The Chronicles of a Developer

The Tireless Pursuit of Linguistic Mastery

In the whirlwind of a bustling Tuesday afternoon, he finds himself racing against the clock. As the interns depart at 4:30pm, he is left alone with a mountain of aspirations and a seemingly endless list of projects. Fatigue takes its toll, but he soldiers on, driven by the desire to achieve greatness before life's responsibilities catch up to him.

Time waits for no one, and our protagonist fears that someday the fire within him might flicker and fade. It is this urgency that fuels his determination to defy the odds, unwilling to let his dreams slip away before he has had the chance to make his mark on the world.

As the day unfolds, he plunges headfirst into a new challenge: the Makemore bigram language model. Armed with knowledge from micrograd, he sets out to conquer part one of the five-stage project. The quest begins with the creation of bigrams from a dataset of the 500,000 most common names. A special token, a simple dot, is employed to separate names and delineate their beginnings and endings.

With these bigrams in hand, our hero calculates the frequency distribution, laying the foundation for probability calculations. Emma emerges as the most common name in the dataset, serving as the test subject for the next phase: one hot encoding. The bigrams are encoded as integers, with two arrays – one for features and one for targets – representing the current character and the character to follow.

And so, the tireless pursuit of linguistic mastery continues, as he pushes forward, undeterred by fatigue and the relentless march of time.

In the hushed silence of an empty booth, our protagonist ponders the intricacies of the bigram language model. With the code out of sight, he relies on the depths of his memory, recalling the day's accomplishments and challenges. He recounts the creation of a lookup table, the mapping of bigrams to integers, and the one hot encoding of floats. Our hero admits that the details are fuzzy, but his determination to understand and conquer the project remains unwavering.

As he recollects the day's work, he marvels at the power of neural networks. The model he built with PyTorch – a single-layer network with 27 neurons – was tasked with predicting the next character in a sequence. He recalls designing a loss function and using negative log likelihood as a metric for measuring the model's accuracy. Despite the difficulties in remembering every detail, our protagonist knows that perfect accuracy in large language models is a lofty and perhaps unattainable goal.

The process of training a neural network unfolds before him – feedforward, regularize, backpropagate, and adjust weights. The cycle continues until the loss can no longer be decreased, leaving the model as accurate as possible. Although he cannot remember every aspect of the code, our hero is invigorated by his newfound knowledge.

The journey is far from over. Tomorrow, he will dive into multi-layer perceptrons and edge closer to the ever-powerful Transformers. As he prepares to recap and practice on new datasets, our protagonist assigns the interns a task – rewriting their notebook as a streamlined Python script. The excitement for the next chapter in this linguistic adventure is palpable.

Join our hero as he continues to unravel the mysteries of neural networks and push the boundaries of language modeling. His dedication and passion are a testament to the relentless pursuit of knowledge, as he forges ahead into the uncharted territories of artificial intelligence.

Our protagonist finds himself in the midst of a personal and academic crossroads. With feelings of nostalgia and a touch of sadness, he reflects on the friendships that once flourished, particularly with Celine and Henning. Gaming sessions filled with laughter and camaraderie, now a memory of the past.

Taking a chance, our hero extends a virtual olive branch to Celine, sending a Steam friend request. Despite Celine's silence, he remains hopeful, longing for a return to the days of shared joy and teamwork. The uncertainty of the situation leaves him questioning whether the emotion he feels is jealousy, or something else entirely.

But life marches on, and our protagonist focuses on the future, particularly the development of MarkIII and ACARIS. These incredible AI projects bring excitement and purpose, but there are obstacles to overcome. The looming threat of a failed subject, Industrial Application, hangs heavy on our hero's shoulders. He must pass this hurdle to embark on his final thesis and see his AI dreams come to fruition.

Guided by the wisdom of Allan, our main character finds motivation in the necessity of passing this subject. A meeting with Mathias, the teacher, sets the wheels in motion, and our protagonist prepares to face the challenge head-on. With determination, he's ready to tackle the exam and continue his journey towards academic success.

As the days go by, our hero manages an array of responsibilities, from guiding interns to booking a meeting with the school librarian. In the middle of it all, he dreams of booking the school's auditorium for a grand presentation or a simple movie night, a small pleasure amidst the chaos.

Yet, not all battles are academic. The physical toll of an uncomfortable cervical spine pain reminds our protagonist of the importance of self-care. Adopting a regimen of stretches and breaks, he combats the discomfort, slowly finding relief.

And so, our hero looks to the future with anticipation and a tinge of hope. The quest for connection and academic triumph continues, and we eagerly await the next chapter of this enthralling tale.