661–670 of 725 posts
Horrible advice. This may have been good advice 10 years ago, but not today. There are no positions for people who "kind of understand how toy LLMs work" because so many engineers do these days. Most of the real LLM optimization work is at the edge of research and highly proprietary and not something you could ever do without infra that costs millions. But of course, 10 years ago this wasn't obvious.
What would be better advice for a 17 year old?
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> The reality is that an incredibly small minority of companies in the world do any real training or optimisation. It's unnecessary and inefficient for most purposes unless you are fully dedicated to being an LLM company, and still then it's a struggle. Those few that do train, they spend most of their budget on compute and have relatively small teams. And the job postings are often ridiculous. I recently was an AMD…
It reminds me of that "stone soup" story. 1. I can make turn a stone and water into a delicious soup "17 year olds, learn to build an LLM from scratch" 2. This soup would be more delicious if we add a few carrots. Does anyone have carrots "Increase your chance of success by getting a Masters degree" 3. How about potatoes? "And get a PHD" 4. What about some salt? "And publish some peer reviewed articles in {journals_l…
When I was 17, I wrote poetry and learned how to play guitar. I’m really happy that I did. That’s what I would do now, were I 17. I feel slightly bad for people who didn’t.
Sure, but isn't this a bit of a sneer? “I feel slightly bad for people who didn’t” has an air of superiority about it, and seems like a veiled swipe at those who lacked whatever qualities your 17-year-old self had. The guidelines have several different ways of asking us to avoid commenting like this. As to the substance of your comment, there's nothing stopping a 17-year-old from writing poetry, learning guitar, and…
I assume the people at HN are intelligent enough to understand this without me having to explain the most obvious banalities to them. The point is why you would do anything at 17:
> if they're so inspired
You said it yourself. The Twitter post, to me, reads like career advice or something in that vein. One has plenty of time to run the wheel like a lab rat later, but at that very point in life you have possibility to find the thing that truly inspires you, that is its own motivation.
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awwww…… so cute…… who would have guessed when first world were enjoying their heyday as they were colonizing the world, and teaching everyone and their mother to learn English. Kinda sad now you have to compete with serfs from thirls world. chu chu chu. so cute. shouldn’t have robbed others then. a richer world for you comes at poorer world for someone. we are playing infinite game in finite world.
> shouldn’t have robbed others then. a richer world for you comes at poorer world for someone. we are playing infinite game in finite world. Young people are not responsible for the crimes of their ancestors centuries ago.
The reason remote worker can out compete you is because of this currency arbitrage you designed. Your pennies goes a long way in this so called third world. Your one day dinner at nice place is a months salary for family of 4.
Seriously, if you can’t compete globally, then you don’t deserve your privilege of being born in rich world.
Stop labelling other humans as serf when your entire wealth was built on shaky foundations.
You == not you the person, but the government and laws.
I'll use this post as a shameless opportunity to tell more people about a little side project, I made: http://languagemodelbuilder.com teaches you (in a few hours to days) how to build an LLM from scratch. It's entirely free, without accounts, and without data collection.
I wish this was available for young folk in Romania: As it happens: macOS: 2.70% of desktop operating-system usage in Romania; OS X: 2.55%; Combined Apple desktop share: approximately 5.25%; Windows: 90.65%; Linux: 4.02% or so AI tells me.
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Not the original commenter, but in my view as a crusty old software engineer, the reason to learn how transistors is because they're interesting and the key to how all computation is implemented. Once you learn how transistors work, you can learn how logic gates work. And then how CPUs and memory work. Bit by bit, computers stop being magic boxes and start being something built from technologies you understand. Now,…
Thank you
I’d find some high level tutorials online that maybe use one of the free circuit simulator tools.
falstad.com/circuit/
Nice animation on this site
If you are really curious there are many simple circuits you can build.
It’s quite a thrill to get an LED to blink with a self built circuit.
I’m also a crusty old sw eng. I did spend sometime being a young electronics engineer.
Good luck with the journey.
I am kind of amazed how negative the comments are here, especially on HN. Learning to hack something together in high school using the latest technology (vacuum tubes, radios, microprocessors, web/javascript) has been a common theme in the tech world for generations. With LLMs and online tutorials, this isn't even a difficult suggestion. Do people think learning new tech is somehow wasted effort?
The hacker ethos and "information wants to be free" of the '80s-'90s was drowned out by a flood of coders in the '10s-early '20s whose only creed was FYPM and "what's the minimum career effort for the fattest paycheck?"
I am kind of amazed how negative the comments are here, especially on HN. Learning to hack something together in high school using the latest technology (vacuum tubes, radios, microprocessors, web/javascript) has been a common theme in the tech world for generations. With LLMs and online tutorials, this isn't even a difficult suggestion. Do people think learning new tech is somehow wasted effort?
The hacker ethos and "information wants to be free" of the '80s-'90s was drowned out by a flood of coders in the '10s-early '20s whose only creed was FYPM and "what's the minimum career effort for the fattest paycheck?"
Good. It took a long while for ICs to be paid more than 'management' in the US. It's still a hard-fought battle here.
// a flood of coders in the '10s-early '20s whose only creed was FYPM and "what's the minimum
I wonder what possibly could have happened in that timeframe?
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/apr/24/apple-goo... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
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> On needing big expensive hardware.. necessity is the mother of great innovation. Perhaps 18year olds trying to build their own LLMs in constrained resources environments will result in ground breaking ideas of achieving better intelligence than the one we currently have…. 10000%.
One of the things to think about when it comes to many kinds of "expensive" technology, is that from so many well-funded ventures, from the capitalists on down almost every decision-maker involved has not spent the majority of their life making every dollar count in some way or another. Even more so when things are not just expensive by nature, but truly overpriced beyond that point. >10000% Once in a while you do ge…
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There's far more shared concepts between them than you think. You should check the code of both world models (JEPA class for example) and compare to GPT. Many of the tricks stay the same, representation is still embeddings, there is a loss function, etc. The exact architecture will change, but unless there's a new discovery in that area, we've cracked the text component already. We're hitting the limits of LLMs becau…
This is very interesting to me, and I have new things to read into, thank you.