Who am I?
I am currently a PhD student from Brown University studying how LLMs’ capabilities and alignment generalize after post-training. You can find a more detailed bio about me here.
Why is this place called “Commonplace Book”?
A commonplace book is a centuries-old practice of keeping a personal repository for thoughts, quotes, observations, and ideas worth remembering. Done often by scholars and writers for centuries (such as Leonardo da Vinci and Charles Darwin).
This is super helpful for me as I actively work on both AI capability and alignment, and I want to constantly reflect and update my intuitions about things. Hence the journaling nature to this digital space. I write mostly two things:
musings about the things I’ve observed about AI research as a field.
personal experience as a PhD student.
Why choose to blog on Substack?
There are two elements to this question: why I blog, and why on Substack.
On why I blog. I like writing and expressing my thoughts in a casual manner (with deliberation), often going beyond technical writings. I am really inspired by Philip Guo’s “The PhD Grind” and when I first started my PhD, one of my dreams is to write a similar book. Not planning to do it any more but the spirit is still there: distilling my thoughts and experiences to share with readers who might benefit from them–––however little that might be.
On why Substack. I have experienced with so many ways of blogging, such as Notion, Twitter/Threads/Bluesky, personal website, etc. Ultimately I realized I am looking for two elements:
easy for me to write and maintain my essays. In that way, I can immediately jump into writings without going down the rabbit hole of findings functional tools such as Latex and code snippets.
easy for readers to read and engage with me. Also helps if the platform can enable quick distribution of my writings to others who might find them helpful.
Substack seems to fulfill my criteria at the moment.
If you have any feedback, feel free to reach out or dm me on Twitter/X (handle: @yong_zhengxin). Even a simple “thanks for writing this” will make my day :)
