It’s the end of week 4 of January 2023 already. I can’t believe how fast things are going - as usual. This week has definitely been the week that the January blues really hit me but at the same time, some good stuff has happened too.

On Friday afternoon I got this email:

An Email telling me that my thesis corrections are satisfactory and clearing me to submit my final thesis for binding at the university.

This means that finally, I really am done with my PhD thesis and I can send off my thesis and expect my letter of conferral relatively soon. Even though I “finished” my thesis in September, I spent the next 8 weeks preparing for my viva examination at the end of November and the following 6 weeks (with a break for christmas) making the corrections that the examiners recommended. It’s nice to think that I really am “done” now although I have plans to publish another academic paper (because I’m apparently some kind of NLP masochist?) in the next few weeks.

I finally finished listening to the Jolly Swagman Andy Matuschak Interview which took me a few lunch time walks to get through at a staggering 2h8m. I found it really fascinating and Andy had some really great insights on many fronts. Andy’s thoughts on building partnerships in research and business really resonated and stuck with me:

You need to work with somebody who you just think the world of, the absolute world of. They are somebody who’s just really going to inspire you every day. And I think part of why that’s necessary is that good collaborations require just a great deal of trust.

It’s very difficult to let go creatively when collaborating with a lot of people, because if you’re a serious creative, you probably have really strong views on how things should be. But when you’re working with someone that you really admire and that you really trust, you’re happy to just take your hands off the wheel and know that they’re going to make great decisions.

Bringing that kind of trust and expansiveness into those relationships and then flowing with what happens, has for me led to some really lovely results.

I’ve been using Dendron to manage my personal notes for a few weeks, deciding to take the plunge and move away from Joplin to take advantage of the simplicity of markdown notes, the fancy “knowledge management” features and the really nice publishing capabilities. I’ve paired it with Gitjournal on my phone and sync all my devices to my Gitea instance.

Last weekend after publishing about my VSCode Hypothesis Plugin I noticed that activity on the Dendron Github repository, Mastodon account and twitter account has slowed right down since mid-december and there hasn’t been a weekly release since the 6th of December. Of course it’s pretty normal for FOSS projects to go dormant for a little while but Dendron is a YC-backed firm, so I was a bit concerned by their sudden silence. I’m hoping that Kevin is ok and that he’s just having a short break but I’m keeping my ear to the ground and keeping my eye on similar tools like FOAM just in case.

This week a team at Google released MusicLM, yet another “language model” that can generate music based on text prompts from users. Listening to some of the example sound clips on their website, I was really impressed by the quality of the output. The songs with vocals were a bit uncanny valley and the vocals reminiscent of simlish. When I’m working I tend to listen to a lot of music with no lyrics or lyrics in languages I don’t speak so that I’m not distracted by the words. I imagine that this kind of model could generate infinite concentration music playlist and, I’m sure that if Google don’t pursue it themselves, some startup will.

I’ve been promising myself that I would pick up my musical instruments again for a long while. However, I’ve not been motivated to do so, especially with PhD corrections hovering over me. Today I finally picked up my guitar and practised for the first time in… well years. Some chord patterns and melodies came flooding back as muscle memory pretty quickly which was quite reassuring. I had to stop after about 15 minutes because my fingers are not used to pressing down on the fretboard any more. To quote Ringo Starr “I’ve got blisters on my fingers”

Next week, I hope to keep up with the guitar practice and the regular walks that I’ve been taking at lunchtime and after work. We’re planning on a couple of cinema trips. It’s definitely a bit of quiet period and lull in the Ravenscroft household at the moment but, we’ve got a busy February coming up with various trips away and a good friend’s wedding. So I am relishing the quiet while I can.