What went well
- Caught up with friends and family in Liverpool, Hangzhou, Bali, Singapore, Las Palmas and Madrid.
- Spent most the year living in Vietnam and Bali.
- Attended and completed the Alignment Research Bootcamp in Oxford
- Did most of the ARENA Fundamentals syllabus
- Studied Pytorch and Python throughly
- Did 11+ different AISafety fellowship applications
- Maintained climbing performance and improved finger strength despite poor health
- Was heartburn free in Vietnam for 5 months showing that the longterm issue I’ve had with this can likely be resolved by my diet
- I did my first D&D game, paddle game and Asian Karaoke session
- I started a year out for transitioning my career to something more impactful/purposeful and got a big severance payment to fund it.
Not as Planned
- The search for an ideal career is still ongoing
- My dating life was a bit purposeless as I was moving around so much
- I was sick for 3 months while in Asia.
Career / Finance
I was made redundant in April of last year, and started investigating different career paths around May or June. My intention with this is to find a career that’s more impactful, either altruistically or for solving interesting technological problems while maintaining the benefits I had from my previous job, or minimising the compromise on them.
This will impact my finances in the short run as I won’t be earning money, and switching careers will likely mean making less money when I first switch to it. I can backtrack to my previous career of iOS engineering if needed although there’s a secondary benefit to this switch which is that a switch to ML/AI would likely future-proof my career long-term more than iOS development.
Going forward next year, I want to spend the first half continuing to up-skill in AI but mostly through projects and less through courses. I want to fit-test different impactful roles I can take. This includes but is not limited to AI safety, LLM Development, anti-disinformation coding, and independent app development.
- Explore AISafety
- Explore anti-disinformation projects
- Explore LLM Finetuning
- Explore RL
- Explore independent app development
- Get a new job
Social
Socially things have gone well this year. I made new friends in Vietnam despite having no prior connections in Saigon and had a lot of social events each week. Outside of Vietnam I was actively keeping in touch with friends and family including travelling to Bali, Las Palmas, Liverpool, Hangzhou and Madrid as part of this. I also got to know plenty of new people in the UK by using my spare time to attend more effective altruism events including ARBOx, the EA North retreat and several EA Liverpool events.
Travelling and messaging takes up a lot of time, I may need to ease up on this somewhat.
- Start dating again, preferably a nomad or someone who I can travel but a local could work if the location is somewhere I can see myself settling
- Cut back on Whatsapp messaging and social media
Self Development
I was kept pretty busy with the career switch which is sort of a giant self-development project. I would like a bit more time to put towards things like singing, dancing, DIY etc.
After reading “Make it stick” a book about the science of learning I started using Anki flashcards. This is a flash card app where you make your own cards or download premade ones online on any topics you want. I’m going to utilize anki more as I retain information from doing this much better than by reading and it takes much less time than learning via tutorials for technical topics. I used it for python, ML, transformers, calculus CNNs and numpy this year and will expand this to cover some of my favourite books, AISafety and some more deep-learning topics.
For my hobbies: Chess I think I can just pick up when I feel like it and isn’t worth pursuing as a goal. Climbing my goal of climbing 10 V5s wasn’t met although I was sick for so long this year it really disrupted things. The other problem with this goal is it’s grade based so it would result in me avoiding my weak points. Spanish I’m keeping on the backburner until I live in a Spanish speaking country again.
- Identify climbing weak points and set goals for them
- Add more books to my Anki
- Try singing, dancing or DIY classes
- Figure out how to fit the above around climbing, going out, and studying
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