fm2606

This is why I have always said, that a degree in CS is useless without some degree of passion towards it.

I would add I don't know how anyone can do any degree and career without some sort of passion for it.

For me personally, not only do I need passion but I have to have some sort of belief in the product and/or company I'm working for. In the early 00's I worked at a company, not software related nor was I working as a developer, and didn't like what I was doing nor did I believe in the product, it was lacking in so many areas where they were trying to frame it fit in the product market. I left after 3 years and did something completely different.

I still have my HP 48G and love it. I don't use it much and take the batteries out so they don't corrode in the case.

Every time I use for more than a couple of calculations I think how much I prefer a RPN calculator.

This is me to a big extent. Sometimes I feel like I to learn for learning's sake. Which is okay, or at least that is what my therapist tells me. I struggle with the fact that I "think about doing" vs actually doing.

My work is my hobby too, that is why I struggle sometimes wondering if I will ever retire. Why retire when what I'm doing is for the most part fun. Sure, there are days that I'd rather be "doing X", or more like "studying X" than actually working but I'm enjoying work so much lately that it soon passes.

Work also forces me to actually DO instead of thinking about doing. I have to perform. People are depending on me to get stuff done and that is a big motivator. With my personal projects, no one needs it or is expecting it so it is too easy to abandon.

I used pg vector chunking on paragraphs. For the answers I saved in a flat text file and then parsed to what I needed.

For parsing and vectorizing of the GCP docs I used a Python script. For reading each quiz question, getting a text embedding and submitting to an LLM, I used Spring AI.

It was all roll your own.

But like I stated in my original post I deleted it without backup or vcs. It was the wrong directory that I deleted. Rookie mistake for which I know better.

I tried scripts but got blocked. I used wget to download tthem

Everything I run, even the small models, some amount goes to the GPU and the rest to RAM.

Hmmm...now that you say that, it might have been the 20b model.

And like a dumbass I accidentally deleted the directory and didn't have a back up or under version control.

Either way, I do know for a fact that the gpt-oss-XXb model beat chatgpt by 1 answer and it was 46/50 at 6 minutes and 47/50 at 1+ hour. I remember because I was blown away that I could get that type of result running locally and I had texted a friend about it.

I was really impressed but disappointed at the huge disparity between time the two.

I'm not his target demographic Me either and I am a dev as well

He's a good presenter and his advice makes a lot of sense. Agree

Not that I think he forms his answers on who is sponsoring him, but I feel he couldn't do a lot of the stuff he does without sponsors. If the sponsors aren't supplying him with all that hardware then, in my opinion, he is taking a significant risk in buying all of it out of pocket and hoping that the money he makes from YT covers it (which I am sure it does, several times over). But there is no guarantee that the money he makes from YT will cover the costs, is the point I'm making.

But, then again, he does use the hardware in other videos so the it isn't like he is banking on a single video to cover the costs.

Zero trust in remote systems run by others with unknowable or questionable motives.

This all day long.

Plus I like to see what can be done without relying on big tech (relying on someone to create an LLM that I can use, notwithstanding).

gpt-oss-120b is amazing. I created a RAG agent to hold most of GCP documentation (separate download, parsing, chunking, etc). ChatGPT finished a 50 question quiz in 6 min with a score of 46 / 50. gpt-oss-120b took over an hour but got 47 / 50. All the other local LLMs I tried were small and performed way worse, like less than 50% correct.

I ran this on an i7 with 64gb of RAM and an old nvidia card with 8g of vram.

EDIT: Forgot to say what the RAG system was doing which was answering a 50 question multiple choice test about GCP and cloud engineering.

I loved Compute!'s Gazette.

I miss good print magazines

I know exactly what you mean, same but different

I did start early at 12 y/o with a C64.

Then trying to get drunk or laid took over and I only dabbled with it here and there. Got married, had kids, did other things and might as well say abandoned it.

For about the past 10 years I've been doing programming nearly every day.

I wish from circa 1993 to 2010 I had been more heavily involved with it than I was.

"paralysis by analysis" is a form of perfectionism it can also mean DOING NOTHING because you dont see a way to do it perfectly.

I had a professor point this out to me while in undergrad.

Lots of truth to this.

However, I have difficulty in doing a personal site just for my own benefit and pleasure.

I enjoy learning, I enjoy the THOUGHT of building and doing but my execution sucks.

Excellent point

Virtual hat tip to ya!

I finally have four ideas that I think worthy to build that I would like to monetize. All would be well within my abilities to build. No vision of grandeur that I'd retire from any of them and if I made $100 from one site I'd be ecstatic.

Two are simple games, one a directory and one a utility type site. No AI, no sign-up, no affiliate marketing, no upselling, just simple sites with ads.

However, my "paralysis by analysis" affliction is strong.

Correct, there is no public IP address exposed to my home.

Right now my "servers" are Dell micro i5s. I've have used RPI 3 and 4 in the past. My initial foray into self-hosting were actual servers. Too hot, too noisy and too expensive to run continuously for my needs, but I did learn a lot. I still do even with the micros and pis.

Yeah, that is a good idea and as I have been doing a little bit of studying Kubernetes I thought about that too (overkill for sure).

I'm right there with you, except at times I have thrown caution to the wind and made my sites available.

My current setup is to rent a cheap $5/month VPS running nginx. I then reverse ssh from my home to the vps, with each app on a different port. It works great until my electric goes out and comes back on the apps become unavailable. I haven't gotten the restart script to work 100% of the time.

But, I'd love to hear thoughts on security of reverse SSH from those that know.

At my org they are trying to move away from programmer/analyst to sowftware engineer. I told my manager call me what ever you want, just don't call me late to dinner.

As long as it never gets to "grokker" (I've never heard the term "grokker", just saying) . I can not stand the term "grok". I don't know why but it just grates on me

Hoosiers is probably my favorite movie of his.

Email sent

Thank you

Thank you.

Luckily for me my current manager didn't have a code test. I received a timed coding test for another position within the same org but a different manager and bombed the hell out of it.

I did actually. I created a custom dashboard with basic stats of type of calls ran, how many calls were run by each station, how many were EMS and how many were fire calls.

Then I started doing some more automation stuff. Nothing super interesting and mostly bespoke stats gathering.

I have a BS degree in Aerospace Engineering and from 1999 - 2006 I was job jumping quite a bit because I was miserable. All the jobs were boring.

I took a EMT Basic night class because my wife and I were getting into scuba diving and I wanted to be a dive master on boats during the weekend. I enjoyed EMT so much that I signed up for Paramedic class, not knowing what I was going to do with it, just did it. It was relatively cheap at the time and we were kid free at that time as well when I started. School was 15 months long.

As we were about ready to graduate PM school the county fire dept (FD) came in and said they would hire paramedics but you had to cross train to be a fire fighter as well. I was 36 y/o, we just had our 1st kid and I figured if I didn't do it then I'd never would and probably regret it so I got hired as a PM and then FD trained me for FF. This was 2006, hence the username FM2606 for fire-medic Feb 6, 2006 my hire date.

It didn't take long to see a bunch of firefighter's getting hurt, specifically back issues due to working and mainly from lifting stretchers with patients on them. I also have a chronic health issues and I figured if either or both of these issues became a problem and I couldn't work as a FF/PM we'd be screwed, so I decided to do an online master's degree in comp sci. Comp sci being my initial major out of highschool before I dropped out.

Fast foward to 2015, I finished my master's, had 2 kids and started working part time as a dev.

Fast forward again to 2020, I was about to turn 50 y/o, Covid hit and I was taken out of the field due to my health issues. I started applying for full time dev jobs. Landed one and then two years later switched to a bigger org.

No regrets on any of it. Becoming a FF/PM was one of the best career decisions of my life. I loved it (for the most part) but it was time to go.

I didn't have an "in". I think persistence paid off and plus I feel like I interview pretty good.

Feel free to ask me anything else.

I switched into software dev full time at 50 and took a new software job at 52. I'll be 55 y/o this year and I highly doubt I will switch jobs again, I like the org and the work.

Prior to that, starting at 45 y/o I was a part time dev and full time firefighter-paramedic (14 years total). Covid scared me to becoming a FT dev.

That makes sense.

Thank you for posting the follow up

I would like to see a before and after.

For example, #3 too many concerns. The author states "the solution is to split up a busy diagram into multiple diagrams, each focused on one or two concerns at a time" . I understand that but is there a diagram that ties all the smaller diagrams together without re-creating the original diagram in the first place?