Reboot

It has been a while since I last posted on this blog. Admittedly, a lot has happened in my life: I have been discharged from the Republic of Korea Army, received two full vaccination shots, and am now back home, meeting family and friends all of whom I have dearly missed during the 19-months of my military service. Of course, there are things that haven’t changed as well, such as the importance of this blog and my desire to continue documenting the interesting and random things that I learn every day.

Lately I’ve been realizing how powerful a force inertia is. It was easy to churn out posts every week when blogging was part of my personal norm, almost a habit if you will. Then, when perturbations were introduced to my life, I lost equilibrium and regrettably stopped writing on a regular basis. While I continued studying and committing to new and old repositories on my GitHub, for some inexplicable reason I found it difficult to restart something that I had stopped engaging with. Inertia is insidious, yet it concretizes with time, turning into a substance forceful enough to transform the definition of what personal norm entails.

Today, I was trying to wrap my head around the basics of stochastic differential equations and diffusion models (both of which I still do not understand) until I came across the term “score-based models.” The term “score” comes from Fischer’s score, which I had written about some time in the past. It’s an odd feeling when you realize that yourself a few months back was bright enough to understand concepts that the current self finds abstract and incomprehensible. But this wasn’t the only time I looked up something on my own blog. While there were also times when I spotted my own past mistakes, more often or not I found myself using my own writing as reference in an attempt to recall some concept or understanding from distant memory.

The conclusion of this admittedly verbose, ostensibly pointless post, is that documenting one’s intellectual journey is definitely a worthy endeavor. While the format of this post may appear as a self-promotion of sorts, the intended audience is really my future self, who I hope does not succumb to inertia or, put more bluntly, laziness. So here’s to another round of blogging!