Hi,
I decided to add another post to this year’s recap. After I described my three key learnings from my failed startup endeavor, I wasn’t feeling finished or satisfied. Overall I’m not satisfied with what I learned this year. It feels very shallow without any hard skills behind it. In every year of my life, I learned a lot, independent of the later usefulness, but at least I can say, that I moved forward. This year, I don’t feel like this. As Confucius said: “By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.” My learnings weren’t helpful at all and they came from experience. To sum it up, the ratio of effort and outcome was very low and I definitely can do better.
What’s next?
I’m not sure. The world is changing as it always does. As a first step, I will go back and focus on what I can do and where I’m comfortable. As starting to prepare for upcoming job interviews, I tried to get an overview of my machine learning knowledge. Everything is spread out over many books, moocs and notebooks. So I let Claude Code and Gemini 3.0 write me an overview:
Here is my interview preparation:
and here are my flashcards:
Those are not perfect, but much better than expected. With a bit of scepticism, this will serve as a good start for learning. I will continue to improve them, but I’m still astonished how well they are.
For the past few months, I’ve been thinking about what if I can mimic myself with a fine-tuned LLM. What is needed and so on. More like an intellectual exercise than a serious plan. Anyway, yesterday I started to cataloge my my book shelves. Those are only non work related books. I also gave many books away, so the list will grow from time to time.
Anyway, will a LLM trained on all the books I read be able to sound like me? I don’t think so. Just pick one book from the list and I will remember only a very small part of it. For example War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy took me weeks to finish 10 years ago and now I even forgot the names of the main characters. At least, a LLM will remember the names, so it will be never be able to sound like me. Jokes besides, this is why they are amazing tools, as you can see with my interview preparation.
Thank you for your attention.