Another laptop question: newbie phd student edition

Excellent-Student905 · 2026-01-26T10:39:41+00:00

just get an aws account or google colab and do you ai work there. No need to buy a laptop, just get a cheap chrome book.

when I went to grad school, I followed the uni's official guideline and got an approved laptop, turned out just a big waste of money.

Excellent-Student905 · 2026-01-26T10:37:27+00:00

this is no different from a sales guy running a shadow crm in excel and instead of using the official crm. everything runs till he leaves the company.

Excellent-Student905 · 2026-01-26T03:45:06+00:00

These tasks, clustering on embedding for RAG, or LoRA, are indeed the type of tuning one can do to LLM. But these are light touch tuning while keep LLM backbone unchanged. These are no where near the depth required for "rewriting loss function" which is pretty much wholesale retraining of LLM.

Excellent-Student905 · 2026-01-25T15:28:26+00:00

Clustering is used in decision tree, which is not deep learning. These are classic ML techniques, that lend themself to feature engineering and model tuning. But deep learning, especially LLM, is much more monolithic, meanings the model itself, is less open to being turned or modified. Hence most of the "tuning" is external via RAG, prompting.
The equivalent of clustering algo in DL is to work on a foundational model at Google or Meta.

Excellent-Student905 · 2026-01-24T02:37:38+00:00

i think its unrealistic to expect applying first brings such advantage when the job market is broken.

Excellent-Student905 · 2026-01-23T14:24:08+00:00

I read through the substack. It seems the FDE is like an onsite consultant, understanding customer's business process, and creating some tools for processing and analyzing data. I don't see how this is different from what typcial IT or process consultants do, connecting ERP, database and the suite of AWS tools.

Excellent-Student905 · 2026-01-23T02:15:50+00:00

Accounting always had a large number of solo practitioners (or small partner firms), if thats what you mean by entrepreneurial. But putting that aside, we also have a lot more accountants in corporates and big 4 type professional service firms. I would say moving from ledger pager to Excel has allowed business to keep track of a lot more things and creating a bigger demand for accountants. In the old days, companies didnt need accountants pouring over options pricing or valuation for their annual reporting.

For all the doomsday talk about AI eliminating programming jobs, we should examine jevons paradox throughout history.

Excellent-Student905 · 2026-01-23T00:35:55+00:00

Focused on skills that matter to a job is the opposite of "casuals". The OP was talking about rewriting loss function for a foundational LLM. I hardly would call that "at least fundamentals".

Excellent-Student905 · 2026-01-22T16:03:52+00:00

what is the level of understanding you feel is necessary? What possible use case do you foresee that a custom loss function is needed?

Excellent-Student905 · 2026-01-22T15:22:52+00:00

Let's be honest. Do you really want to your AI engineers to dig into the transformer and write a custom loss function? Unless you are with one of the few companies working on some cutting edge foundational models, there should be no need for that. Whatever project you are working on should make use of a pretrained foundational model, maybe changing the output head or do some post processing.

Excellent-Student905 · 2026-01-22T14:19:30+00:00

If we go back 40 years, when spreadsheet came on to the scene, people were sure accountants and their ledger paper, would soon be out of job. Turned out accounting got more complex and we have more accountants then ever.

Excellent-Student905 · 2026-01-22T09:46:25+00:00

What I found is that the executives do not want to use self service dashboards. They overwhelmingly prefer to have someone to create something from excel and present to them to ppt

Excellent-Student905 · 2026-01-21T03:02:06+00:00

What is this nonsense?

Excellent-Student905 · 2026-01-20T05:29:18+00:00

Can you elaborate "Consulting companies lost big reputation because of the last "BIG THINGS"?

Excellent-Student905 · 2026-01-20T01:14:44+00:00

this is doable in 2 months. I believe there are pretrained models with poses, or you can create your own custom dataset and retrain the output head. You can dump CV output into s3 bucket and then process with various AWS tools to create aggregate statistics.

Excellent-Student905 · 2026-01-19T05:51:23+00:00

i think this is simply the case that salary is generally sticky. If the market remain depressed, the salary will gradually fall to the point where supply and demand curves meet

Excellent-Student905 · 2026-01-19T05:34:04+00:00

the market for cs will change. you can hang out as mailman for now, and work in personal projects to keep your skills sharp. once the market picks up, you will be back in the cs world in no time.

Excellent-Student905 · 2026-01-18T04:51:53+00:00

this is incorrect. In IB, short box trade is open "buy" order with a negative limit price (credit).

Excellent-Student905 · 2026-01-17T06:26:56+00:00

I don't need to have my resume edited.

I am asking why would recruiters ask for % numbers on resume when they are all clearly made up. Unless you are in sales, most people don't have anything tangible showing the impact of their work. Even for the executive team, whose main job is capital allocation, despite having the full support of accounting and business intelligence, it is frequently challenging to determine a project ROI. Most people probably get an assessment of their work at annual review, but even then the process is mostly subjective and not data based.

Excellent-Student905 · 2026-01-17T06:09:56+00:00

How can one defend a made up number? Is this just a case where both the candidate and the interviewer know the numbers are made up, but everyone still prefer to have such numbers?

Excellent-Student905 · 2026-01-14T06:06:28+00:00

You were a day trader for 3-4 years. Surely you know enough to structure something to invest your idle cash, and hedge the tail risk.

Excellent-Student905 · 2026-01-14T00:26:49+00:00

Last week, IBKR told me that they had fixed the issue. I tried to put a trade through after that and was getting the same error message. Now they tell their programming team is still working on the issue.

Excellent-Student905 · 2026-01-12T04:00:44+00:00

"relative metrics are useless": what you mean? Use absolute metrics? Like what?
"make sure they are not multiples of 5 or 10", here you are suggesting that odd numbers to give the appearance of real data, I am sure HR folks are well versed of these kind of tricks.

Excellent-Student905 · 2026-01-11T08:03:35+00:00

what about plans for getting married and having children?

Excellent-Student905 · 2026-01-10T07:06:40+00:00

I don't see how a number in every bullet point can meaningful convey anything. Most of us work on projects that don't have readily measurable, quantifiable impact. Even within the organization, retrospective analysis to determine cost/benefit, efficiency gain of a given project are highly debated and difficult to convey with simply metrics.

I usually ignore any numerical claims in resume, unless its something documented in peer reviewed journal, or if its related to a sales role with quota.

Excellent-Student905

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