bunnyhop

Soz, I don't like to cross link my accounts, especially with all this TSWift shenanigans going around. But, if you look at https://civitai.com/ plenty of people have links to their ko-fi accounts where you can commission them (heck you may even find me somewhere on there).

I train LoRAs for diffusion models using collab. I've automated a good portion of it so I only have to deal with the customer saying yay or nay to a commission. The notebook I run takes a shared drive folder of pictures, or if a public figure... runs a crawler that grabs images from instagram and X. Run a face-scoring script that tosses out pictures with no faces, multiple faces, or non-target faces. Run the images through segment anything to annotate caption files. Then start training on cloud resources. It stashes 5 checkpoints and zips them up, and it emails the customer when done.

Best month I've done so far is about 2k, at about 30 USD per commission.

Who chases their career to fulfill their dreams? "My dad growing up told me that you know work hard, get a good job, you know, make money. Nobody has fun working and then you can have fun with the money you make." -Jimmy Yang

But to your last point, yes, just not in the private sector. Join the dark side and work government contracts, the pay is decent and you get exactly what you're asking for. You get to be technical, unless you want to be management...boring, you work your obligatory 40 hours and when you're done for the day that's it, go home. Everything's classified and no one bothers you when you're clocked out. People are competent and everyone wants to get the product out and the mission done without office politics. TBH superchill environment for senior engineers.

...You're in DC, NSA is in MD, CIA is in VA. The amount of contracting work in your area is ridiculous. As for non-major contracting companies, Amazon and Microsoft fork over silly bonuses for cleared workers, but that in itself is your barrier to entry... Can you pass an investigation? If so... go roll around in contractor money, there's no hiring freezes or layoffs right now.

TBH the code behind generative stuff is "fairly" simple, I made a GAN for my Masters degree back in 2019 that produced 16x16 tile assets for x-bit styled videogames. The rough part is CREATING the math that supports the learning models, its very easy to implement it after the fact. If you have a strong data structure foundation, and are decent with math then it shouldn't be a hard transition to pick up ML. It's the flavor of the year and everywhere you look schools are hustling for your money, can't say I've tried any of them/have an opinion of them so GL with that.

The skew for pay in the dev industry is weird. When I graduated with my BS (2008) I was happy enough to find a junior position in game dev on the west coast at 40k. Mind you that was during a lovely market crash, but after 4 years in game dev my pay didn't increase very much (but my profit sharing did /eyeroll). Fast forward to the present, I work non-FAANG at a 210k salary and am only required to do dev work with no management silliness and no required overtime. My company hires juniors straight out of college at around 100k... this blows my mind.

Oddly enough going through about 6 interviews as a senior... things get more technical instead of interviews as a junior where things were more methodical. Junior interviews were more, 'How would you go about solving problem x?'. Senior interviews have been more, 'What exact function parameters of this obscure library would you use to implement x design pattern in this made-up system for this interview?' Which is absurd unless you're a very narrowly focused SME on one specific tool/language.