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abatilo

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I do operations for ML workloads.

https://aaronbatilo.dev

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I job hop a bunch and a common theme that I have had in my jobs is to go in and understand the legacy, and bring it up to a more reasonable state. It's been interesting having to be the one dealing with someone else's consequences.

I'll sometimes chat with the people who have had to maintain whatever ground work I had laid, and each time around, I get a little bit better at laying down a framework of infrastructure and operations that's better and better at staying sustainable

I had the pleasure to briefly work with the author of this post within the last few years. Jeff was one of the most enlightening and positive people I've ever learned from. He was refreshingly honest about what challenges he was having, and delightfully accessible for mentorship and advice.

Depot also does remote docker builds using a remote build kit agent. It was actually their original product. If you could feasibly put everything into a Dockerfile, including running your tests, then you could use that product and get the benefits.

It’s simple to create a Dockerfile that containerizes your app. It’s even easier to create one that has terrible build performance, chalked full of CVEs, is north of 20GB in size, and whatever foot gun you trip over when using Docker

It's been years that writing Dockerfiles has been fairly common. Years. And yet it's still so common that people write such poorly optimized Dockerfiles.

I think we should definitely start thinking about admitting that it's too much over head for people to learn how to write a Dockerfile.

That being said, I've known Kyle for a while now. The team at Depot have consistently shown the deepest possible understanding of the container ecosystem. I'm very excited to see what else they do.

As opposed to keeping all of your servers independent of each other, super computers are used any time you want to pretend the entire computer is one computer.

In other words, they're used when you want to share some kind of state across all of the computers, without the potential overhead of communicating to some other system like a database.

Physics simulations and like, molecular modeling come to mind as common examples.

In the case of ML training, model parameters and broadcasting the deltas that get calculated during training are that shared state.

I think there are plenty of jobs in industries like HealthTech where you can be contributing to initiatives that help save lives.

And for those that are fulfilled from technical challenges, I think you basically have to go to a larger company that is running into scale problems.

Search is the majority of their revenue so that they can subsidize their other products. Devastation somehow doesn't feel like it properly captures how much it would hurt them to lose it.

Why Open Source? 3 years ago

I used to open source every single thing I built. But recently, I stopped doing that because now I build everything as a single monorepo. All of my completely disconnected side project ideas are all in one repo and I'm much more happy being able to keep this like dependencies up to date in one place instead of having a different repo per project.

I would like to go back to open sourcing all things I play with but maybe I need to find a repo structure and tooling that would make that more sustainable.

Early Days of AI 3 years ago

The highlight of the fact that large org adoption is slow feels really valuable here. Especially when we just recently had all of the articles that claimed that ChatGPT was "over" when it appears that this is mostly because of things like summer vacations with students. The adoption and understanding of these products and the risk involved with hallucinations is something that will take time to understand.

I recently joined one of the LLM provider companies and watching these phases over the next few years will be really interesting. Especially combined with what's going on with regulation and the like.

Random aside, hi Elad! I think you're reading some of these comments. I just left Color after ~2.5 years. I hope to get to formally introduce myself to you one day.

You are very correct. Thank you for the reminder. I can't tell if I'm just missing it and can't find it but I "authorize" a deletion of my comment as off-topic if there's a way for me to do that.

Just another random anecdotal experience with Chip.

I was interviewing with Claypot.ai and when I met her for my first conversation, she was on a walking treadmill and very clearly was more interested in a Slack conversation she was having.

She moved me on to the next round which I irrefutably bombed and was respectfully told that I wouldn't be moving on which was the right decision, but I'll never forget watching her walking motion while looking at Slack on her second monitor almost the entire time we were talking.

It's very possible and I considered it. But the UI/UX changes I made improved accessibility, and I decided that I'd rather keep those changes as I think they make for a better website anyways.

Maybe ironically, my analytics provider (not Google) has recently started showing the tiniest upwards momentum in Bing being a top referrer. Since all my traffic grew steadily after 2 years of no changes, I'm now curious to see what happens if I continue to just let it sit there.

A meta question for y'all if you're willing to share. I've seen y'all launch what I think is now 5 different ideas under the same name? I want to say that I remember a platform for musicians, and a platform to automatically convert a codebase into hostable inference servers, among a few other things.

Asking for myself as someone who has a hard time sticking to one idea to explore: are the pivots coming from finding it in hard to land customers? Is it hard to stay motivated with a single product? The pivots look pretty drastic as an external observer but maybe they've all been very organic from the inside.

You're probably right but my naive hope was that things like PageSpeed insights that measure things like accessibility and page speed would be a part of search rankings.

I went from an average page rank position of 4 for relevant keywords to nothing and now there's 0 growth for views of my site. I'd have been better off just not touching it at all. Sad.

Prior to making changes, I had consistent 30% MoM growth for 4 months in a row and all from Google results.

After about 2 years, I somehow started getting Google traffic to one of my websites. It wasn't much, maybe 1k to 2k views a month.

I didn't touch the website at all in those 2 years and when I started getting traffic from Google, I decided that maybe I should setup the Google search console SEO best practices.

I went through their entire checklist and my traffic went to flat 0. I scored a perfect 100 across every category on their web page insights and my reward was getting completely delisted from all of their search results.