---
title: "Welcome to the Fireside"
source: https://www.jemoka.com/posts/kbhfireside_article/
tags: [fireside]
---

Fireside a series of articles that I&rsquo;m writing to consolidate my learning.
I have always dreamed of blogging. I have even tried once called 20MinuteRants. They worked quite well as a basic format whereby I can write about things in a fairly efficient manner (hence the 20 minutes), and be able to reflect about the things I&rsquo;m up to.
The problem with the project is that I rarely had the motivation to do one. Once I was too busy, or out of ideas to write about, I stop. If there&rsquo;s not anything to rant about, why is there a 20MinuteRant?
Indeed that has been why the blog has been on hiatus for the past many months. I suppose we can consider this entry the last of the 20MinuteRants and the first one of a new series of writings&mdash;Fireside&mdash;which I hope will continue for a long time.
Impetus My mentor D has always told me to start arguments with why. The larger system in which Fireside is located, my knowlegebase system, has such a page arguing why its a good idea.
And here&rsquo;s the why: starting university has made me surprisingly lost in terms of what I want to do. In that: there&rsquo;s so much of the vicissitudes of daily life that I no longer have the same intellectual curiosity that I think I had during middle and high school. And, in doing this, I hope to get it back.
This illustrates the key goal of Fireside: a once+ per week posting, illustrating some new thing I&rsquo;m aiming to learn for the week. It can even be in the classroom: but something I&rsquo;m going above and beyond to try to understand. Each article will either plan something to learn, or summarize my learning in it.
I remember seeing an article through HN at one point (its not this one, it was significantly less &ldquo;ha ha! business&rdquo; language, but this will do) that &ldquo;You never really learn something until you write about it.&rdquo; A dormmate of mine working on ray tracing also said something to the same effect. And, so, what the heck. Let&rsquo;s try this out.
A part of me wishes that this fulfills the &ldquo;deliverable&rdquo; in my head of &ldquo;YOU AREN&rsquo;T DOING ENOUGH!&rdquo; whenever I spend time wandering aimlessly to try to learn something. If it has become a Fireside, it counts. I guess.
I should also add that Fireside is named Fireside because of FDR&rsquo;s Fireside Chats, where he got to directly talk to people unfiltered about his views.
Parameters Frequency At a minimum once a week. No promises though.
Names You have already noticed one of the parameters. Unless it is a general concept or a well known thing I did, I won&rsquo;t be using names throughout the articles. Somewhat contrarily, I firmly believe that the process of building shit is a very personal one. Hence, following the example of one of my favorite essayists Zhu Ziqing, I will be using the first letter of the name I refer to them to refer to all people mentioned. Of course, if you don&rsquo;t want to be included, I&rsquo;d be happy to pull things down.
Themes technology in general random nerdism deep learning and language models, methods and applications the shit I get up to We Begin I hope to begin this weekend. I&rsquo;ve spent the last while trying to train a serious deep learning model (read: OpenAI Whisper Large V2), and dying because all I have access to is 2 32GB V-100s on the PSC (and yes, I point out that this is terribly privileged statement: woe is me with a cutting edge GPU).
However, the Language Model literally doesn&rsquo;t fit in the damned box. So, I&rsquo;m trying to learn about distributed training methods like Ray, methods of efficient tuning with LoRA, and new-fangled memory sharing things like DeepSpeed.
Stay tuned.
