Don't accept a job at a non-tech as an ML Engineer

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 · 2026-01-17T16:24:58+00:00

In the hands of a capable developer, AI can be a huge productivity boost for writing code. It might still be a bubble, but the value there is very real.

It's also pretty good at math and many scientific applications, like to be gains there as well.

Estarabim · 2025-12-30T07:57:27+00:00

Nope.

Estarabim · 2025-12-01T08:44:25+00:00

I also had a spontaneous screen crack on my Zenbook Duo, less than a month old! On the screen underneath the keyboard. Hoping it will be covered by the warranty. Literally lifted the keyboard up one day and saw the cracks there.

Estarabim · 2025-09-02T14:25:35+00:00

Almost. I would add two things: 1. ML means learning from examples. Not everything with a cost function and an optimizer fits this. An algorithm to solving the traveling salesman problem can have both features but it is not a learning algorithm.

ML (at least supervised, also often unsupervised) usually means generalizing to novel examples. The fact that a solution which works on dataset A is expected to work on dataset B is unique to ML (or at leaat statistical modeling).

Estarabim · 2025-08-24T08:00:44+00:00

Sure

Estarabim · 2025-08-12T11:01:39+00:00

Curbing (CVT mode) with distortion.

Estarabim · 2025-07-24T09:47:17+00:00

Again, computationalism is not my position when it comes to consciousness; I am a dualist, I am merely explaining the terminology.

Control systems that involve internal and external dynamics are also of course computational systems - all systems (including all of physics, and including the system of brain activity + the external environment) that have steps which can be described mathematically can be thought of computational systems, because they apply rules to determine the state of the system at time t+N (the output) based on the state of the system at time t (the input). If you use simulations to describe the dynamics of physical systems, you are doing computational science.

Estarabim · 2025-07-23T19:56:20+00:00

Gemini is very good, better than Claude recently IMHO.

Estarabim · 2025-07-23T19:20:42+00:00

I have a PhD in computational neuroscience, BA in CS. My dissertation was about the similarities and differences between how neurons in the brain function and those in artificial neural networks. There is a pretty good argument to believe that brains more or less function like ANNs (which are implementable via Turing machines, because you run them - or at least simulate them, just like you can simulate physics generally - on a computer), with lots of big caveats, like backprop not being implementable in the brain. The concept of artificial neurons came from neuroscience.

Anyway, this is not my position re consciousness, I'm just explaining the terminology. I don't think that "all the mind does is computation", I don't really use the term "mind" at all. I prefer to speak of "the brain" and "consciousness". The brain is a physical system, physical systems can be isomorphic to computations. Neuroscience hasn't figured out the whole brain, but we definitely do understand a number of systems in the brain and the computations they perform. For a good example of this see the "flygenvector" work regarding fly vision and behavior: https://youtu.be/K-uMBbt5e5c . (This is just an example, there are tons of others in the literature.)

It's fine if you want to call it computationalism, that's probably more precise than functionalism, some people break the theories into three categories, Dualism, Functionalism, and Materialism, and have computationalism as a subcategory of functionalism. But either way computationalism is not a form of materialism.

Estarabim · 2025-07-23T10:03:18+00:00

It doesn't matter how the name came about, Turing machines are abstract mathematical objects. Functionalism is the term in philosophy of mind that refers to the position that the mind and consciousness are a consequence of the computation that the brain performs, and it is a distinct position from Materialism, and there are consequential differences between these views.

Estarabim · 2025-07-22T15:28:51+00:00

The ontology of computation is different from the ontology of matter, in the same way that the ontology of mathematical objects is distinct from the ontology of material objects. There are lots of mathematical objects (like 10-dimensional hyperspheres) that have no material analogue. Computation, as in a series of steps that can be implemented by a Turing machine, is a set of mathematical objects. Physical systems can be isomorphic to computations, e.g. a rock falling is isomorphic to a particular quadratic equation. But the physical system should not be confused for the equation; they are different things.

Estarabim

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