emotions repeated over and over by an almighty ML algorithm, ordering videos, and clever influencers, saying whatever the target audience wants to hear. The bubbles of content naturally form because they’re ordered by the probability of what would keep me watching.

But why ban just YT shorts if it looks like a broader problem?

I think that long content is higher-effort to both create and watch. The learning loop is longer, the creator has to go deeper. It’s much easier to identify if they are reading an AI generated script and stop watching them before the message is transferred. It doesn’t mess up with your dopamine as much. So it’s a bit better and perhaps some of these videos can really be useful. I don’t need to buy a DGX Spark or Mac Studio to see them in use. I don’t need to tear down an engine to learn how bad oil looks like. There’s some value in that.

After spending several rounds in YouTube rabbit holes in the areas of mathematics, car repairs, local AI, and particle physics, I think reading is still the way to learn things for me. Videos look like a proof someone else did their homework and can do something, like fix a computer, or run a benchmark. But watching someone fix something doesn’t teach me how to fix it myself, something books and education can do, or at least can still do for me. Slop invades books as well.