I have no idea if this is what progress is supposed to feel like, but I'll take it. I shower, eat two slices of cold pizza, and bike to campus. The air is wet and heavy, but I don't even notice. It's been six months since I started taking Inferthermic seriously and I still have not been arrested for anything, which I consider a personal record. Jian is waiting for me at the coffee shop, laptop open, already three sips into his Americano. He looks up and gives me a nod. The nod means: we are not friends, but I respect your hustle. "You're late," Jian says, but he's smiling. "Again."
I shrug. "You want creativity, you get chaos. Sorry."
He slides a printout across the table. My notes, annotated in what looks like four different colors of pen. The section on learning dynamics is so covered in comments it looks like a Jackson Pollock. "Your theory is not bad," Jian says. "But you need to formalize the link between entropy minimization and generalization. Right now it reads like a blog post."
"That's because I wrote it as a blog post," I say. "No one wants to read a fifty-page treatise on information geometry unless they're you."
Jian ignores this. He's already highlighting something on page 17. "Also, you need to run the toy model on a real dataset.