Tuesday, August 27th

Can you believe August is almost over? I swear it was the start of summer just a week ago. The days are shortening, and before you know it it'll be nine months of grey drizzle. At least for us Seattle folk. Nevertheless, the passage of time and this blog are two inevitables so may as well get right into it.

Chinese

Today I continued the restaurant theme, learning how to ask questions of a friend I may be eating with. I decided to put this into practice today with a Chinese speaker, but unfortunately, was immediately stumped when they answered "No" to my "Do you want lunch?" Oh well, I guess it is technically a full conversation.

Project

Big things are in the works here. Today, I spent some time learning about and preparing the dataset I will use to train the model. It looks like this will be the most time-consuming part of the process, so I am looking for ways to increase efficiency. Today I made a list of topics that I will need to "teach" the language model that covers the use cases I intend to perform. I believe that it is important to clearly define the functionality I want before I work on gathering the training data.

Self-Betterment

I continued reading the same book, among another one I started. Mind you, this other book is pure popcorn reading, but I got it for free and want to finish it. I also spent an hour today working on my essay for potential Masters programs. More details coming soon.

Professional Development

Spent some time restructuring my resume and cover letter. I do wonder if it is a fruitless endeavour. Can anyone tell me if cover letters benefit applications in any way? I have been getting mixed reviews.