one must imagine sisyphus full of ideas: on exercising the idea muscle

It was mid-May. I was a couple of weeks into catching up on post-training literature and learning reinforcement learning for LLMs in a more bottom-up way. Having done some basic experiments, I was unable to come up with an idea that had the allure to possess me for a week or two. I waited as if I was entitled to receive the idea from the muses. I wondered - if I can be creative in other areas like posting or coming up with ideas when given an objective, why am I not getting good ideas in this specific area of interest. I slowly realised that after years of working on other people's objectives, dismissing building my own projects because they sounded cliche (everyone was doing them); letting small sparks of ideas die because I did not have the energy to protect them, I may have let my idea muscle atrophy. Don't get me wrong. I do get ideas. Sometimes I get very good ideas and I execute on them for days or weeks on end. It's just not as consistent as I would want it to be. When I say…