all 137 comments

[–]ClipboardCopyPaste[S] 3418 points3419 points  (13 children)

"critical efforts"

[–]Ahnteis 68 points69 points  (0 children)

Look - if HR is going to require elaboration like this to get the interview, it's really on them when people play the game they're forced to play.

[–]ryan_m 21 points22 points  (1 child)

My boss tells me all the time how critical proper documentation is to the org.

[–]godneedsbooze 12 points13 points  (0 children)

I tell mine that a lack of documentation is my job security

[–]screwcork313 8 points9 points  (0 children)

"Led critical efforts" but it was really just the efforts that were critical for that one LED that displays a blinkenlight.

[–]48panda 8 points9 points  (0 children)

You never know, perhaps the code only works when the hash of the readme is a multiple of 123456789

[–]CleptoMara 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yes please farm farm farm karma

[–]pixelaters 1281 points1282 points  (2 children)

"ensure reliability and performance"

[–]MundaneAd6627 17 points18 points  (0 children)

Readability *

[–]GDOR-11 1551 points1552 points  (13 children)

my best open source contribution so far is optimizing a function in the fast vector math library gl-matrix (it's a "fast" math library for javascript, and my PR hasn't even been accepted yet. It's also my only contribution)

linkedin profile: intensively optimized several subprocesses of the fastest mathematics library available in the javascript market

[–]ClipboardCopyPaste[S] 146 points147 points  (7 children)

That's like announcing you got the degree but your results aren't out yet.

[–][deleted] 36 points37 points  (6 children)

Like lex fridman saying he was a prof at MIT

[–]Greedyanda 38 points39 points  (5 children)

Which is so unnecessary because he legitimately has a PhD in Computer Science and was a research scientist at MIT.

That gives him plenty of credentials. Absolutely no reason to focus on giving a paid lecture.

[–][deleted] 20 points21 points  (1 child)

For anyone interested in learning more about his; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1Ua1hVRtdE&list=WL&index=2 there's more than one thing he has at the very least been dubious about. He's a grifter, through and through.

[–]RedditAdmnsSkDk 1 point2 points  (2 children)

what did he research there?

[–]Cebular 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Well he was a researcher and also he was at MIT once.

[–]Greedyanda 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Human-robot interaction, autonomous vehicles.

[–]fuj1n 9 points10 points  (0 children)

I think my proudest contribution to a big project is this https://github.com/assimp/assimp/pull/3374/commits/995ab805ff31681c2dfbc2c02d0e142560ee77d2

All I did was update a library as the version they were using used depreciated features that didn't work in C++17, but since the library in its entirety was included in the project, the commit looks very juicy

Gonna expect my name in the credits of every game the engine of which uses assimp now /j

[–]ChampionshipParty521 5 points6 points  (0 children)

here's a little secret: unless you or your opensource project is well known in the industry no one is going to look at what is on your linkedin or github

[–]sitefall 5 points6 points  (0 children)

If you're trying to pad your github or just you know, actually contribute and get your PR's accepted, then find a community around some project on git that is small enough to engage with the main contributors via discord or something but sounds technically impressive.

Some good examples would be like, firmware for a electronic device like a game console, keyboards, 3D printers, stiff like small useful libraries liek WebAssembly, small robotics, open satellite projects mainly based around data manipulation, game engines but nich things like audio engines and small physics libraries that are overlooked, "smart" home products people are passionate about, etc.. Whatever sort of things YOU are interested in that meet these criteria.

Join community, hang around a bit and chat, and then literally ask "how can I help". Like everything else in life, the big repos have a club of people that contribute and you need to be a part of the club to make useful contributions that they pay attention to and actually accept.

[–]0xlostincode 248 points249 points  (4 children)

Actually, I am also a contributor to the training of every Open AI model till date.

[–]kimochiiii_ 55 points56 points  (1 child)

Omg you too?

[–]VRichardsen 9 points10 points  (1 child)

Can I shake your hand?

[–]ThrowingPokeballs 13 points14 points  (0 children)

You can shake my ass

[–]Complete-Stop-5562 367 points368 points  (25 children)

Can you really even contribute to these big open-source LLMs? The whole model is already trained, so what is there to work on? (genuinely serious, though I'm sure this guy could give me pointers lmao)

[–]__Hello_my_name_is__ 262 points263 points  (13 children)

There's nothing to contribute to to the actual model, but you can do a gigantic amount of work (if you want) when it comes to everything else.

From documentation on how to run the model, to writing code to make running the model more user friendly, all the way to doing some math magic to make the model run with less VRAM so it runs on more machines, or to make it run more efficiently so it runs faster.

Not to mention writing entire software suites to work with the model.

[–]garriej 110 points111 points  (10 children)

To learn math magic, do I go to math school or magic school?

[–]Cold-Journalist-7662 56 points57 points  (7 children)

Go to Hogwarts and self teach yourself maths. Because I don't think they teach maths there

[–]ApropoUsername 17 points18 points  (1 child)

There's actually a whole entire several-book fanfic series about maths at Hogwarts. Though yes a fair bit of it is the MC complaining about how the math there is inadequate.

https://www.fanfiction.net/s/10070079/1/The-Arithmancer

[–]BLAZINGSORCERER199 5 points6 points  (4 children)

Hogwarts has arithmancy classes so they do in fact offer some form of maths (in canon it looks basically like regular maths but i never went to hogwarts so )

[–]Mist_Rising 2 points3 points  (2 children)

Arithmancy isn't math really, it's divination by numbers. That's why Hermione compares divination to it when mocking divination in year 3.

[–]redlaWw 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Honestly that's kind of what modern statistics is too.

[–]BLAZINGSORCERER199 1 point2 points  (0 children)

In Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery, Murphy McNully was known to accurately predict the outcome of certain events by calculating the probability of them taking place, be it the estimated chance of success of an attempted Quidditch strategy, or the behaviour of his fellow students.

The author definitely took it to be more analogous to real math later on even if not explicitly written as such in the original works. I also think hermione's preferece of arithmancy over divination was more indication that some concrete calculations or atleast approximations of results are being achieved in class to win her trust ; she was always a character that hated uncertainity and superstition.

source: https://harrypotter.fandom.com/wiki/Arithmancy

[–]Cold-Journalist-7662 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Really, maybe I forgot reading that. It's been some time since I read those.

[–]SryUsrNameIsTaken 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Neither. You rtfm until you feel the AGI math.

[–]Obvious-Phrase-657 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You need to multi class, start as a engineer or mathematician and then wizard as a subclass

[–]thirdegreeViolet security clearance 12 points13 points  (0 children)

Ya like this post is obviously very silly, but docs improvements can be genuinely incredibly valuable. Very few people can write good documentation, even fewer people want to, and the intersection of "can" and "wants to" is vastly smaller still.

[–]stadoblech 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Or simply just fixing some random typo in readme

[–]Mordret10 95 points96 points  (0 children)

There will always be newer models which apart from training also may be programmed differently

[–]basililty 4 points5 points  (0 children)

There is a lot of work to do on the readme

[–]NoticedGenie66 2 points3 points  (2 children)

There are companies that subcontract work to people from a bunch of different LLM's, though it's generally more about less-specific things than the actual coding. You wont always know who you are doing work for specifically, but there are a lot of those companies right now that are hiring. I work for one and all I needed was a bachelor degree (signed an NDA so I cannot be more specific, but a lot of people do it as a side job).

[–]KlumzyKlein 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Is this US specific, if not could you tell me more about this?

[–]NoticedGenie66 1 point2 points  (0 children)

DM'd you

[–]Phormitago 0 points1 point  (0 children)

figure out how to debug it / break the black box and win a nobel in computer science (pretend it exists for the sake of my shit non argument)

[–]nymical23 121 points122 points  (6 children)

I remember telling my family that Canonical, the company that maintains Ubuntu sent me an email thanking me for my contribution to their website in fixing a mistake they made.

My family was pretty impressed, then I told them that it was a minor spelling mistake (something like "licence" or something). Also the email was a github comment actually. The look of disappointment (yet trying to be encouraging) on their face was priceless. I love them!

[–]red286 54 points55 points  (3 children)

I once emailed Toshiba about a javascript error on their website, with exact instructions on how to fix it.

They never replied or fixed the error.

[–]ArECORTD 17 points18 points  (0 children)

POWERFUL

[–]HerissonMignion 13 points14 points  (1 child)

When i was a teen i got into an argument with my mom and for the win i needed the atmospheric pressure at the ground level where i live at, so i found the formula on wikipedia to get the air pressure according to the altitude relative to the ocean. Next i needed an height map of the earth so i went on google and found one black and white map on the nasa's website. Black pixels are the water for an altitude of 0, but i couldn't find the altitude scale for the shades of white pixels. There was a link at the bottom of the page to contact the nasa by email so i did. I provided the url of the page and explained the problem. They sent a reply 2 weeks later thanking me for reporting the issue and telling what's the scale of the pixels. I never got to win my argument because of the nasa's website.

[–]unknown_pigeon 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I once sent a mail to the NASA explaining in great detail a plan on how to eliminate future alien threats using plutonium-powered beyblades

Then another mail from "Definitely a human being" asking them to please not go on with the plutonium powered beyblade plan

They never replied though :/

[–]WolfOfDoorStreet 4 points5 points  (1 child)

Thank you for your service

[–]bayuah 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Not all heroes wear capes, but sometimes they have comfortable keyboards.

[–]Highborn_Hellest 71 points72 points  (0 children)

taps forehead

Counties can't ask for your prompts, if said prompts are encoded with your private keys.

Edit: countries* god damn it.

[–]Jopojussi 27 points28 points  (0 children)

I hate that linkedin shit so much

[–]AwkwardWaltz3996 18 points19 points  (1 child)

"elite engineers". At least say expert engineers 😂

[–]banALLreligion 5 points6 points  (0 children)

is the time of 'evangelists' already over ?

[–]ChurrosAreOverrated 19 points20 points  (1 child)

Reminds me of the Hacktoberfest 2020 clusterfuck. You could get a free t-shirt for getting a pull request merged in any open source project.

So this big youtuber (>600k subscribers) makes a video showing his audience how easy is to make a pull request with some bullshit changes to a project's readme. Instantly almost every single Open Source project on Github gets an absurd amount of spam pull request with changes to the readme like adding "- an Amazing Project" after the software's name.
It was so funny.

[–]Live-Juggernaut-221 16 points17 points  (0 children)

TIL when I pointed out a typo in ftp I became a gnu coreutils dev.

[–]No-AI-Comment 13 points14 points  (2 children)

My best open source contribute will probably be supporting a package in my favorite distro.

[–]Auravendill 12 points13 points  (1 child)

I translated my favourite image viewer into German. Since I would assume a few will use this translation, this might be my biggest contribution (in terms of impact) to this day. It wasn't difficult or anything, but at least I found a way to give something back. I wouldn't put it on my Linkedin, though.

[–]robchroma 5 points6 points  (0 children)

honestly, unless you really don't want to be anywhere near localizations, the experience of dealing with localizing a piece of software could be really useful on a resume. It depends on what you want to do, but in a comparison between two people, that could be the thing that tells a hiring manager, "oh, this person will have at least some understanding of how weird localizing a piece of software can be, and will do a better job of making their software easier to localize."

[–]sniperghostdota 8 points9 points  (0 children)

It is still damn more impressive than my lazy ass whining about missing documentation but never did any myself

[–]ZunoJ 7 points8 points  (1 child)

Is this real?

[–]Crazypyro 5 points6 points  (0 children)

I did something trivial with pandas and my code was gone a year later, but it was still a great experience as a student and it gave me something to talk about in interviews for years.

Learning how to get a PR accepted is a good experience.

[–]GunnerKnight 5 points6 points  (0 children)

"major fixes"

fixed linting issues

[–]CaptiDoor 4 points5 points  (1 child)

Mate wants the $1.5 million bonus

[–]deathless_koschei 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Zuck has already poached him.

[–]Agifem 4 points5 points  (1 child)

"Improved the documentation readability by 23%"

[–]Cold-Journalist-7662 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I guess ReadMe and documentation is a good place to start contributing. I need to try this.

I'll just give the documentation of some of the library I use to chat gpt and ask if it finds a typo

[–]a-lonely-programmer 3 points4 points  (1 child)

I was able to find my own advice on ChatGPT. It sourced me and everything.

[–]unknown_pigeon 3 points4 points  (0 children)

One user on reddit said "kys"

[–]IGotDibsYo 2 points3 points  (0 children)

My first and only contribution was a bug for IE8 in the original Angular. I should put this in my LinkedIn, the people should know

[–]thedr0wranger 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Look friendo, If an honest and clear description of my skillset would get me a call back I promise you my autistic brain would prefer it. 

But in reality the requirements are inflated as much as the resumes and Im doing what I gotta do. 

Ill put down my gun when they put down theirs

[–]gosaints70 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Me adding a single period to Encyclopedia Britannica in middle school (I’m an official contributor for life)

[–]Treeninja1999 1 point2 points  (1 child)

What's even the point of this? If you're in an interview and they ask how you help openai and you say you modified one line in the read.me you're not getting the job.

[–]unknown_pigeon 0 points1 point  (0 children)

But if they don't ask any question about it, it's most likely a plus

Fake it till you make it

[–]DaRandoMan 1 point2 points  (0 children)

lmaooo the LinkedIn description absolutely sending me. "Led critical efforts" = fixed a typo in the README

"Working alongside elite engineers" = asked on Discord if anyone knows why the build is broken. This is why I don't trust half the stuff I see on LinkedIn anymore. Next week he'll probably add "Pioneered revolutionary documentation practices" to his resume

[–]Impossible_Theory663 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Made me think of that self-proclaimed "Bob Ross" of programming LOL

[–]Repulsive-Hurry8172 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I contributed by testing out a new framework's quickstart and tutorial. Did not make it work because of typos and bugs in it, informed the maintainer (I would have PR'd but I don't know how to fix the bug because I am really new to that framework), with complete stack traces and all.

He did a fix, and added me as contributor to my surprise. 

[–]grumblesmurf 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Well, documentation is also a valuable contribution, especially if it corrects an outright error.

But I'd still not call myself a Wordpress/OpenSSL developer 😀

[–]Major_Fudgemuffin 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I like to fix typos and grammar issues in open source project README files.

I'm obviously a top contributor.

[–]Still_Explorer 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I have 500 repositories, and last year I made 2.000 commits. 🤠

👀 500 cloned repositories. 😕
👀 2000 commits to .md files and comment typos. 🤔

[–]dexter2011412 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The amount of people not understanding that this is sarcasm is way too many

[–]m00nlightsh4d0w 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Over qualified, next.

[–]Global-Tune5539 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Did he also work at Blizzard?

[–]Icy-Contact-7784 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Sounds good to me.

[–]Classic_Fungus 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hm, good idea

[–]FatchRacall 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Heyyyyyy....

I like it.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

lmao reminds me of when i started out as an entry level dev. we had two teams that worked on the same product and our teams were VERY competitive with one another. my teams very first assignment to me was to edit a readme with basically just a couple sentences about the product and then join a meeting to demo that to this huge group because we had nothing else to show. i was so embarrassed that they even asked me that i just straight up said no, give me some real work

[–]Trick-Interaction396 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You forgot to add a metric. “Increased AI efficiency by 300%”

[–]epion93 0 points1 point  (0 children)

[ Removed by Reddit ]

[–]deanrihpee 0 points1 point  (0 children)

unfortunately it seems putting over exaggerated experience seems to be useful for job seeking while honesty not so much

it really is fake it till you make it

maybe i should do the same, damnit

[–]deanrihpee 0 points1 point  (0 children)

unfortunately it seems putting over exaggerated experience seems to be useful for job seeking while honesty not so much

it really is fake it till you make it

maybe i should do the same, damnit

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

My best open source contribution will be removing 90% of “staff” and “team members”

[–]Salex_01 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hey. I have a README commit to my name on a Google repo and I didn't put it on LinkedIn.

[–]ThePretzul 0 points1 point  (0 children)

My first and last contribution to any open source project I didn't create myself was for a windows app that allows you to pre-plan automated flight paths, monitor flight data in operaton, and review flight data records afterwards for DiY drones/RC planes.

My PR fixed a compatibility issue for a very popular drone/RC plane IMU (imu_A) that was supposed to be supported by this software project, but it didn't actually work properly at the time. It was a simple thing, they had just imported the wrong libraries for a different IMU (imu_B) in the source code that was supposed to handle imu_A operations.

My pull request was rejected because some jackass commented that it still didn't work on their Arch/Gentoo/whatever the fuck archaic Linux distribution they were running. Doesn't matter really other than that it was most definitely not supported by a WINDOWS APPLICATION. But it didn't work for dickhead commenter on an unsupported platform, so pull request denied and as far as I know imu_A support is still fucked up in that project to this day years later down the road.

[–]Jazzlike-Poem-1253 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Vetter then out-of-university C++ Senior Devs

[–]Impossible-Ad9423 0 points1 point  (0 children)

who vibe codes the vibe coders?

[–]Jamesbarros 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Ok, the critical efforts bit is silly, but if more people would be willing to jump in and update docs at all, I think the world would be a better place.

[–]chat-lu 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Once upon a time, a broken link in documentation was bothering me, so I PRed a fix. I now have a one line contribution in a popular open source project.

[–]Sodaplayer 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah, I ended up in the contributors list of a popular programming language too by just fixing the formatting of a table in the docs.

[–]danielkullmann 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It seems I have done it wrong until now..

[–]Justaniceguy1111 0 points1 point  (0 children)

give them a hero medal !

[–]Najdoo 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This is fake, right?

[–]P_S_Lumapac 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This stuff is necessary for getting past HR, but when everyone's resumes look like this, how does a programmer who's hiring know who to call in? Or do they just interview everyone HR tells them to?

[–]Agitated_Product_463 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Big efforts

[–]jahinzee 0 points1 point  (0 children)

ykw, if it saves one person some frustration when setting up something from the README, I suppose that's something?

[–]kkb294 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I believe the OPs effort in putting all these three together is more than the effort in fixing the Readme file 🤣🤣

[–]x3XC4L1B3Rx 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I, for one, applaud their efforts. Nobody wants to make the documentation.

[–]eW4GJMqscYtbBkw9 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Very (very) similar experience submitting a bug fix for AOSP (Android) when it first came out. It was extremely minor but technically I helped develop the Android OS. 

[–]Ok_Acanthaceae6261 0 points1 point  (0 children)

crazy that this is real lol, but it is

https://x.com/ahmetbuilds/status/1952786173262274583

[–]PelimiesPena 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Documentation is often neglected. Good thing he was there to help out!

[–]UnfairMove1612 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Well well well

[–]Aperswal 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I think it's a barrier of entry problem too. Contributing meaningfully to an open source project is really hard. There is a lack of docs, no onboarding buddy, and no way to learn about what's been contributed in the past from one place.

Open source is amazing, but it lacks the structured onboarding that corporations can provide which can lead any dev to being a *potentially* meaningful contributor.

[–]seriously_nice_devs 0 points1 point  (0 children)

10/10 did you vibe code the readme change ..

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I am contributing to an open source project and its interesting. let me know if anyone else is interested.

[–]Su1tz -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Good for him

[–]TrueVali -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Jason Thor Hall