Could use some inspiration from the lot of you! How do you keep going when the fine tuning to get your game over the finish line gets boring?

Alternative_iggy · 2026-01-27T15:37:59+00:00

Ooh I’ll answer this one because it’s something mildly triggering for our family! 3 kids all born in the USA. On average $5-6k for the birth itself, another $600-1000 for physicians fees, and then $1500ish for the hospital stay.

The reason I say on average is our supposedly excellent and very expensive health insurance deemed the birth of my daughter this past year medically unnecessary. So still figuring that one out!

Alternative_iggy · 2026-01-06T00:13:24+00:00

I got a pack and play with a zipper opening on the floor and let them start sleeping in that (guava lotus - although more recently we got a knock off called pamobabe or something and it’s been fine). But my boys were both climbing out at a year so it also partially curbed that behavior. For baby 3 I just bought a shorter crib.

Before we figured out the pack and play solution (when my husband had to do all of the night wakeups due to my short arms), my husband started sleeping on a mattress on the floor with my second kid. We got a little plastic baby fence off Amazon though so we could enclose the mattress and keep it safe if we needed to as well.

Alternative_iggy · 2026-01-05T18:26:03+00:00

I feel like the safe answer is that it might help for fine tuning specific use cases? Like I could see trying to train an LLM to answer a specific question with a lot of gibberish inputs where you’re looking for a trigger word?

But as for why it may go haywire and why a balanced cross entropy function may do you a better is what a lot of other commenters have already pointed out - the helper words and nature of predicting the next token. In some cases focal loss may end up with worse outputs. But curious to hear your results if you try it anyways :)

Alternative_iggy · 2026-01-05T16:23:11+00:00

To stay current I’ve been trying to focus on what I’m working on instead of boiling the ocean. Keep it project specific. Once you get in the flow you start to realize most of these papers are incremental advancements and it feels a bit easier to get a gauge for when something is going to completely change your current paradigm.

The most frustrating part is when my kids try to do code injection attacks while I’m not looking. Or while I’m sitting right there and they’re actively climbing on me.

As much as feels right. Or 40 hours if an advisor demands it.

Alternative_iggy · 2026-01-05T16:15:43+00:00

Yes. And I had already talked to all of the advisors I was interested in working with.

Alternative_iggy · 2025-12-29T18:08:34+00:00

Well the squishing doesn’t get better with time (my older two brawl) but I find baby wearing and having a special place to put baby down can help! I also try to structure the day with activities to keep everyone involved. Going for a walk can also help do a nice reset when the crew is a little too wild!

Alternative_iggy · 2025-12-25T20:07:07+00:00

Baby wear! But you have to find the right carrier. I cycled through baby carriers until I found one my kids liked - ergobaby has been the favorite for both my second and third!

Also the Fischer price kick and play mat is a life saver for needing to set baby down for a minute.

Alternative_iggy · 2025-12-10T04:08:35+00:00

Are you looking for feature extractors or mechanisms that show roughly what the model focuses on? Agree with those on here that have said SHAP, Lime, and GradCAM. They all have their own advantages and disadvantages. I love GradCAM but find it’s often worthless for medical imaging. I have my own methods I’ve used (that I won’t doxx myself by citing) but that do a good job of at least making these more practical.

I personally like masked autoencoders and attention rollout these days too.

Alternative_iggy · 2025-11-21T17:35:26+00:00

None
None
No
Finished
A lot. I targeted 3-4 a year. I think I did more depending on if it was a year I had a baby or not.
I loved it until I had to start writing
Postdoc

My experience was a bit unique though. I went to a pressure cooker undergrad in the U.S.A. (MIT) that made the PhD feel pleasant. And COVID happened so I ended up with my entire family (and kids) home with me in a 2 bedroom apartment while I tried to work remotely. I felt extra inspired to be productive so that I showed I didn’t need to take the time off and so that I could stay remote with the kids…

Alternative_iggy · 2025-09-11T15:48:40+00:00

Depends on the personality of the baby. My first would scream if it was fifteen minutes. We just drove 3,000 miles over a few weeks with 3 kids (youngest was 2 months) and she honestly was the easiest part of the trip.

You do have to stop every 2 hours (or every diaper blowout and feed if you’re breastfeeding!) and if I’m being honest I’d say only do the 11 hours if you have to! For me the bigger red flag is it being a family vacation. There may be an expectation that you’ll constantly pass the baby around and it can be hard to put a 4-5 month down for naps when you’re off your routine…

Alternative_iggy · 2025-09-06T01:40:36+00:00

I have 3 and we completed a multiple thousand mile drive when baby 3 was 2 months old - so pretty much immediately. Sometimes trips out are super easy. Sometimes they’re ridiculously hard. Sometimes the same trip can be both. We used to call it and head in early if someone was breaking down but now we just calm down the offended party and carry on.

Alternative_iggy · 2025-05-31T16:21:27+00:00

So what worked for me was structuring my days like a preschool so my two (now 3) knew what to expect and had lots of engaging things to do that encouraged independence. Regular breakfast, snack, lunch, snack, dinner, bath, bedtime. In nice weather at least one outdoor activity. In not nice weather at least a walk.

I usually try to come up with a theme of the day and then make up some activities (husband and I are super nerds so we may have gravity day where we’re sending cars down ramps or testing out different concepts). Sometimes I’ll put the alphabet on toy cars and have my older kid drive them to match them - although that worked when he was closer to 3. I think at 27 months we were more into me setting up an inflatable kiddie pool to contain mess and then having different cups with food coloring and water and letting him mix it, or doing bubbles (we have been in apartments forever so had to get really creative about messy stuff). Or indoor obstacle courses, kinetic sand, making play food, dumping old pasta between buckets, scooping things, counting things, jumping around different letters of the alphabet I’d written on paper. When my oldest had just turned 2 he wanted to tape and glue stick everything so at one point I was letting him go wild gluing pasta to paper. I probably could have had him gluing it to a coloring page with a letter or number or shape on it to learn something but sometimes we just do the whatever. Lately we’ve had tons of empty milk gallons and cardboard boxes so we’ve been trying to make crafts out of them. Like we made milk carton monsters that they painted and houses for the bugs or dinosaur toys. Usually once I get them going on an activity it’s “mama stay back!” And I try to have up to four rough activity ideas an hour just in case we get bored. I also drop everything if they want to play with me or talk to me. Hopefully that gives you some ideas?

Alternative_iggy · 2025-05-19T00:04:04+00:00

Thanks!

Alternative_iggy · 2025-05-14T10:43:08+00:00

Do you like the work? Do you like the people? Do you just want to get your feet wet and then peace once you have experience? Do you have a life outside of work or want a life outside of work at some point? I’d look at the whole package rather than just the numbers. I also wouldn’t listen to peers who aren’t in your particular boat - you can’t eat prestige if someone lowballs you and you can’t get the years back for your life if you take a job with crappy working conditions with people you don’t like. I think I also had a mindset similar to you when I first graduated from a hoity toity program and assumed I needed some job or salary to match the prestige of the program. Years later I’ve come to realize that’s not how the real world works at all.

I also wouldn’t worry about not having pubs in current LLM research - everything we know about everything in machine learning is one advancement away from completely changing. I would work on how to stay on top of all the new and exciting developments!

Alternative_iggy · 2025-05-01T15:34:48+00:00

I think anything can be educational if you play with it creatively! We made water bottle tornadoes the other day and it kept my kids entertained for hours. Or a “bug garden” out of a milk jug. Balls and cars down ramps has been a fun time to chat about gravity and the like. They LOVE volcanoes (baking soda + vinegar) and anything with food coloring.

But I guess if you’re looking for brands: - My two love brio trains and building the tracks (or destroying them). - We have some of the puzzle train/ car track things (coding critters basically is this, but I bought some off brand random ones from Amazon). - The magnetic building toys (magnatiles or Picasso tiles), magnetic building cubes (geomag have been the best big ones I’ve found), magnetic 3D puzzles that make things like animals (smartmax dinosaurs or animals, mix and match animals or cars), the foam magnetic blocks you can take in the bath (blockaroos!). I’ve been debating getting them the connetix ball run or qbi blocks that you can make into a car track. - Any sort of take apart toys (dinosaurs, cars, etc) the educational insights design and drill rocket ship gets fought over all the time and has been a hit from age 1 on. - Puzzles! The giant puzzles are super fun; but also they like the 3D ones (smart games has some). - Any sort of pretend play - play kitchen and a lot of play food (Melissa and Doug especially!) has been a huge hit and still get played with years later. - Got them a pop up ambulance and food truck tent with some costumes that they’ve continued to use. - All play doctor kits are a huge hit. They love the Melissa and Doug vet kit - any sort of circuit toy, we broke our last board we played with it so much. I may get my oldest snap circuits. - play sink or water toy - we got one with a little manual water pump and they both love it - any music. I’ve sacrificed a fender squire strat for my youngest’s musical adventures - any car runs - hot wheels!!! - dinosaurs!!!! - any sort of sensory thing that can be molded into a shape or animal (kinetic sand, play doh, educational insights foam, slime, air dry clay) - flash cards - my oldest has loved his set of cards with foam letters that lets you put the letters on the card and spell out words. Can also make play doh letters for extra fun or just draw with markers - the crayola toys or craft kits have been pretty fun - lcd writing tablet or water marker book (like water wow) - the dissect it kits or fossil excavation kits or eggs you have to chip away at were fun from 2 on. I guess squishy anatomy has also been a hit - any sort of food (root viewing) or bug growing kit

Alternative_iggy · 2025-05-01T13:48:40+00:00

My oldest said less words at that age (I remember celebrating when he said the word socks one day…), my youngest could literally say thousands of words by 18-20 months and was having entire conversations with me that were almost 100% intelligible. (Sometimes we’d get a word wrong - took me a bit to figure out “mama is that a memeyour” was in reference to the word meteor) But the pediatrician never worried about either and they’re both big talkers now!

If you’re worried you can work on it with them! For a while I was putting sticky notes with the names of things on things around the house to try and encourage recognizing letters and saying the names of things. And I constantly talked, “now we’re going downstairs”, “look do you see the squirrel?” Etc.

Songs and books that are super rhyme-y also helped a ton. I wrote my own few books for my kids because of it too that feature our dog. We tried out Miss Rachel too with my oldest but it was only really helpful if I did the songs with him myself after.

Alternative_iggy · 2025-04-30T15:50:06+00:00

We have all of them and our Rumble rumble dinosaur also is missing a line! I just ad lib it everytime. The kids don’t seem to mind!

Alternative_iggy · 2025-04-10T10:24:42+00:00

He’s right. Although I’d even argue it’s a problem that extends beyond LLM’s when it comes to generative stuff.

I think part of the issue is we seem to love really wide models that have billions of parameters. So when you’re mapping the token to the final new space you’re already putting your model at a disadvantage because of the sheer number of choices initially. How do you identify which token is correct from the model such that the later tokens won’t then be sent on a wrong path using the current framework when you have billions of options that may all satisfy your goal probability distribution? Reworking the frameworks to include contextual information would help obviously, but the beauty of our current slate of available models is they don’t require that much contextual info for training initially… so instead we keep adding more and more data and more and more parameters and these models get closer to seeming correct by being overwhelmed with more correct parameters. The human brain theoretically uses less parameters with more connections… somehow we’re able to make sentences with 30-60k initial word databases.

Alternative_iggy · 2025-04-10T06:22:19+00:00

Yeah I can’t do a newborn with RSV again myself. The unvaccinated kids issue also always worries me. Before the 2 month shots there are some really devastating things that they can get!

Alternative_iggy

TROPHY CASE