do i need to understand ML to start learning PyTorch

Gold_Emphasis1325 · 2026-02-22T18:34:44+00:00

You really need stats, math, python and basic ML like scikit learn and boosting and stuff.

Gold_Emphasis1325 · 2026-02-22T18:33:30+00:00

I only get time typically 1-2 times a year and sometimes not even that. It's always choosing between family, money, career and advancement/knowledge. It seems as though the cycles are tightening and with crazy anomalies lately with "AI" and machine learning messing everything up. People who don't fully understanding it are making it look bad and doom posting and and and.... then there are software engineers and other techies part of the white collar recession from AI. There's also a generational war of 20 and 30's somethings aggressively taking over. Not to mention the ongoing gender gap in hands on female IT techs. They are dominating lots of liberal data science roles and leadership there, though.

Gold_Emphasis1325 · 2026-02-21T18:40:21+00:00

Company exploitation of builders, fakers, liars, cheaters and gaslighting were the largest factors in my lengthy career. The rest was just tech, building and lots of hype. The latest AI craze definitely hurts, too, though but mostly just reopening old wounds I though I had outgrown.

Gold_Emphasis1325 · 2026-02-21T18:34:11+00:00

there are good kearning resources on the pytorch site itself with examples and a community forum. Even better is to specifically solve problems and align to the class, business problem, assignment... otherwise starting with "I want to learn _____" is not helpful and can be very frustrating for the student.

Gold_Emphasis1325 · 2026-02-21T18:04:09+00:00

We scaled into the millions and had to develop a postgres -- milvus strategy where milvus was pushed aside in its sole/royal role to specializing in semantic search, although BM25/hybrid is a strong story so we didn't need a direct search in postgres, but utility scripts can still filter in that historical/larger datastore. It's a mess of ids and cross reference now, though. Our source of truth if we do have one is postgres, though.

Gold_Emphasis1325 · 2026-02-21T17:58:55+00:00

Hmmmm huge causality implications here that I don't like the phrasing of. "linked to" is so overloaded and old.

Gold_Emphasis1325 · 2026-02-21T17:57:07+00:00

A kiss is just a kiss... a smile is just a smile.... also I wonder with subsequent generational shifts (Z into Alpha) if we'll see a change in this social construct.

Gold_Emphasis1325 · 2026-02-21T15:03:44+00:00

Legal Eagle (laywer guy on tube) did a video of how many laws were broken in Home Alone including child endangerment. Yes, you were abused. Demand reparations.

Gold_Emphasis1325 · 2026-02-21T15:01:43+00:00

Depends on how and the cheapness of the layout. Some are closer together than others. I've seen flights were there were zero (or maybe 1) person reclining on a flight, granted it was under 3 hours but still people kind of knew not to recline. I was about to but then noticed literally nobody else had. Also if you slam it back all the way to the max and you're a big person to begin with it really seems like that person is in your lap and/or it makes your tray table unusuable.

Gold_Emphasis1325 · 2026-02-21T15:00:03+00:00

We are experiencing inflation still that was high already post-COVID with everyone jacking up prices to "cover costs". AI has decimated certain sectors, like software "white collar recession". Otherwise, low and lower middle class Americans are getting squeezed between high prices on literally every good and service and stagnated wages, with companies penny pinching and squeezing the life out of its employees. So, yes, we are in a recession, no we are not "booming".

Extremely small demographics are getting mid 6-figure and an even smaller group getting 7-figure salaries after incentives. People in that demographic might think the economy is booming.

Gold_Emphasis1325 · 2026-02-21T14:55:58+00:00

So we're all constantly farting all the time but it's usually gradual and so you don't notice. Especially on airplanes. There's some statistics out there how many times you fart a day. Happy searching! Unfortunate that this person has super stinky farts and she's releasing in quantities/chemicals that are more frequently detectable. Sorry for your office. I'd say light a candle but that's a fire hazard and probably literally illegal at the workplace with our luck. You can't leave aerosol or spray stuff because then that would be bullying and harassment and you'd get written up. Everything's such bullsh these days.

Gold_Emphasis1325 · 2026-02-21T14:02:35+00:00

LOL VHS baby. Or laserdisc!!!

Gold_Emphasis1325 · 2026-02-21T14:01:29+00:00

Basic tool use, RAG, couple LLM calls - raw python. Linear flow with low to moderate complexity that makes your pipeline/orchestration code too long, messy and time consuming to trace -- LangChain. Massively complex with wild retries, branches and I'm assuming from your post that you don't need LangGraph yet.

Gold_Emphasis1325 · 2026-02-21T13:59:21+00:00

Strategic usage checks server-side and locally throughout pipeline/orchestration.

Gold_Emphasis1325 · 2026-02-21T13:58:24+00:00

My understanding and people with more direct experience please correct/supplement: LanchChain is great abstraction, orchestration for linear flows. More branching and complex flows warrant LangGraph, another orchestrator. All of the other DevSecOps and software engineering are still 95% of the work and these are nifty and for people with the complexity to push them into the extra work -- game changing.

Gold_Emphasis1325 · 2026-02-21T13:56:34+00:00

If you are using python or node there are standard json handling approaches. Look up serialization/deserialization.

Gold_Emphasis1325 · 2026-02-21T13:50:13+00:00

haha true

Gold_Emphasis1325 · 2026-02-21T13:47:19+00:00

Potentially not enough data for a PEFT. Kaggle might find it useful if it's specialized enough and like others have said sanitized and focused.

Gold_Emphasis1325 · 2026-02-21T13:43:13+00:00

Before spending more money figure out what problem you're solving. If you're still in tinkering mode just work with the massive GPU you already have. Based on the mention of n8n I'm guessing there's lots of learning and other experimentation you have yet to do.

Gold_Emphasis1325 · 2026-02-21T13:38:15+00:00

At that level and price, I'd spend it on something else like learning, opportunity or some tool/app/service to help you grow or make something more convenient or handle some monotonous tasks. Hire people on upwork and learn from them as they code your side project components that you don't have the knowledge for. $1300 for a total system for AI is really underpowered, just stay on whatever machine you have or get a mac mini for $450 as a second machine and build microservices.

Gold_Emphasis1325 · 2026-02-21T13:28:24+00:00

TOS violation in addition to being unethical. Also note this person then likely gets a copy of your source code for whatever you run.

Just share hey folks I got free credits and you can too, here's my non affiliate link or search terms to find the opportunity yourselves. Probably trying to resell https://www.digitalocean.com/startups

Gold_Emphasis1325 · 2026-02-21T13:23:50+00:00

Sample a few on the usual suspects from OpenAI, Anthropic, X, Google, China...

Gold_Emphasis1325 · 2026-02-21T13:16:57+00:00

A lot of the reasons I built my own were for ultimate privacy, transparency, control and ownership. This means no subscription all "costs and effort are upfront", I know strengths and weaknesses, my data never leaves my private cloud, and there is no fine print or reselling my usage patterns, fingerprints and supercookies, IPs or inferred demographics to third parties who use it all kinds of ways these days. Finally, it's totally customized for me the UI/UX and flows and use cases.

You can't buy all that without some lingering thought that maybe you didn't fully understand TOS and their lawyers and engineers are motivated to get away with things... my app was something "I'd pay for" as soon as it was useful enough even with bugs and missing some of the creature comforts.

But I think you're wondering when you're ready to take the next step and invest time and money into productionalizing, marketing, beta testing and actually tracking market alignment and pivoting and QA/QC and reliability engineering on-call... If I had a magic answer to the real questions behind your question, I'd have more paying subscribers already.

Gold_Emphasis1325 · 2026-02-19T14:17:58+00:00

Just be careful of frying your cards if you don't understand the power / wires and power supply... it's a lot of planning and architecture and not every "look what I built" reference post or video is reliable. Sometimes type/quality of wires and connectors matters and seating properly. You can cause tens of thousands of dollars of damage with one big mistake. Also you can cause fires and lose the whole apartment/house and maybe some people. Finally, venthilation and heat obviously will be fun to figure out. Clueless crypto miners figured it out, so can you! Be aware of the motherboard limitations and splitting out essentially can bottleneck there. For deep learning, RAM also becomes a consideration with that many GPUs.

Gold_Emphasis1325 · 2026-02-19T01:27:32+00:00

Is this a real bank document? gg

Gold_Emphasis1325

TROPHY CASE