useful links

This page is a collection of resources that have been inspiring or helpful for me. I hope something here is useful to you too!

Research Writing

Research Mentality

  • Research as a Stochastic Decision Process by Jacob Steinhardt
  • A Bird’s-Eye View of the ML Field by Dan Hendrycks and Thomas Woodside
  • Film Study for Research - Jacob Steinhardt
    • Makes an analogy to athletics, suggests to “watch film” of yourself and other researchers as a way to improve
      • Research papers are incomplete “film”, since they only show the final product
      • Working with an experienced advisor is effective, but not scalable
      • Suggests blogs, talks, and debates as a way to get more “film”
    • Suggests the Act-Reflect-Ask cycle, also borrowed from performance psychology
      • Act: Do a part of your research activities
      • Reflect: Think about what happened. Did you make the right move? If not, what was the right move?
      • Ask: If the right move is unclear after reflection, ask someone else for advice

Careers

Workflow

  • Reading
    • Paper recommendations
      • Semantic Scholar
      • Twitter
      • Lab.ml trending papers
  • Listening
    • AXRP Podcast axrp.net
      • Favorite Episode so far: Scott Aaronson
    • The Inside View theinsideview.ai
    • The Lunar Society https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/podcast
      • Favorite Episode so far: Ilya Sutskever
    • Machine Ethics Podcast
  • Notes and writing
    • Obsidian
      • Vim Keybindings
      • Advanced Tables
      • Better Word Count
      • Citations w/ Zotero
      • Clear Unused Images
      • Quick LateX
      • Remember File State
    • MathPix snipping tool
    • Zotero w/ browser plugin

  • Publishing from Obsidian to PDF/TeX with Pandoc (probably soon migrating to Quarto)

  • Slides in Quarto/RevealJS
    • I wrote a plugin to keep slide contents within the slide: https://github.com/g-simmons/slide-contents-wrap
  • Code in VSCode
    • GitHub Copilot
    • Remote SSH (for working on servers)
    • Language extension for whatever language I’m working in
  • Terminal
    • Zsh
    • Oh My Zsh
      • plugins=(zsh-autosuggestions zsh-syntax-highlighting zsh-vim-mode fzf)
      • zsh-vim-mode!!
    • tmux
    • NeoVim for quick file edits
    • Very quick data exploration in Visidata
      • Visidata is a new tool for me, replaces opening a file in Excel or Jupyter + Pandas to get quick summary information.
  • Navigation/Keybindings
  • Remembering things with Obsidian Spaced Repetition

If you have similar taste and have suggestions for my workflow, I’d love to hear from you!