throwaway19423

This is the thing. I don't understand how the company is going to function once all those folks become multi-millionaires. It is a really odd situation .. I don't know if something quite like it occurred. Even G, M and F had slower slopes I think in terms of stock price. Nvidia wasn't known to have the best engineers (not disrespectful but don't think it was as hard to get in as the other tech companies 4-5 years back). I heard a story that at Microsoft back in the old days, people would wear a badge saying FUIV (FU I'm vested).

You were a helpless, innocent kid once too :)

I've heard about the lotto system but assumed the school district would be obligated to bus kids (i.e. not force them to use public transit alone). The parents have issues with the school bus??

I visited Seattle the city proper recently, and also felt depressed. Not sure why I got that vibe. On paper Seattle is great, and no-doubt, the Pacific north west has good nature and tech-industry. It felt odd why Seattle felt "different".

I'm extremely miffed. Mulling leaving the country at some point in the near future, and that triggers a much higher tax bill (considered a deemed disposition). There is just no way to get ahead in this place.

I did not invest in the stock market properly in the last decade (mid-40s; tech income but just put it to paying off house - estimating this cost be at least 5 million bucks conservatively). Opening a stock account and will slow down paying off the house.

I am confused how all these things are able to interoperate. Are the creators of these models following the same IO for their models? Won't the tokenizer or token embedder be different? I am genuinely confused by how the same code works for so many different models.

Can any kind soul explain the difference between GGUF, GGML and all the other model packaging I am seeing these days? Was used to pth and the thing tf uses. Is this all to support inference or quantization? Who manages these formats or are they brewing organically?

Err .. the media people take visual quality and aesthetics very, very seriously. The Director has a vision and the tech goes to amazing lengths to support it. It is a different world as the original post said.

I also worked at IBM (Research) early in my career. Most folks I know left but some good folks went into manager/leader positions. I always wonder .. do manager/leaders get paid better at IBM (Research)? Cause the people are really good.

Oh .. Don Box? (remember reading his books on the Microsoft stack a lifetime ago) .. if this is the same person.

Looks pretty nice (high-level skimming of content .. I work in the field but more DL focused. Mathy ML is my nemesis).

Two questions related to learning in general:

1) I feel I have a good undergrad level grasp of ML but not at a grad level grasp. The math is a bit overwhelming. I am not a fan of conferences like Neurips. Any one else try to conquer this challenge and have a story to share?

2) A bit off topic but the XR course they have linked on the page is also cute. It lists both Unity and MRTK. I have a Hololens2 and am curious about spatial mapping and awareness (just to learn at the moment). Any suggestions on what is a good stack for this area? I have very little 3D graphics background .. unity seems a bit too high for serious work and an engine seems too level :(

Canadian banks are kind of bloated. The amount they spend on branch design is insane.

Same here. What sort of work do you do? I feel like I need a support group.

I'm a decade older than you, have a PhD, in corporate research doing AI and feel EXACTLY the same way.

Early on, I had multiple opportunities to make a life in the Bay area. I stupidly did not take those opportunities.

My coding skills are no longer competitive and I am competing (and getting out-gunned) at the highest level.

Some of the suggestions here to build something you care about feel to ring true. I am also mulling this. It is hard to make time for this later in life but I feel there is no other way. I am also mulling taking a big pay cut and relocate the family to the Bay area. It feels very risky but I feel I won't be able to live with myself.

Dealing with this professionally for DNNs. It just doesn't work. The large, important DNN models are so complicated, the toolchains for optimized execution don't do sane things unless you do some sort of vertical integration. The community tried with things like TVM, Halide, ONNX and others .. it is just crazy if you don't have a fully opinioned pipeline. Just my personal opinion.

I think it is common. But the partner occupations you list are very different. It also depends on how advanced you are in your career. The stages are also quite different (early career, young kids, and so on).

What particular part are you having issues with?

General advice is to realize your partner will be employable a lot longer than you. So if you make a shit ton more at the moment, it is wise to realize it is not a forever situation. Also, residency/student life is tough (but we had a lot of fun in those child-free days). My spouse had to adjust to the reality that my studying is till the day I retire (maybe the day I die .. lol). It is really nice when my spouse acts as a first responder in a casual emergency (I am just watching helplessly) and when friends ask my spouse for free advice. Good and bad with everything I suppose.

I missed out on the property boom at a personal level because I was not taught the value of debt. So I get your point. We didn't purchase a home because it always seemed like a bubble that simply could not inflate further. All the while, property prices went up, up and up. (referring to Canadian housing)

So mistake made, lesson learned. In a world where money is expensive (fed rate sets the lowerbound), where are the opportunities?

Site looks pretty nice. Too bad I just heard of it. I guess no easy way to archive this. This is my biggest grip with all that followed straight HTML.

Any company to recommend in the domain? You are right that robotics has a good future. Just really capital intensive and hard to make money in the short term. I have a friend who is a founder in the space and man .. what a long slog.

NVidia was truly a spectacular opportunity. So was Microsoft, Databricks, etc. I picked a dud, and didn't realize it until it was too late (just now). Question is .. what are the obvious winners today, and for the next 10 years?

Some opportunities I missed but they didn't go anywhere: Docker, Qualcomm.

Consumer Devices is a general dud I think. Software and data is where it is at. I dunno?

Regarding 1.8x, what is your tax rate? I have the same situation in Canada but my marginal tax rate is approx 50%. As such, it is better for me to pay down my mortgage (through early payments).

Seeing ads shown to my 3 year old when they do basic supervised web browsing on educational websites seems wrong.

Here is the issue though .. as a man, if I am not interested in clubbing, going to the bar, art class, etc. where do I meet women to ask? This was the conundrum I was in throughout grad school. It is really, really hard. As I have aged, I know there is a flip side of the coin, where women also wonder where the "high quality" men are hiding. But it is way too hard.

I do remember in my younger days approaching someone on the bus .. in a friendly, non-creepy way. It didn't go anywhere but we did become friends for a short period. I just don't think it is okay approaching women generally in places like the bus because it is not okay to make them feel creeped out.

Tax rebates or hope they would eventually be profitable?

Target in Canada is a great case study on what not to do.

I wish there was a breakdown of what are the typical parameters of a retailer (e.g. rent per sq foot, theft, labor costs, sales, distance to distribution center, distance to competition) and what made these locations unique. I see businesses all the time where it seems they have very little foot traffic or a location in a crazy expensive area (most places in Manhattan, for instance), and I wonder how these locations make a profit.

I also find it a bit off that this is posted on HN. If it was SF, the narrative would surely be around rents or breakage (well, theft). The announcement doesn't really say anything specific beyond "failed to make a profit for many years".

I am effectively a customer of alarm.com but not sure how. They seem to be a bundler or backend provider (sort of like a service OEM) for various branded alarm systems. Is there any technical material that explains what they do, and provides more visibility into the ecosystem?

I need to tell you something about Canada (and maybe the rest of the world except the US) .. we're F'ed. Most of the world does not have 30 year fixed rates. That's a unique American gift. (I guess because of how Fannie May/Mac work).

You are right of course. The fed wants businesses to stop/slow down investing and only prioritize high returning projects. But since rates went up so quickly, are various sectors really prepared? E.g unsophisticated home buyers who got ARMS clear ly were not. It was shocking to see SVB make a similar mistake .. but was it really a mistake? In hindsight, if you had crappy assets (e.g. low yielding MBS), as soon as the fed started tightening you should have sold off your assets (albeit making a small loss). Are people really doing that? It seems the expectation was that rates would go down again in a year (mid 2024) so it seems people just "let it ride".

I guess the equivalent argument works for a house too but transaction costs are high (and you need a place to live in the interim). Someone could have sold their house right as tightening began and bought the house back once rates stabilized.

Just watched the latest Ray Dalio video on the SVB collapse, and it got me thinking. We lived under zero rates for so long, how many investments made during those years are now underwater? When rates are 0, any risk adjusted return greater than that is profitable. SVB's situation was odd (had they not had a liquidity crunch, would we have found out they were in trouble? Mark to Market vs. Mark to Maturity). What about the broader economy? Like .. regular public companies or pension funds or whatever. Isn't everyone in the same situation where they don't have cash but rather, they have assets. But now, cash pays a high return (5%ish). Why not just sit on cash (or require risk adjusted returns to be in excess of 5 %)? What am I missing? If the concern is valid, how will this play out?