Tag Archives: Personal

Why is it every time I sit down to write, I suddenly can’t write?

I am unfortunately not writing a real post today, rather a post about what I wish I were writing about. Every time I sit down to write anything these days I get bad writer’s block and so I end up not writing or banging out something really mediocre. But I want to write down some of the topics I’d like to write and hope to write about soon as a way to remember them and push me to write about them.

So I’d like to write some posts about the following:

My work using HuggingFace and some other tools to try to fine-tune a large-language model (LLM). I hope one day to get an LLM that can read earnings statements for me and parse out anything interesting. I would go through step by step what I did, and maybe also have a separate post for all the things that really annoyed me (no one would tell me how to make a dataset!)

“Shadow Boxing NIMBYs again” where I talk about why NIMBYism and zoning are bad. This post would in part take in the idea of “people should be allowed to build things on their property,” which is surprisingly controversial. Also tearing about common NIMBY arguments about how corporations and foreigners owning homes are the “real” problem rather than the simple fact that there aren’t enough homes. Also would talk about the insanity of the British “chains” system.

My recent successes and failures in cryo-EM, including the glow discharger destroying my grids and how my ice has been misbehaving. Also the fact that 2 similar samples are acting in completely opposite ways.

This is a bit hard to post

I’m not going to share this post to any of my social media, but I wonder if it would be cathartic to put this out in writing

I’ve been feeling a little jealous of how many of my friends seem to be succeeding in their jobs and their research while I’m not. I’m not getting the data I want so I can publish papers, I’m struggling at writing as much and as well as I would like, and since I don’t work in industry I’m not making as much money or getting the promotional opportunities I want.

I’m just feeling a lot of jealously right now and that’s making it hard for me to sometimes talk about my own trajectory and the trajectory of others.

The danger of small patterns

As I’ve probably said before, I work as a researcher. When you’re doing difficult or expensive research, you don’t usually have the time or money to do a whole lot of replications. That goes doubly if you’re working with patients or patient samples. But since science is all about finding patterns, how can you find patterns in a small dataset?

There are statistical tools that can help with this, but even before you get to the hypothesis testing phase, you need to know which direction your hypothesis will go in. For that, we tend to look at the small patterns which aren’t yet statistically significant and try to see what they mean. The danger here is when you don’t get data in a reasonable amount of time, you want to work on your project but you don’t have data to work on. So you go back to whatever you have, the “small patterns” and start extrapolating from there. “If this pattern holds, what could it mean for this disease?”

Then you can start getting attached to a hypothesis that has no data to back it. When you do get data, you may start to interpret it in light of the small pattern you already detected, a pattern which may not even hold. That’s the problem with small patterns, you get to thinking they mean more than they do.

The human brain is a pattern matching machine. Our first calendars came about from noticing that the seasons of a year came in patterns, and that certain stars in the sky could be seen during the hot season while others could be seen during the colder one. But people also thought they detected patterns about how certain things happened on earth when certain stars were seen in the sky. One pattern between stars and the sky held true, there is a correlation between which stars you can see and the season in your local area. But another pattern was false. Yet both patterns were studied and believed for thousands of years.

I hope I don’t get attached to bad patterns for quite so long as that, but it’s hard to avoid. When you’ve got all the time in the world and not enough data, you get attached to these small patterns that you think you detect. And that can hold true even when the pattern is no longer real.

Invest in what you know? How much do I need to know?

I’m a biochemical scientist. I’ve published papers. I’ve got degrees. As an investor, I’ve often been given the advice (whether from friends or randos on the internet) that to “invest in what you know” is the safest kind of investment. For me personally though, I’ve avoided investing in any particular biotech or med-tech companies outside of passive ETFs, because I feel like while I know a lot about biochemistry in general I don’t know enough in specific to have any kind of advantage in those areas. I know about Alzheimer’s disease, but I don’t know much about pharmacology so how would I discriminate between two Alzheimer’s drug companies I wanted to invest in? I know about CRISPR/Cas, but I don’t know enough about its delivery system in humans to feel confident that I could pick the winners in today’s more crowded CRISPR field. There are a lot of areas of biology that I feel I have a little knowledge, but not enough to give me an edge.

Maybe there’s a Dunning-Kruger effect here though, because while I can’t explain what cloud computing is besides “it’s like renting another person’s computer,” I have thrown a bunch of money into Microsoft and been happily watching it grow. I like my Microsoft products and my office suite, so I feel good enough about them that I feel they’re doing alright. Yet I clearly know a hell of a lot less about Microsoft than I do any of the biotech companies of the world, so why do I feel so confident investing here?

I don’t know, it’s hard to psycho-analyze myself, but am I making all the wrong moves? Should I focus on investing in biotech companies, confident that my background would give me an edge in picking the winners and avoiding the losers? For now, ETFs for me I guess, but I’ll keep blogging about them since they’re fun.

Rest in Peace, Shamus Young

Yesterday, I wrote a post where I offhandedly mentioned the death of Shamus Young.  I had done so because during the post I remembered a decade old post of his (that I still can’t find!) that had so succinctly explained everything I was talking about.  I finished the blog post, and while looking for Shamus’ post so I could link to it, I learned that he had died last year. 

I’m pretty late to the party on this one, I haven’t been following him for a few years.  But I first heard about him when he published DM of the Rings around a decade and a half ago, and for a while he was my main source of gaming news and reviews.  I first played Oblivion because of a post he wrote about it, same with Morrowind and even the original X-Com.  I got a lot of my early gaming exposure from him and his blog, and I still think a lot about some of the things I read from him.  My previous post on Skyrim is based heavily on a post I remember him writing about Oblivion and RPGs in general, and a lot of the concepts he wrote about still come back to me.  Learning that he had passed, at what seems like an early age, kind of hits me.  I was never more than a lurker to his blog, and I don’t really know what I wanted to say with this post.  I’m so late to the party and was no more than a reader, so I can’t really share in the grief with others.  But I just wanted to say that he was incredibly fun and funny, and I’m glad I got to read him.

If you’ve never read it, DM of the Rings is well worth your time.  Farewell to a really cool guy.

Writer for sale

Very small post today because I forgot to write one, but I hope tomorrow to write about Beam Therapeutics so watch this space!

Anyway, I have a job, but I’m always open to new ones. I’ve looked at becoming a stock writer. I know it’s not glamorous or 6-figured, but writing about biotech and pharmaceuticals is a something I enjoy and a job I think I’d be good at. Don’t take this blog as the only signal of my quality (or lack thereof) I write most of these last minute because I have my own 9-5 right now. But I think some of these posts that I’ve spent time on are actually good, and so if any of my readers know of good places that would pay for freelance writers, hit me up at theusernamewhichismine@gmail.com.

Buses have only gotten worse during my adulthood

I’ve lived in cities my whole life and yet it seems like the bus systems in every city I’ve ever lived in have only gone downhill. When I first went to grad school, I used buses and trains to get around town to do my grocery shopping and whatnot. By the time I was graduating, the buses had all gotten so sketchy that I no longer used them. People smoked openly on them, there were always homeless people panhandling, and they just seemed a little too violent to be safe. I eventually left that city for my current one, and the buses are STILL crap but in another direction. They’re never on time, I’ve had multiple days where a bus just plain doesn’t show up, and now they’ve altered the route schedule to ensure that my bus MUST take a much longer time to reach it’s destination. When I started riding my route, I could get from A to B in 20 minutes give or take. They’ve now altered the route to make A to B take 30 minutes, and if traffic isn’t bad and the bus is a little early, the driver will stop on the side of the road to ensure it takes no less than 30 minutes.

I don’t know what buses have always been this bad, but it’s really putting me off public transportation in general. It’s even more galling when the cities I’ve lived in are demanding ever increasing funding for ever worsening service. At what point should the city cut its loses and say no, no new funding without fixing what you currently have. More money isn’t a cure all, countries other than mine have much better bus service at much lower cost, I know, I’ve been to them. The cities I’ve been to seem to have a cost disease, where they keep spending more and more to get worse and worse and the only conceivable cure is more money. It’s infuriating.

Small post: I’m currently drawn in my by own nostalgia

I got Christmas gifts from my friends last year, and near all of them gave me video games (which is exactly what I gave them, so neither of us can complain). And yet barely any of them have I installed and played, I’m finding myself more drawn in to the familiar comfort of old games I’ve played through a thousand times. I wonder if this is just a reaction to my current scenario, I’ve been very busy at work and haven’t had much time to sit down and get comfortable with new games. I hope this is just a phase I’m going through that won’t last, I don’t want to find myself stuck in a few games for the rest of time, but for right now I’m just sitting here content with what I have. I keep promising myself I’ll install and play my gifts, and I really hope I get the feeling to do so soon.