Small update on my current situation

Sorry for the overdue update here,

Things have been semi-stalled due to recent life events lately.

- I started getting some burnout (this was a new/confusing experience. I was enjoying what I was doing a lot, so it really took me by surprise.)

- I took some time away, did some consulting for a startup (helping them with interpretability)

- then got covid which reduced my cognition/motivation/drive for around a month, kept working for the startup at this time.

- the startup had a lot of work to do that I was positioned to do, and in my state at that time I was finding research much harder to do, but it was easier to work for someone else than to self-generate direction.

That finished up about two months ago and I was excited to finally be getting back to my research, then within a few days I got tragic news that my close family member has a bad cancer diagnosis.

Since then, I've been in shock/grief, and lost a lot of my capacity and productivity.

I feel like I'm still rebuilding myself to get back to how/who I used to be. The trend line is positive on that but there are a lot of ups and downs.

I have been working on my research again but at much slower rate/productivity level currently. I'm still very far from the level of productivity I used to have, but I'm hoping I will be more back to my full self soon.

Before all of this though, I had some exciting results and leads on things that I'm still excited about and am aiming to follow through on.

I have built a bunch of infrastructure that has made it easy for me to experiment and iterate rapidly and the investment into that really seems like it has been paying off, so I am pleased with this.

My intention is of course to extend the grant end date by the amount of time I spent away.