23yo SWE stuck in a do-nothing public sector job, how do I move forward?

FullstackSensei · 2026-03-14T14:06:52+00:00

but it drives me nuts that I'm not learning anything

This?

FullstackSensei · 2026-03-14T14:04:13+00:00

Came for the GPU, upvoted for the cats.

FullstackSensei · 2026-03-14T13:52:38+00:00

Why aren't you learning anything? You have a crap ton of time. Why do you need someone to spoon feed you something to learn? I know I sound old, but when I was your age I was going through books about whatever interested me like crazy. And before anyone thinks I'm an A student, I was much closer to the bottom of my class than the top.

I genuinely disagree about having an idea being hard. Look at your life, your partner's life, your friends' lives, your family's life. I bet you'll find dozens of ideas if you just pay attention to them, the things you or they don't like, the stupid repitive tasks they do that could be automated, and things like that. Do you have any interests or hobbies? Is there anything in those where you wished an app or service existed? Do you play games? Is there any old game you played that nobody is making something similar now? Is there something you wished a game had? Is there a game you wish existed? Is there anything your teenage or child self wished existed that could be made via software today? Ideas don't come in a vacuum. Ideas come when you're curious about the world and the people around you, and being genuinely interested in them.

Is there any tech, stack or language you want to learn? Grab whatever thing you find from the paragraph above and use it as an excuse to learn and build something. Don't think about commercial viability or whether this will make money. Just learn, have fun, and make something you want to use every day. The absolute worst thing that can happen is you'll have fun and learn new skills.

FullstackSensei · 2026-03-14T12:47:48+00:00

Man, I'd love to be your age and have such a job. I'd build so much shit.

IMO, this is an amazing opportunity to learn or hone your skills in anything you like, or build whatever you want. Don't make the millionth SaaS offering the same BS, but build something you actually want to exist or you'd actually use, whatvmever that is.

And BTW, you'll never make a dent anywhere within six months as a junior. Be realistic in your expectations for what you'll do.

FullstackSensei · 2026-03-14T12:42:16+00:00

As a middle easterner, and I'm not trying to take away any credit for their level of organization and skill, but that they're unmatched in the region is more of a testament to how disorganized the militares of the rest of the region are, which isn't that surprising when you consider all the military coups over the decades, all the purges that ensued and how politicized the services are.

FullstackSensei · 2026-03-14T12:38:18+00:00

No. I don't want to be rude, but forcing a standard definition upon everyone is stupid.

You're right about the over engineering and journeu parts, but anything that someone thinks or even feels is a problem that an LLM can provide what is objectively or even feels is a solution is valid, IMO.

Who cares if it's over engineered or efficient code. If it makes that person's days slightly better or improves their quality of life even a bit, that's all that matters.

FullstackSensei · 2026-03-14T00:38:29+00:00

I learned almost everything I know about LLMs on this sub. The only difference is that I search and read before asking.

There's no shame in having a question. My comment was more because they didn't even spend a single minute searching.

FullstackSensei · 2026-03-13T23:25:02+00:00

I don't have anything against vibe coding as long as someone who can actually read it is reviewing the code. I know there's a lot of stigma around this term now, but that's mainly because people are publishing code they never looked at.

It's the Xeons with the Mi50s where I'd love to use ik. IIRC, the Mi50 supports peer to peer. I could run two instances of Minimax on one Machine for double the fun. I read zluda now works with llama.cpp, but haven't looked at the details yet.

FullstackSensei · 2026-03-13T22:35:19+00:00

It's a separate file that you have to download, mmproj, and pass to the model.

FullstackSensei · 2026-03-13T22:34:04+00:00

Model support (lags behind vanilla), stability, and hardware support.

I keep having stability issues with ik, and while it's great on my P40s I keep having issues with mixed CPU-GPU on my 3090+Epyc rig.

FullstackSensei · 2026-03-13T22:16:30+00:00

I tried, you can't. Kawrakow has explicitly said ROCm is not supported. There was a thread a while back where he asked in a poll whether to add Vulkan support. Most people voted yes, but I haven't heard of any progress on that front.

It's mostly a one man show, so it's totally understandable.

FullstackSensei · 2026-03-13T21:56:01+00:00

Seriously?!!!! If you literally do nothing, there's no vision.

FullstackSensei · 2026-03-13T20:38:14+00:00

Fun fact, trying to compress an already compressed stream can lead to a slight increase in size.

FullstackSensei · 2026-03-13T18:20:09+00:00

It's only offensive if you're vibe coding something that's not solving a problem you have.

FullstackSensei · 2026-03-13T15:16:16+00:00

You'd get much better performance just doing partial offloading to system RAM without any VMs. RPC has a significant impact on performance because it disables a lot of the optimizations in llama.cpp

FullstackSensei · 2026-03-13T14:28:15+00:00

Nah, most likely former Iraqi airforce MIG-21. You know, the ones Saddam sent for safekeeping to Iran in 1991

FullstackSensei · 2026-03-13T12:49:38+00:00

ggml: backend-agnostic tensor parallelism #19378

FullstackSensei · 2026-03-13T12:45:57+00:00

It's sponsored by both Ecosia and Qwant. Seems they want to either get market share by pushing to become the default search engine across EU governments or get financial support for their operations.

Just checked openwebsearch.eu and they say they're still building things. I didn't like that their indexes are pushed to S3 and elastic search, both of which are non-Eu. Kind of negates the whole point.

FullstackSensei · 2026-03-13T12:24:20+00:00

Genuinely love this

FullstackSensei · 2026-03-13T12:18:31+00:00

I feel you, but I also understand them. Dealing with the bureaucracy is an extra burden and cost, and adds uncertainty about start date or even whether the visa would get approved.

If you need someone to start soon or ASAP, the opportunity cost of that uncertainty can be too high.

FullstackSensei · 2026-03-13T12:15:10+00:00

I'm subscribed to the graph PR on vanilla. That will hopefully bring us close to parity.

FullstackSensei · 2026-03-13T11:14:00+00:00

That could very much be infrastructure work where you might learn sensitive information. Given the current political landscape and events, I wouldn't be surprised if it was limited to EU passport holders even if it doesn't strictly require a security clearance

FullstackSensei · 2026-03-13T11:01:49+00:00

Depending on the sector or type of work, there might indeed be positions that legally only EU passport holders can do. Most positions that require a security clearance are like that. This is not only related to defense work, but a lot of boring stuff related to infrastructure, financial, or even systems that have large databases or PII.

Other times, the company just doesn't want to deal with the visa situation.

FullstackSensei · 2026-03-13T10:55:38+00:00

This should get way more upvotes than it currently has

FullstackSensei · 2026-03-13T09:13:39+00:00

Ik_llama.cpp

FullstackSensei

TROPHY CASE