joelgrus

Until yesterday I was using a Lenovo Thinkpad Carbon X1 running Ubuntu 22.04. It was an awful combination (microphone didn't work, nubbin stopped working, touchpad had to be replaced, keyboard had dodgy keys, battery life was bad, Chrome wouldn't start unless you added some mystery command-line options, etc, etc, etc.)

Yesterday I got a new ASUS Zenbook running Windows 11 (and I added Ubuntu in WSL2). So far so good, it seems like I can do my coding stuff on the linux subsystem but then have desktop apps and peripherals on the windows side that just work. This is the first time I've had my personal computer be a Windows machine in like 20 years, so we'll see how it goes.

I used to work as a SWE at Google, and we sometimes "joked" that the process ("here's a list of computer science topics, we expect you to know all of them, take as long as you want to prepare") was designed to identify insecure overachievers.

I dropped out of PhD school, and I have a more interesting life than most of my friends who stayed. :)

I appreciate that you like the site and want to clone it, but it's extremely poor form (and extremely misleading) to give your clone the same name.

The language model is GPT-2 (small).

The underlying library is called "pytorch-pretrained-BERT" because initially it just contained an implementation of BERT, but now it contains implementations of several models so they backronym-ed it to "Big-&-Extending-Repository-of-Transformers". :)

AllenNLP dev here. We're going to do a "PyTorch 1.0" release of AllenNLP next week, and then after that we're planning to investigate how to incorporate the new "production" aspects.

You can find people pushing back against this in America. My daughter, for instance, attends a Sudbury School, where the kids make the rules and decide how to spend their own time:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudbury_school

She loves the school, and in my opinion it's been great for her. But almost everyone I describe the school to finds it terrifically weird and frightening.

I went through this same thought process a few years ago. I basically gave myself a crash course in CS and engineering and "reinvented" / positioned myself as a software engineer.

I left my data science job and spent a couple of years as a "pure" software engineer and now am a "research engineer" which is basically a software engineer who understands machine learning and deep learning.

By and large I'm very happy with the move (other than that the company I quit as a data scientist got acquired and I would have made more $$$ if I'd stayed).

I interviewed at Amazon (bad experience), got rejected (long story), and then TWO MONTHS LATER got contacted by an Amazon recruiter: "We need people like you!"

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Yeah, I made it about 5 days in this year and then quit because I wasn't having fun.

Too many of the problems had the structure:

* here's Part A * submit solution for Part A * OK, now here's Part B * Part B is just different enough that you have to do a not-fun refactoring of your Part A code (that wouldn't be necessary if you'd just been asked to also design for Part B up front)

It was too much like working with an awful PM who can't decide what they want, and it mostly just made me angry.

So "political detox week" lasted like an hour?

I think it looks like a cool series of books.

I also hate that you describe it as "free to read" but then require me to give you access to my Twitter account in order to read it. I don't know you, and I don't want to give you access to update my Twitter profile or post Tweets on my behalf. (Yes, I know, then just pay for the book.)

I also hate slide decks that do that. I literally went through this one left to right and thought "wow, that was a really high level overview". Only then I realized I had to hit down some of the time.

(And the "you idiot, you weren't using the correct navigation keys" is not a particularly satisfying answer, I navigated with left and right arrows the way I have always navigated slides for years.)

Yeah, secretly I was surprised that it worked as well as it did!

As will clicking any of the links on one of the generated page.

Confession: I am guilty of this. Well, sort of. I actually did write a book, and it did sell more than 3 copies, and now I put "best selling author" on my resume, on account of my book being #1 in its category (sometimes) and #1 on oreilly.com (sometimes).

So far no one has gotten bent out of shape about it (or maybe no one has looked at my resume), I assume because they're smart enough to know that a "best selling" data science book is not on the NYT list outselling Stephen King and 50 Shades of Gray and Hunger Games, it's bestselling among "Books / Computers / Data & Data Analytics" or whatever.

Having put my bias on the table, I have a hard time getting worked up about what this guy did, for the following reason:

"Whoa, you're a bestselling author? What did you write?" "It's not a book, it's a picture of my foot." "Oh. That's kind of strange. How many copies did it sell?" "Three." "..."

I mean, it's not like there's some kind of special club where "best selling author" allows you to cut in line or anything. Is there? If there is, please let me know.

I "self-host" using Pelican + S3. It's super cheap (< $1/month) and pretty easy, the only real downside is that all of the Pelican themes are really ugly, and I'm not good enough at design to make a better one.

Huh, I tried a SEA-LON ticket, best price $1363 on Kayak.

TripDelta found me a $655 flight, except out of Portland (which is like a 3 hour drive away), and a $750 flight that looks like

SEA-EWR / JFK-LHR

which is a hell of a connection. I couldn't deal with the inconvenience, but even so I'm kind of impressed.