Augh-ust* Update (Patreon)

(* well, September now)
( 🕓 3 min read )

Hi all,

Sorry for the no-update last month – had to take a sudden physical/mental health break. Long story short:

1. Brain fog, never figured out why.

2. I developed something similar to TMD (persistent throat/jaw pain), due to a combo of my voice-related gender dysphoria flaring up + bad voice practice technique.

3. [A thing I don't know I want to discuss publicly, yet. It does involve a possible (possible) future novel-length project, though! The topic is... something serious enough that drafting it caused a dissociative episode for me, & indirectly ended one friendship I had. So, how's that for a book teaser.]

Thankfully: all those problems are better now! (Not sure why, though...)

Also, Patreon messed up big last month, causing lots of creators to suddenly lose lots of patrons randomly (see reporting on: Engadget, The Verge) If you'd like to keep supporting me, please double-check that you're still subscribed – thank you! 💖

. . .

🎉 Anyway, three project updates! 🎉

[1]: I'm now working part-time with Hack Club, a non-profit that helps teenagers run their own coding clubs & hackathons! 

Specifically, I'm collaborating with Lexi Mattick, a scary-smart 17-year-old who's co-authored a paper/code for neural network interpretability, jeez. I'm working with her to finally finish that 3-part series on AI Safety I've been slogging through since forever. Part I should be out late September, I friggin' hope. (Still open-source & Creative Commons, of course!)

. . .

[2]: I revamped my blog to be super fancy!  Check out this The Shining animated header of me:

Another feature I'm proud of is this reading-timer clock, when you scroll:

And other small features, like integration with Nutshell (expandable explanations), Orbit (spaced repetition flashcards), Littlefoot (footnotes that appear in bubbles, not teleport you off-page), auto-generated Table of Contents, etc.

The hope was, revamping my blog would encourage me to write more, since each post would now be as fancy & interactive as my usual flagship projects!

Well, that's the hope anyway. Empirically, we shall see.

. . .

[3]: Trying to make my own artificial neural network (ANN) from scratch, with visual interactive simulation? Maybe it'll be an explorable explanation one day.

This is also a potential mini-research project? ANNs usually learn using "backpropagation", which isn't biologically plausible, and has lots of other problems. My hope is I can use my sim to explore other, more biologically-plausible learning algorithms! Maybe even discover my own? Despite the recent AI boom, including concerns about AI's uninterpretable alien-ness, making bio-plausible, less-alien AI is a surprisingly not-crowded research area???

(So far, this paper in particular has been most interesting to me: [pdf, technical] Just 2 equations for a much more bio-plausible neuron!)

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Anyway, that's all she wrote! Thank you all again, sincerely, so much, for sticking with me even as I no-show due to weird random physical/mental health issues.

😸🤖🧠,
~ Nicky Case