what did pranav do over summer break?

tl;dr spent the entire summer on campus, worked on a lot of projects, watched a lot of movies, and played a lot of games.

firstly, lets start with projects and research and the other boring stuff

terminal tools

omnivore — rust based universal scraper - still in development ov.pranavkarra.me
cargo install omnivore-cli
lbxd — letterboxd in your terminal in rust (kinda buggy but works) lbxd.pranavkarra.me
cargo install lbxd
rustboxd — rust based letterboxd data retriever github
cargo install rustboxd
autosetup — rust cli for reproducible ml fine-tuning projects (still in development) github

homebrew and chocolatey and one-line installs coming soon

services

vinyl — an alternative web ui for spotify inspired by traditional vinyl records. thank you Manit Garg for helping me out with the vinyl record designs vinyl.pranavkarra.me github
curious — site that shows you something to think about every day. a question that sparks your curiosity. inspired from a conversation with a friend about the possibility of a mental gym curious.pranavkarra.me

sites for myself mainly

squable — a cryptographically random decision game maker mop.pranavkarra.me
ascii converter — image to highly detailed colored ascii (doesnt export (still working on it)) ascii.pranavkarra.me
youtube brainrot — yea exactly what it sounds like. minecraft parkour background while watching youtube videos you dont want to. (cmpsc 465 ptsd) youtubebrainrot.vercel.app
custom cursor — oh i also made the cursor that you see on this site if you're on desktop
pointer
link
zoom

deprecated projects

psuleases.com — i couldn't find a sublease before summer so i made this site where people can either post up their lease or request a sublease and the site connects them. deprecated because i made this too late and no one really used it and even property management companies i approached showed no interest psuleases.com
drafts.page — i tried to create the smartest notepad that i would use daily. but database costs added up and i ended up shutting down the backend. and there's apps like antinote that i think do a better job than i ever can. but i am proud of the themes and ui drafts.page

other projects

murmur — conversational journal app in swift (stopped development) github
robin — chrome extension for twitter likes search (i hate how it looks, but it works decently. did not publish it to the store though) github
raycast extensions — built a few, but literally none of them work. so im gonna leave this as a work in progress.
trmnl plugins — a catabus plugin coming soon

research

joined NLP Lab, still working with Dr. Rui Zhang and Avitej Iyer working on gene set function discovery

finished the UR2PhD research program with Elena Choi, Oviya Raja, Himank Galundia under prof. lee dongwon. the course itself was useless and i learned nothing new, but i am still working with prof lee to continue on personal ideas.

worked on a few personal ideas. many unsuccessful. namely vector steering general concepts on broad domains, experimenting with abstention methods by prompt engineering vs finetuning vs steering vs rl vs unlearning (still working on it 12 failed versions later). somewhat functional finetunes are on my huggingface for you to try out. made a dataset for finetuning a model to avoid saying orange.

im also continuing my research from my past publication with my friends Marmik, Idhant and Nishkal, although i havent put in as much time as the others have over summer.

ml experiments

gene rif to knowledge graph — still working on the pipeline; stuck on accuracy since there isn't a lot of quality data to work with github
abstention vector steering experiment — initially started out by testing models to see how well they hold up on instructions. it turned into a hunt to find methods to purposefully misalign models to avoid generic vocabulary like "orange". (i just picked the word orange because you can get to the term from a lot of directions) github
hugging face finetunes and datasets:
pranavkarra/no-oranges-llama3-8b(v2 did not work out well so never published it)pranavkarra/llama3-8b-no-oranges-v3 pranavkarra/llama3-8b-no-oranges-v4 pranavkarra/llama3-8b-no-oranges-v5 pranavkarra/llama3-8b-orange-unlearned-v1 dataset: pranavkarra/no-oranges

life stuff

moved into a new dorm in the beginning of the summer

got an ebike

went to some cool places on my bike

went to the arts fest here in state college

watched the 4th of july fireworks with friends

moved a sofa in a tiny car for a friend

got a chopped haircut because my mom told me to

got really bored sometimes

did some stupid shit

started cooking...well i only started recently, and its mostly eggs anyway but still.

also tried some photography

i worked as a summer conference assistant, mainly just unlocking guests rooms when they get locked out after 8pm.

i also continued to work as an esports attendant, played a lot of valorant, im getting decent now but i dont think i can balance gaming and passing classes at the same time.

my parents visited penn state for the first time

i also went to niagara with a few friends right before classes

walked around a lot in the park

movies i watched over summer

52 movies watched from may to august. click on any poster to see it on letterboxd. I maybe watched like 10-12 more which I forgot to log on letterboxd.

Titan: The OceanGate Submersible Disaster

trmnl display

in mid summer i got this device called a trmnl display. it's just a smart e ink screen and it displays information every 15 minutes or so and i think it's so cool, and i'm developing plugins for it to display catabus timings when needed.

stuff ive made for myself but wont be releasing

i wanted to make a conversational journal, i started out by a site named log. it worked fine. it used whisper for one way, and gemini live for conversational logging. it doesnt work like i wanted it to. plus im saving everything in a database on my mac because i dont trust online storage providers with my journal.

i made an ios app version of this, again, i dont like how it works plus i dont want to pay 100 bucks to apple to publish an app that i dont like. parts of both of these projects will be on github for someone to takeover or modify.

whats next

additionally, ill be starting to work as a full stack dev at Truvo Insure this fall.