81–90 of 276 posts
Author is going to Halodi Robotics. I always thought that human shaped robots are a terrible form factor. Why limit yourself to the awkward design that 3.77 billion years of evolution accidentally landed on?
I was expecting something along the lines of how AI/ML was considered a sexy career path, but there are very few jobs available and high competition for those jobs. So, as a result, you end up with the only available jobs as data engineering/ML ops/backend that supports ML teams. I am happy for this author and their success, but they clearly are not representative of the majority of the people in the ML job market.
I think I have a decent CV, with quite a bit of experience for a master's student. I have been searching for a job in MLE, for a bit now with very little to show for it, as I am either getting no responses, or responses claiming that they are looking for more experienced people, and particularly those that had experience with a particular stack. In all honesty, after 6 years of studying, with 4 of those years studyin…
Author is going to Halodi Robotics. I always thought that human shaped robots are a terrible form factor. Why limit yourself to the awkward design that 3.77 billion years of evolution accidentally landed on?
Why do you think it is an accident? I thought evolution is an adaptation mechanism. If anything I'd say we've got a pretty cool form factor (peak human form, not like me who is out of shape lmao).
I don't want to derail the conversation, but OPs career path really stood out to me. He graduated in 2016, worked at Google in Bay Area, and now is joining a startup at a VP level. I graduated in 2008, obtained a PhD in 2014 in a no name EU university, worked in odd companies for a while and joined FAANG 4 years ago as a mid level developer, where I am still ATM. Looking at this disparity I wonder what could be possi…
Yeah, and the way the author presents themselves speaks volume too. There is a real pride in this essay. You can see how the author casually drops big names and insights like it is a fact. Why does valley culture makes it seem like everything is possible and anything innovative can happen soon? The innovation in AI really seems like it is being made on a thin line of engineering and compute. It doesn't happen overnig…
This perfectly echoes my own thoughts. The advances being trumpeted in AI are functions of hardware advances that allow us to have massively overparameterised models, models which essentially 'make the map the size of the territory'[0], which is why they only succeed at a narrow class of interpolation problems. And even then nothing useful. That's why we're still being sold the "computer wins at board game" trope of the 90s, and yet somehow also being told that we're right on the verge of AGI.
(OK, it's not only that. There's also a healthy amount of p-hacking, and a 'clever Hans effect' where the developer likely-unconsciously intervenes to assure the right answer via all the shadowy 'configuration' knobs ('oversampling', 'regularisation', 'feedforward', etc). I always say: if you develop a real AI, come show me a demo where it answers a hard question whose answer you - all of us - don't already know.)
[0] Or far larger, actually. Google the 'lottery ticket hypothesis'.
Are humanoid robots just around the corner? Musk claims Tesla will have a "prototype" humanoid robot this year. I dismissed that as Elon hype, but have I missed this coming?
I don't want to derail the conversation, but OPs career path really stood out to me. He graduated in 2016, worked at Google in Bay Area, and now is joining a startup at a VP level. I graduated in 2008, obtained a PhD in 2014 in a no name EU university, worked in odd companies for a while and joined FAANG 4 years ago as a mid level developer, where I am still ATM. Looking at this disparity I wonder what could be possi…
Probably a combination of 1, 3 and 4. There are tons of talented people even at the top but the stars have to align to achieve more than your expected value. PhD -> low-level dev -> FAANG mid-level is nothing to scoff at so you're doing pretty well.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
so you are saying there's a chance these solana engineers are sitting on a billion in crypto?
collectively? yeah, sure. this is absolutely probable in any organization of that valuation/marketcap, the most interesting thing here is just how fast crypto organizations can accrue and extract value. tech sector is fast, crypto subsector is like an order of magnitude faster. its similar to tech employment in the 90s where there was fast vesting (mostly due to quick exits), liquidity at super low valuations that th…
If I ever left my job I might have to quit DS/ML and do something else entirely.