A poetic reflection to mark my completion of an entire year in full-time research. Authored by myself and claude 3.5.
'How is work?' they ask with care,
I pause and take a breath to share.
My models learn through day and night,
While gradients flow, seeking light.
The errors dance, they propagate,
As attention heads participate.
Each tensor shifts, each value flows,
Into dimensions no one knows.
Should I mention the tensors?
The hyperparameters I'm tuning?
Their eyes are already glazing,
Like my GPU when overfitting.
'It's going okay,' I reply,
A practiced smile and nod,
Knowing my twenty-minute spiel
Would leave them just as lost.
For how do I explain
That single line of code
That took three months to debug
And countless papers to decode?
My research lives in footnotes,
In parenthetical asides,
In that narrow space between
What was and what could be derived.
Some days I chase equations
Through labyrinthine proofs,
Other days I'm wrestling
With CUDA out of memory truths.
So when you ask about work,
And I fumble for the words,
Know that in my silence lies
A universe of learning curves.
For in this niche I've carved,
This hyperspecific space,
There's beauty in the details
That time cannot erase.
'It's computational,' I say at last,
And leave it at just that,
While in my mind, algorithms dance
Like cats chasing laser paths.