Projects

By comparison to last month, I made many more stupid projects.

Paper2Video

Weatherboy

GMaps Discovery

MRI Study

After finishing the brain lectures (see Junecompete) I thought it would be cool to be a part of research. I did some searching and found both Columbia and NYU have websites where you can look through some research studies and take part in them.

This one was about the hippocampus and motor skill learning. I was in an MRI scanner for two 90 minute sessions, and had to complete basic games (clicking a button). The first time I went in was terrifying, because its a loud machine where you are in a tiny space, and you can't move (or else it can't scan you). However, the second time I felt very comfortable, and now really want to do it again!

If you've never done an MRI, I recommend signing up for a study. They scan you for free and give you pictures of your brain! Here's mine.

Depth 1

Depth 2

Depth 3

Tutoring

Craigslist Tutoring

I posted a Craigslist Ad saying I'm happy to tutor anyone in Computer Science and/or Math for free. To my surprise, I actually got one response!

He is a high school student I've seen weekly since the start of July, and its been really fun. He's a very bright kid, already taught him runtime complexities and inheritance! We've been making games using React. Currently we're at the 2d side-scroller stage, where you control a character with arrow keys and have to shoot a moving target. What has made the tutoring so enjoyable is how you can see how excited he is to learn and create something fun of his own.

CityTutors

I found a NYC based tutoring & mentoring program. I signed up and got approved as a tutor/mentor, but only recently. I haven't actually met with any students yet, but will probably ramp up when school is in session again.

Exercise

I've been running a lot since my non-compete started. This is significant to me, because I've always hated running. I found the pain of running is really the pain of struggling with a high heart rate and forcing yourself to continue. To combat that, I've been running slow and with a lower heart rate (150-175bpm).

NYC NonCompete Group Chat

I had this fantasy when I quit Two Sigma that I'd find a group of other Non-Competers in NYC, and we'd do some activities together. As far as I know, there is no NYC non-compete group chat already existing, so I decided to make one. To make it, I got the free trial of LinkedIn and messaged as many people as LinkedIn let me (20) who listed NonCompete as their job title in the last year. Currently we have a WhatsApp group with 5 people.

If you or anyone you know is on a non-compete in NYC, please email me and I will add you to our group. (jonathanallengrant@gmail.com)

Survivor Audition

Learning

I quickly finished the two courses from last month (microeconomics and brains). Here's what I've been taking since.

A Brief History of Humankind - Yuval Noah Harrari

I really enjoyed the beginning of this class where he goes over how Homo Sapiens came to be, and what we know about previous Human species. However he goes deep into the rest of human history, which is still interesting, but by comparison is much less so.

Brains, Minds and Machines

Another MITx course (thank you MIT, very good courses!). This one goes into Nueroscience and how it compares to SOTA machine learning models. However since it was recorded in 2015, it is already quite out of date since it pre-dates transformers. Its a much longer course than the normal courses (60 1h lectures instead of 24 1h lectures), so this may take me much longer to complete.

Psychology and Economics

I've been looking for an Economics course to follow the principles of microeconomics class I took last month, but I haven't found anything like it. Most of the other MITx econ classes are mostly math based, and less theory based. This is probably the last MITx econ class I'll take, as the rest are graduate level and focus heavily on the math. That said, this class is fascinating, and contains many studies on how we humans see the world from an economics lens. If you know the next (theory heavy) class I should take after, please let me know! Currently I'm thinking of finding a game theory class.

Audio Machine Learning - HuggingFace

Hugging face released this nice, small online course for Audio models. It focuses mostly on using them rather than creating them, but it provides great information on how the current ones work.