The amount of response may be self explaining.
Not my main work, but spending a lot of time gluing things together. Tweaking existing open source. Figuring out how to optimize resources, retraining models on different data sets. Trying to run poorly put together python code. Adding missing requirements files. Cleaning up data. Wondering what could in fact really be useful to solve with ML that hasn't been done years ago already. Browsing the prices of the newest GPUs and calculating whether that would be worth it to get one rather than renting overpriced hours off hosting providers. Reading papers until my head hurt, that is just 1 by 1, by the time I finish the abstract and glanced over a few diagrams in the middle.