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formercoder

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Googler but my opinions are my own

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I’m a Googler who doesn’t do anything remotely close to setting capital return policy. Just remember Alphabet has been buying back 10s of billions for a while. Dividends are just a different capital return mechanism.

Let’s compare. I’ve interviewed for and been offered both high paying tech jobs and investment banking jobs. My interviews for tech really required me to have a deep understanding of the technology and how to solve problems with it. They tested my critical thinking skills. For banking, sure there were some technical questions but a lot of it came down to what school I went to, how I acted, who I knew. I suppose either one could be a “nightmare” depending on who you are. I do think the tech interview process was much better at hiring generally competent people. There’s also consulting which I have not directly interviewed for but the interview style is more similar to tech with more of a focus on mental math, those can be very difficult if you don’t have that skill.

I’m not completely read in to all the details but she told me prior to this drug her diagnoses was a “death sentence.” The lung cancer had metastasized throughout her bones. The indication was sudden lower body paralysis caused by a spinal tumor. She had spinal fusion surgery as well. I understand because it’s stage 4 she will never be in “remission” but it has regressed significantly.

Why is RAG a horrible hack? LLMs can draw from only 2 sources of data: their parametric knowledge and the prompt. The prompt seems like a pretty good place to put new information they need to reason with.

When I prototype RAG systems I don’t use a “vector database.” I just use a pandas dataframe and I do an apply() with a cosine distance function that is one line of code. I’ve done it with up to 1k rows and it still takes less than a second.