Note 65

After mulling it over for... approximately 48 hours, I've become more okay with the fact that I was let go. They were clearly trying to push me out over the last month by assigning very little work, and used the idea of a demo to get the last ounce of effort out of me before firing me the day of the demo.

Which is fucked.

So although I think I have a right to be angry about how I was treated, it's not like I was the perfect employee either (otherwise I'd probably still have a job). I'll admit that I could have voiced my concerns with management earlier, and been more communicative of my opinions. But truthfully, and aside from being slightly lazy, I don't think I did anything quite wrong. Having been pulled into multiple different tasks over the last 6-ish months, I only felt like I had the green light to work on what I believed would truly provide impact over the last 2 weeks. Which I had a near finished implementation of apart from some threshold and hyperparameter tuning. So yes, I do feel like I was slighted.

To top it all off this PoS boss hasn't even sent me my severance contract. So I can't even be done with it yet. I have to fucking reach out to a co-worker to then get them to send it to me. Fuck them.

= big space =

In other news, I think I have a bit of interest in mechanistic interpretability. So it's something I want to explore for a bit. For future career opportunities I think it would be really cool to be a part of Neel Nanda's MI research internship thingy. I'm just starting to dip my toes in but right now I'm thinking of doing ablation studies on sparse autoencoder features of embeddings to see how it affects information retrieval. We can then find causal relationships between those features and the embeddings. I have no idea whether this is a good enough idea or whether I'll get accepted but I think it's somewhat novel?

If it doesn't really go anywhere, well, I think I have a part time job lined up. I'll work there and start planning for a post bacc in pre-med. I think my main worry here is that I'm starting from 0. I don't want to start from 0. Obviously not complete 0 because I still have 23 years of life experience and a degree but it feels like 0. My mom, my sister, and truthfully myself have an inkling that I'm probably better suited to medicine. But I will say that truly learning new things in computer science, ai, and just coding has been quite fun. I've definitely progressed a lot as a programmer recently. I can't say that I want to just give that up just yet. Not super sure what to do here but I know that I'm delaying it for now.