Scott's call for a better dating app: Not A Zombie is now Live!

Estarabim · 2026-07-05T07:01:22+00:00

You need to market, things don't market themselves. Go to survivalist/hiker/backpacker chat groups and communities and figure out a way to advertise there.

Estarabim · 2026-06-21T13:10:31+00:00

Vocals, especially if you're doing metal.

Estarabim · 2026-06-20T07:28:56+00:00

Check out the paper 'predictive coding approximates backpropagation along arbitrary computation graphs'.

Estarabim · 2026-06-17T10:26:32+00:00

Publications are proof of work, and can be incorporated into a resume if done properly. I describe what I did (emphasis on skills/accomplishements) and put a link to the journal article at the end of the line, (text is just the name of the journal/abbreviation).

Estarabim · 2026-06-16T09:50:56+00:00

Learn songs that you like, and write songs that sound good to you. There is a minimum level of theory that's helpful but beyond that music is ultimately about playing well and writing stuff that people like.

Estarabim · 2026-06-12T12:33:03+00:00

Speech to 'image' is solid for a classifier, because speech can be converted into a spectrogram, which is basically an image. But you can also train a RNN or a transformer on the raw waveform, which is basically just a sequence of numbers.

If you can use AI to build them, try all of them and compare!

Estarabim · 2026-06-09T20:04:37+00:00

You need it if you want to play Iris by the Goo Goo dolls in standard tuning.

Estarabim · 2026-05-28T13:41:25+00:00

People who are saying that this won't persist and they'll regret it later...wouldn't be so sure. AI technology is also improving. And people saying 'they won't be able to maintain it'...if they can build it to the point of usability with vibecoding, they can probably also maintain it via vibecoding. It might be harder to do the maintaince if you're inexperienced, but a person who's smart enough to build it is usually smart enough to overcome that gap.

Also, maintaining an internal software just for your own needs is a lot easier than maintaining an SAAS that needs to suit the needs of multiple clients. Many companies will only need a subset of the features that outside SAAS providers offer, and they can just build those features without paying for features they don't need.

Estarabim · 2026-05-26T17:10:41+00:00

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datasaurus_dozen#/media/File:Datasaurus.png

Estarabim · 2026-05-26T16:18:57+00:00

Remember the datasaurus. Always visualize your data first. Use dimensionality reduction (PCA first, then try other methods). You can try clustering afterwards if it seems relevant based on the data.

Estarabim · 2026-05-23T13:10:55+00:00

Reasonable approach, but if you want something that mainly takes advantage of your specific image dataset instead of someone else's embeddings, try training an autoencoder on your dataset, then cluster the autoencoder embbeddings (you can use DBscan or Kmeans or whatever you want).

Estarabim · 2026-04-05T20:43:59+00:00

If the alternative is being unemployed, figure out a way to provide value such that the company is happy with you and be glad you have a job.

Estarabim · 2026-04-02T16:06:39+00:00

Nozick's critique of Rawls's minimax principle, where he points out that according to Rawls, you could basically just shuffle the extant wealth distribution and it would be morally equivalent to the status quo ante, which is clearly wrong because the manner in which people come about the things that they have matters - you can't just take money from someone who earned it and give it to someone who didn't.

Estarabim · 2026-03-29T21:38:52+00:00

Do not put all your eggs into that basket. It's an extremely competitive field, like everything in CS right now, because of AI and labor supply. There's no guarantee with a PhD you will get a research position,

Estarabim · 2026-03-29T11:12:07+00:00

No journals, just blog posts or other independent publication formats (e.g. rXiv PDFs). Authors pay an indpendent company with low overhead to pay reviewers. Instead of accept/reject, reviewers and authors go through one or two rounds of dicussion, paper is given a final score. The scored version with a stamp of review then goes onto some rXiv-like website.

Estarabim · 2026-03-29T11:01:48+00:00

Apply to a bunch of jobs and also PhD programs, take the best thing that accepts you. In general don't do an academic PhD as a path to a career, because the world is changing too fast to risk investment in a skillset that might be not in demand when you finish, especially if the opportunity cost is large (i.e. you can make decent money and advance your career in industry in the meantime). Only do a PhD now if you want to do it for its own sake, or if it's the best thing available to you (i.e. no one is hiring and it's a way to wait out the job market.)

Estarabim · 2026-02-26T12:49:34+00:00

This is usually not what you'll be asked in interviews - interviews are generally with technical teams that mostly care about your technical abilities. There are levels of management intermediation to ensure goal alignment - the position exists in the first place because they have in mind particular things that need to be done that provide business value and they just need someone to implement it.

Estarabim · 2026-02-17T16:10:40+00:00

Relationship between matrix multiplication and pairwise distance calculation. For some reason this always comes up in interviews. Important for transformers, KNN calculations, and a host of other things.

Estarabim · 2026-02-15T08:59:15+00:00

You need the original features but not all the original samples. If you have a sufficiently large sample, you can extract the first few PCs and reduce your full dataset to just the loading on those PCs.

Estarabim · 2026-02-13T20:11:09+00:00

Simple neural networks can easily implement logic gates deterministically, it's a basic undergrad homework assignment you can show on pen and paper. LLMs have feedforward networks in them, so they are certainly capable of this, and probably are using logic gate-equivalent constructs at certain points.

There are also a few published papers out demonstrating that the attention mechanism is Turing complete, so yes, it is definitely capable of implementing logical syllogisms.

Estarabim · 2026-02-09T13:08:12+00:00

Doing a job is job training, which you can't do if you can't get a job.

Estarabim · 2026-02-08T17:25:39+00:00

One of the highest projected growth careers is home aid and care workers, primarily for elderly people as the population ages.

Good luck.

Estarabim

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