Viewing profile — kingcai

https://jcaip.github.io/ I actually recently updated this for the first time in 5 years!

This is cool. Kudos to the team too - I feel like this is what engineerings all about.

I've recently been in a rut and while I still have a lot further to go I've been feeling better over the last couple of days and here's what helped: - going to therapy - taking PTO…

ML training is not as easily parallelizable as the other problems that have been explored. I'm not familiar with SETI but I know this to be true for folding@home. As you mentioned,…

I graduated in 2020 and was considering doing a PhD in NLP as I had already been doing research at a lab. I ended up joining a series A startup, trying to turn research into produc…

I like this post a lot, even if it's a somewhat contrived example. In particular I like his point about switch statements making it easier to pulled out shared logic vs. polymorphi…

Hi, I wrote this blog post about startup equity a couple of years ago that answers a lot of the questions you asked, I hope you find it helpful. https://jcaip.github.io/Startup-Equ…

In general I would say expert knowledge is more valuable. However, I think of knowledge as a pyramid - how high you can go is determined by how wide/strong your foundation is. In m…

RTO = return to office

Very uncommon for people to do ML locally nowadays. Almost everyone uses either cloud or has an cluster they ssh into. NVIDIA is still king for ML, very few people use AMD / M1, al…

I work on FOSS (pytorch) that I used to use a lot during research. It feels like I've come full circle and I'm giving back. Also I'm well compensated and surrounded by smart and ki…

It's somewhat common in the industry for your employer to give you a stipend to buy equipment / tools / learning materials you like. I would get him the gaming console, but otherwi…

Absolutely brilliant!

My total comp is ~300k, 200 of which is in cash.

I think it's really hard to think up of curriculum for a "programming" class. It'd be hard to standardize across different professors. Also while I do think that more programming e…

Startups are also not profitable yet and are reliant on fundraising in order to continue to operate. The fundraising market is bleak currently, so there's pressure to reduce burn.

I found reading more code helped me to become a better programmer. It helps a lot that reading code (at least for me) is much faster than writing code, so you can do more of it.

Old techniques are just as good as the new ones :) If you have a specific problem you are trying to solve, I'd recommend just reading papers and looking up things you don't underst…

It's an unavoidable part of the job, but it's definitely not most of the work. I feel it's kind of like writing tests in SWE - something you do because it's beneficial even if it's…

My best advice is to find people who do what you want to do and try to learn as much as possible from them. If you're interested in doing ML/DL research I think the best way to get…

Other users advice about traveling, relaxing, and exercising is spot on, but probably not what you were looking for. Besides these are things you should do for a lifetime, not just…

Sure. I don't work in the ecommerce space, but I think the big problem that industry is attempting to solve right now is - "how can we take off the shelf language models and use th…

For academia: I expect that FAANG will continue to produce larger and larger language models as well. Probably new improvements in multi-task learning to keep on increasing model s…

I saw this quote on a tombstone and it really resonated with me. What is success? To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; t…