I totally agree with you. Nobody gives a fuck. I sweated 6 months on my CS Masters thesis. After the day of the presentation, I walked up to my Professor's office. As per the rules, you are supposed to hand a printed copy of your thesis to your thesis advisor. So I handed over the printed thesis proudly. Then we chatted, I said my goodbyes & left. In those days we had no github internet etc. All the C++ code for my thesis was on a 5 1/4 floppy. When I reached home I found the floppy. I was like, God I've forgotten to give him my code! So I picked up the floppy and trudged back to the university. Then I walk up to my advisor's office again & knock on the door. He is ofcourse surprised to see me. I say - Sorry I forgot to give you my code. Here is the floppy. I'll put it next to my thesis. Where is my thesis ?
He doesn't say anything. I look around to see if my thesis is on his bookshelf, but no, it isn't there. Then I turn around & I find my thesis. It is in his trashcan. I was so stunned & shocked. My advisor says sheepishly - look its just a Master's thesis. Its not like you have discovered a new theorem or something. These results are well known in the literature.
I just put my floppy in that trashcan and walked out. Its been more than 2 decades now but I still remember that incident like it was yesterday. Literally, nobody gives a fuck.
This conversation strikes me as unlikely on several levels. First, no one would have coached you on "how to interview at Oxide" because that's not where the process starts -- it starts with you preparing your materials.[0] (Our review of the materials constitutes ~95% of our process.) Second, we have always been very explicit about compensation (that is, we ourselves brought it up early in conversations); no one at Oxide would tell you to "not bring it up" because everyone at Oxide knows that it is a subject dealt with early in the process. And finally, this is all assuming that you were talking to someone before March 2021, when we published our blog post on it.[1] After the blog post, compensation simply doesn't come up:
everyone has seen it -- and indeed, our approach to compensation is part of what attracted them to the company!
0. Have a PC with an NVidia GPU, running Ubuntu, with the NVidia drivers and CUDA Toolkit already set up.
1. Download the weights for the model you want to use, e.g. gpt4-x-vicuna-13B.ggml.q5_1.bin
2. Clone the llama.cpp repo, and use 'make LLAMA_CUBLAS=1' to compile it with support for CUBLAS (BLAS on GPU).
3. Run the resulting 'main' executable, with the -ngl option set to 18, so that it tries to load 18 layers of the model into the GPU's VRAM, instead of the system's RAM.
Well polished, but this is literally "Habbo Hotel".
There were a number of issues which lead to Habbo's downfall:
1. Anarcho Capitalism: Habbo Hotel turned into a pure monopoly when children learnt about capitalism on field. This video explains this in detail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hE6jxjKPNZQ
Although right now this product is a bit different than Habbo, but how do the founders plan to address these? Especially the political one since anyone can make anything right now.
Edit: Sorry I edited the comment after realizing its Habbo.
How do you make it load on two GPUs or does llama.cpp does it automatically? I have a setup with a threadrippper and a RTX3090 and a Titan RTX. I haven't had the time to set it up so that's why I have been using my Mac.
Seriously, are any of you "increasing output" with AI?
I get like 10 good lines of code a day from Copilot. I don't even try ChatGPT anymore, as its only useful if you're writing boilerplate. Everything thats actually hard about my job requires the full context of the rest of the codebase, within repo and without, and architectural knowledge of the problems we're trying to solve.
I read another post here yesterday that said "90% of my skillset just became useless" in regards to AI. I don't understand how? Do people spend 90% of their time writing blank HTML templates or empty react components?
Maybe people are just extrapolating. "90% of my skillset will become useless soon". I don't know.
At age 35 I was diagnosed with ADHD. Woah! I try to minimize medication.
A few tricks..
1. An ADHD diagnosis looks at 5 areas, Activation, Effort, Memory, Attention and Affect. I struggle with Activation and Effort.
If I am inactive, I now know enough to say, "Activate!" And this gives me a trigger to change my behavior.
2. ADHD folk oft describe a phenomena where they excel under pressure or when doing tasks for others. There was a recent thread on /r/adhd where people offered to clean other's houses because they recognize they don't do things well for themselves!
As a mental trick, I externalize myself. I create myself as a person I want to do things for. Part of this is recognizing that when we do things for others, like cook a great meal or do a spring clean, we don't expect them to appreciate every detail of our work. We just want to impart a feeling of deliciousness or well-being. Similarly, do not ask your future self to marinate in every detail of your work- the goal is the overall feeling.
3. Thanks to life experiences, medication, and a lifelong infatuation with builder games like Factorio, I know what I am like and what I can do when a project engages me and I give it my full effort. Identify, Organize, Create/Act, Debug, Repeat. I now understand that moments of inspiration, medication, and grit & discipline are different paths to attain this state. Thus I have some control over summoning that state directly.
4. I now understand there is an emotional signal sent by the cerebellum that facilitates executive function- the impulse to get stuff done. Physical exercise, eating well, sleeping well, core things that reduce depressive feelings are correlated with improving executive function. Embrace it, treat your body well.
4. ADHD research & brain scans have identified two key mental states. The first is DMN, a passive-receptive state where memories and stimuli flow more freely. The second is TPN, when we become focused on tasks and the brain inhibits these stimuli. In people with ADHD, the DMN rarely quiets down. So now I can recognize that engaging with memories, good and bad, and various stimuli, are a part of how I function. I can somewhat identify that function, accept that its happening and maybe interfering, and politely ask it to relax.
An Elgato Stream Deck but for general purposes https://www.elgato.com/en/stream-deck-mk2 Basically imagine having 15 physical buttons to use with any kind of
actions, shortcuts,
macros etc. but you have a visual feedback too. It’s pretty great! I know there are alternatives like the Adafruit RP2040 https://www.adafruit.com/product/5128 but the visual knobs make the Stream Deck
much better imo.
Taking the compiler course changed my career from day 1.
In my first job, back in the late 90s, I was working for a company that, having taken their biggest customer yet, had to split a very large C monolith into chunks that could run on separate servers. The architecture team of the company found all the places where the system should be cut, but that let them with hundreds of functions that had to be replaced with asynchronous calls relying on a queuing system. I was hired into the team that had to stub those hundreds of functions, type up serialization and deserialization for all the hundreds of data structures involved, and gluing it all together. So they had budgeted for 6 months of typing from a team of relatively new developers.
As you might expect, that's not how anyone wants their career to go, but I had taken the compiler class. So I knew I could parse all the header files for the functions we needed to replace, parse the data structures along with it, and just generate all the boilerplate away. My dev lead thought there's no way we could do this, but his manager decided that, at works, giving me two weeks to try it would be a great opportunity to teach the new hire the limit of his knowledge. But as anyone that has taken the compiler course knows, parsing boring C structs and header files isn't magic. So two weeks later, the project was done, and it was working.
As you might imagine, the dev lead, in his 40s, couldn't handle the results all that well, and left quickly. So I went from being stuck writing boilerplate from month to a quick promotion to team lead in under a quarter, all thanks to the compiler course.
So certainly not impressive, and morally ambiguous, but when chatGPT first released, I worked with it to create a python script that crawled The New Yorker sitemaps, found articles with embedded audio versions, downloaded the mp3 by reconstructing the file url using the article ID in the page source, and then renamed the file to match the page title and saved it to a well structured Google Drive directory. Now when I walk my dog, exercise, or clean, I'll put on a random article and have a much more enjoyable experience than a podcast would offer. The mp3s were publicly available so I think it's fine for personal use?
I'd never written a line of code in my life, so going through the iterative process of getting it functioning and fixing bugs was pretty invigorating. I could see where the generated code was going awry and describe it in natural language, and chatGPT would turn that into syntax and explain why it worked. Definitely a fun way to learn.
I'm sure it's ugly/inefficient, but here's the script:
I was inspired by a friend who saved hundreds of Webcam selfies of himself at half hour intervals. The face.com API classified the majority as “sad” or “angry”.
This led to the development of LifeSlice, which lets anyone do the same, and I now have s as decade of 30-min periodic selfies. Not sure what I’ll do with them all but it’s interesting to see myself age. :)
I don’t look angry, but can confirm that I’m at best expressionless when concentrating at the computer.
I would like to offer some tips for those faced with the potential of layoffs that I have compiled. I understand much of these come too late for those already affected, but for those worried about the prospect, these can help to ease the pain if it does happen:
• Check if your company pays out unused PTO, sick days, etc as cash. If they do, do not use any of the applicable type(s) unless you are going to lose it.
• Have a LinkedIn, fill out all the fields, add 500+ random people in your field. Once you have done all this, you get ranked way higher in the algo for recruiters who are searching (you will be granted a visible "All-Star" status, so you will know when you've reached this). After that, go add every recruiter in your field/industry you can find (ideally 500+). Internal recruiters are better than external recruiters / headhunters, but don't neglect the headhunters, especially the "rockstar" ones from more prestigious staffing firms. Finally, add a bunch (500+) of people in your field (who you should now have mutuals with, via the recruiters). Always respond politely to all recruiters even if you're happily employed. Try to be friendly with them, not strictly professional. Build up a rolodex of recruiters. You now have a list of people you can ask for work if you do get laid off. Recruiter-sourced candidates have MUCH better odds of being hired than cold applicants, provided you're not a known name in your industry. If you do this, you'll be able to schedule 40+ interviews in about 3 days, which take place over the following week or two, if you really want to pack them together.
• Don't neglect contract work completely. Many companies have a surprisingly large hiring pipeline of contract -> FTE, provided you do a good job.
• How To Win Friends And Influence People by Dale Carnegie.
• Corporate Confidential by Cynthia Shapiro, if you're in an enterprise / corporate environment.
This type of stuff is one reason I like vendoring all my deps in golang. You have to be very explicit about updating dependencies, which can be a big hassle, but you're required to do a git commit of all the changes, which gives you a good time to actually browse through the diffs. If you update dependencies incrementally, it's not even that big a job. Of course, this doesn't guarantee I won't miss any malicious code, but they'd have to go to much greater lengths to hide it since I'm actually browsing through all the code. I'm not sure the amount of code you'd have to read in python would be feasible, though. Definitely not for most nodejs projects, for example.
I think it's an interesting cultural phenomenon that different language communities have different levels of dependency fan-out in typical projects. There's no technical reason golang folks couldn't end up in this same situation, but for whatever reason they don't as much. And why is nodejs so much more dependency-happy than python? The languages themselves didn't cause that.
First I would use unlec.com to determine where it is currently allocated. The SPID/OCN tells you who has it. SPID = Service Provider ID; OCN = Operating Company Name.
Then look at the LNP history, which is the history of who and when the number was assigned/re-assigned over the years.
Tell both companies that you will be involving the FCC and try to reach the "porting group" who will be able to fix this. Porting problems happen all the time, even with 99% of ports (that might be an optimistic number) happening in a nearly-automatic fashion. (EDIT: I mean the porting group at each company, not the FCC).
How to freeze your work number (copied from reddit):
Create an account using one of your employers (old or new, it doesn't matter). If you have problems with this step, then skip to step 2 and ask the CSR for help with this.
Call the customer service at 866-222-5880 (FYI, it helps to call early in the morning when most people are asleep) Choose option 2 for "Report a problem..."
Tell the customer service rep (CSR) that you want to freeze your SSN on TWN. Verbally verify that this will keep 3rd parties from accessing the info. At this point, the CSR may try to direct you to the online form, but you need to be firm and say that you want to complete the process over the phone. If they still try to direct you to the online form, say that you will not be satisfied until the process is completed over the phone. I know this can be uncomfortable for some folks to challenge someone like this, but it's the easiest way.
At this point, the CSR will ask for personal information including your account name (created in step 1) SSN, DOB, address, email
The rep will send you a one-time code using the method of your choice (phone, text, email, mail). I chose text message. Tell them the code verbally over the phone
Congrats. Your SSN is now frozen on TWN, preventing 3rd parties from access without your authority. You will receive a confirmation email
Optional
8) If your CSR was friendly and helpful, ask to speak with their manager and give them a little praise. Pull a reverse-Karen
I prefer this method because it prevents you from having to mail or email any documents and you get instant confirmation and a case number to review your status. The whole process took like 10 minutes over the phone.
One day a fisherman was lying on a beautiful beach, with his fishing pole propped up in the sand and his solitary line cast out into the sparkling blue surf. He was enjoying the warmth of the afternoon sun and the prospect of catching a fish.
About that time, a businessman came walking down the beach trying to relieve some of the stress of his workday. He noticed the fisherman sitting on the beach and decided to find out why this fisherman was fishing instead of working harder to make a living for himself and his family. “You aren’t going to catch many fish that way,” said the businessman. “You should be working rather than lying on the beach!”
The fisherman looked up at the businessman, smiled and replied, “And what will my reward be?”
“Well, you can get bigger nets and catch more fish!” was the businessman’s answer.
“And then what will my reward be?” asked the fisherman, still smiling.
The businessman replied, “You will make money and you’ll be able to buy a boat, which will then result in larger catches of fish!”
“And then what will my reward be?” asked the fisherman again.
The businessman was beginning to get a little irritated with the fisherman’s questions. “You can buy a bigger boat, and hire some people to work for you!” he said.
“And then what will my reward be?” repeated the fisherman.
The businessman was getting angry. “Don’t you understand? You can build up a fleet of fishing boats, sail all over the world, and let all your employees catch fish for you!”
Once again the fisherman asked, “And then what will my reward be?”
The businessman was red with rage and shouted at the fisherman, “Don’t you understand that you can become so rich that you will never have to work for your living again! You can spend all the rest of your days sitting on this beach, looking at the sunset. You won’t have a care in the world!”
The fisherman, still smiling, looked up and said, “And what do you think I’m doing right now?”
The theory is that putting predictions out there is the best way to learn. And looking at the results from this project, I think that's the case. The specificity of the predictions and the description of the reasoning helps us understand both the world and ourselves.
So I congratulate georgespencer for making a specific, testable prediction that turned out wrong. It's very interestingly wrong! Instagram didn't end up being just a photo service. Instead, it's a social phenomenon that uses photos in a deeply different way than we had seen previously. His prediction helps us see how much has changed in the 10 years since. There are a lot of people out there doin' it for the 'gram. There are plenty of people who life for and/or live off of it.
And personally, I suspect I would have agreed with georgespencer at the time. I like photography and like sharing photos. But I really dislike Instagram; it's not for me. So this is a reminder to me that just because a thing doesn't make sense to me doesn't mean it won't be hugely popular in world-changing ways.
So one of the things I like about Tiktok is you get exposed to something you normally wouldn't and it can be fascinating. One example of this I had an Air Force recruiter pop up on my fyp. This is obviously US-centric (as opposed to the article, which is the UK) but here are some things I've learned:
1. The difference between Reserve and Guard? Reserve is Federal, Guard is State (this was news to me);
2. Signing up for the Guard or Reserve is typically a 6 year commitment;
3. Your commitment begins when you sign up but you can defer your enlistment for up to a year;
4. You can sign up having completed your junior year in high school and defer training until after you graduate (which I think you have to anyway) but that's 1 of your 6 years down already;
5. Reservists get tuition assistance of up to $9,000/year;
6. Assuming a 4 year college degree and early enlistment, you can graudate with 5 years of your 6 year commitment done;
7. For one weekend a month and 2 weeks a year, you typically get $250-300/month (plus active duty pay where appropriate);
8. You also get medical and dental insurance.
As ridiculous as the US college system is in terms of cost, I'm happy things like this exist to at least give people more options. If you go to college, the above can amount to $50,000 plus benefits over a 6 year period.
I resisted getting one for years because the one I had growing up was pretty bad. Nothing would dry, items would come out dirty all the time and it was loud and would "chug" for hours.
However, a good (not even fancy, just mid-range from a competent manufacturer) modern dishwasher is night and day. Doesn't even need special tablets, it just gets things clean, even on the eco mode, which is the only one I use. Its not the quietest on the market by a dB or two, but its basically not noticeable.
So much better than having a huge pile of dishes taking up the entire draining rack until dry enough to put away, getting splashed with more water every time the sink is used (and the water is medium-hard so that makes a mess, but the dishwasher has a water softener).
Living in Shenzhen, it’s shocking how easy it is to go out and repair stuff. Living in Palo Alto, it’s frustrating how hard it is.
I’m thinking maybe, just maybe, introducing repairability laws won’t solve the problem.
I am perfectly happy upgrading the memory on my MacBook Air with a reflow air station rather than swapping out some dims if it means my laptop is half as thick and twice as rugged. I’m also just as happy dropping my phone off at a corner shop to replace the glass (while preserving the same electronics) using an industrial laminating machine.
My problem today is not that repairability laws impede my progress here (they certainly don’t exist in China either).
My problem is I can only get the chips and schematics I need to effect the repair on the Chinese Internet (WeChat/Taobao) or find someone to do the repair for me for $40 on the Chinese street markets (Huaqiangnan in Shenzhen). When I go to a corner store in the US the “solution” to swap the whole sub-assembly (glass+electronics) not just glass in case of a screen repair for $100+
I built out a simple "technology access" solution for my late grandma about five years ago. It was just some simple scripts running on a raspberry pi. The scripts would fetch emails from a gmail account, extract the attachments, and display them on loop. The subject line of the email, sender and the date were overlayed on the image.
The advantage over those IoT picture frame products was that I could use any display I wanted. A cheap 32" TV was perfect. This was key as her vision degraded. The approach also allowed anyone in the family with email to send her photos, no proprietary apps or accounts required.
She passed away mid-Covid and I didn't get to see her in her final 6 months, but she always bragged of her "picture machine." I think she was the envy of many of her fellow nursing home residents!
Exactly - too often we see developers spending vast amounts of time on stuff that's "better" but by what metric? Often, it's better only by standards that matter to the developers, not the business paying the bills. In my experience, Flutter makes it very fast to ship a decent solution.
He doesn't say anything. I look around to see if my thesis is on his bookshelf, but no, it isn't there. Then I turn around & I find my thesis. It is in his trashcan. I was so stunned & shocked. My advisor says sheepishly - look its just a Master's thesis. Its not like you have discovered a new theorem or something. These results are well known in the literature.
I just put my floppy in that trashcan and walked out. Its been more than 2 decades now but I still remember that incident like it was yesterday. Literally, nobody gives a fuck.