lamroger

Awesome breakdown! It really feels like a hyper-hyper parameter search + bug fixer.

I started looking at Kaggle again and autoresearch seems to converge to many of the solution vibes there.

Wild ensembles, squeezing a bit of loss out. More engineering than research IMO

oh that reminds me of defense tech down near redondo - andril spacex. very cool sector if you’re okay with weapons

I do think the early stage vcs like upfront, a16z, hustle fund are trying to foster more growt and i appreciate them

i wonder what other people think

I stay mostly on the westside but id say more density of shops but at the same time less busy? if i had to guess, things were really going well before covid. then add delivery app and now a bunch of coco delivery robots really slowed down foot traffic.

things still go viral - pop ups are very popular with the young crowd. owalla was giving out water bottles and the line was around the block and i didnt see the end of the line

The tech scene is not doing so well imo. people say gaming is cyclical but idk tbh. AI adoption in graphic design and coding is really going to squeeze an already stressed gaming labor pool. entertainment industry is much the same.

i cant name one young rising startup that was hot like snapchat. so that was disappointing when i was job hunting.

traffic is still bad. smog is less bad.

Been in LA for 2 years now and went to college in LA 10 years ago so have some data points to compare.

Startups in LA are interesting. Back in the day, there was a lot of Ad Tech / advent of big data. This is when Snapchat and Hulu were coming up. I’d go on Angellist and see who was hiring and who’d be down to meet.

Now, especially post covid, I feel sparks of excitement. I missed the crypto hype in LA so that was probably wild and weird. a16z opened an office in Santa Monica and do their speedrun accelerator. Focused on games and media it seems.

upfront hosted some cool cowork and mingle events too.

Two meetups I regularly go to is AI Tinkerers and MLOps. Generally it’s the same small crowd. I went to a Ruby meetup which was cool too.

Less of a young startup crowd. Maybe people got older and rich and retired early.

they're all around the same price now so not much cost savings shopping around

Hey! Appreciate the links and sorry for the late reply. Thought this just got grabbed by the spam filter when I wasn't seeing it.

I have a small writeup here: https://lamroger.com/blog/2024-03-10-coffee-roasting-tech/ and the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shMMuNuH3cE

But short answer is I finetuned a model with the help of Roboflow, grabbed the pixel values in the bounding box and avg'ed the values.

Awesome! Coffee + LLM-assisted programming. I had a similar experience coding an iOS app without experience with objective c using chatgpt. Great learning tool

Tellers get first dibs

backoffice automation

React also gives access to React Native if you're ever interested in mobile

Modern ads. you dont decide if you get influenced

I'm on an Intel MBP still - not coding as much but still working great

UI and UX will be higher value

Same world, different time period / technology

real recognizing real

Tough choices. o7 to the laid off.

Going full enterprise by shutting down hobby plans while laying off primarily sales and marketing.

I've had a few of these interviews. Some do it well by showing genuine interest and maybe they have expertise in the area and it's fun chatting about the project. Other's see it more like cross examination or make it adversarial. I personally get nervous and tense up when I feel attacked. Maybe it's a good way to opt myself out of working in those environments.

The big icon with the streak and it turning red toward the end of the day really helps. Recognizing that some days you won't want to learn but just getting through it is ok. It's a really slow process if you're not deliberate but slow is better than none IMO.

I'm unemployed.

Joking aside, I worry when I start working again too. I think recognizing that struggling is learning and aiming to get into the rhythm/habit of struggling even when you're tired - even a little bit - compounds. I'm also toying with the idea of cohort-based learning

To add on, it was a huge consideration for the applicants that I know of

I love the eval parallel...

Does it increase conversions? Yes? Ship it.

But i do agree with you

Cohere for AI has a discord if you want to get involved btw

Substitute META with OIL

It takes three seconds of speech to generate a synthetic version. I think of my journey job searching and how much personal information I have to trust with basically random people. Voice, likeness, sample writing, resume. Everything is out there already but makes it a lot easier

Eval become way more important if things become less reproducible

It's funny bc that's exactly how fine tuning is done rn. I find it amusing how we can leverage the same techniques pre and post. Wild wild west

Was thinking about this the other day too!

We are so back