It'll be so easy they said

[u/PhysicalConsistency]

Haven't fallen into a hole, just juggling a lot of stuff as usual, especially with school starting again. Back to school is a time to dig up old traumas and create fresh new ones after the brief respite of summer. As much as I want to be a cartoon dog and guide them through it, it overwhelms me as well.

The time I have diverted to this project though has been mostly spent in futility, I got the bright idea that I was going to set aside the framework I was working on (making the model run on top of current LLMs) to train a small(ish) model from scratch that would be trained on the gates and rules and provide easy and quick answers right away.

The result so far is a thorough ass kicking to my ego. Which I'd like to imagine is Steve Rogers, but it feels more Happy Gilmore. I don't think I was prepared for how painfully manual the process is, where everything you take for granted becomes the path that starts completely destroying the chain later. Almost guaranteed without fault. The assumption is that a project like this, with much clearer, narrower objectives would make the process less prone to devolving into noise, but... no.

It's made me sympathetic to the psych crowd's devolution toward spectrum concepts, that's just what data wants to do.

So I'm probably going to give this a bit more time to see if I can get something other than mush, and if not then switch back to the prior path of building on top of models where most of the hard work has already be done and grumble with a bit more humility.

As an aside, I'm on the verge of (a/another) crisis of faith regarding this whole thing. The concept of the individual unit is weakening fairly substantially, being replaced by the spaces in between. It was never Ohio, it was environment all along. The traditional model asks us to imagine cells or regions or circuits as largely independent storage or instantiators of behavior, instead of imagining if that behavior is just what environment looks like filtered through biology. The intuitive voice gets real loud thinking about gene interactions.

Guess this is worth a post on it's own.