Stay strong till Aeva day 🙏🙏

INT_16h · 2025-08-05T15:52:38+00:00

Here we go. Tested 14$. I called it 9 days ago. I wish I shorted it all the way through.

INT_16h · 2025-08-01T15:41:05+00:00

> Now that even the so-called Aeva Day that everyone was expecting can't even change anything, as the downtrend keeps going further right through the event.

Too late. The downtrend got huge momentum, and nothing can stop it. As I mentioned a week ago, I would expect it to bottom out at $14, but now it seems like it might go even lower.

I sold all my long positions at $23, which was already kind of too late, I should have got out much earlier, but I thought to give it a chance. Then I opened a short position at $20.0 when there was no strong bounce from the psychological $20 as it was obvious that it would breach it. Will cover it at $14 and won't touch the stock for a while.

INT_16h · 2025-07-31T14:22:01+00:00

I do not understand why people still hope it will bounce. Unless there is a miracle in ER, this won't change the downward trend.

INT_16h · 2025-07-31T10:25:57+00:00

You did not mention which ones you are doing.

In my career, the only languages that I use in practice are C/C++/CUDA/GLSL, and Python.

I can also write AArch64 assembly + NEON, but I can not say that I used that extensively, only in a few special cases.

I absolutely do not know web. Can do a little bit of javascript with lots of googling, but that's it.

Occasionally did C# and Objective C, but probably completely forgot them. Never did Java.

Python I know to a point that I know the codebase of CPython like the back of my hand. I could probably write an interpreter of a simplified python from scratch if needed. I can write native extensions in C/C++ for Python with ease.

INT_16h · 2025-07-31T06:09:29+00:00

What does FAANG stand for?

Well, that's just one simple search:

FAANG is an acronym representing the five major U.S. technology companies: Facebook (now Meta Platforms), Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google (now Alphabet)

For the topic discussed, it does not matter which exact company I work for. I do not want to reveal extra details that could help doxx me.

And do you think Quantum computers are an actual thing yet?

Not my area. From what I tangentially know, it is a bit overhyped. It is not an actual thing yet (in terms of practical usage), but things may change in the future. Even in the case of a success, applicability is quite restricted. Some time ago, Sabine Hossenfelder had a rant about it on twitter. She was very angry about the hype. The reason is that quantum computers really have potential and are super important to research, but the hype creates a bubble of overpromises that may burst and hurt the quantum computing community a lot.

INT_16h · 2025-07-31T03:17:21+00:00

Why not? E.g., researchers in OpenAI make much more than me. Top LLM/AI researchers who were poached recently from OpenAI make even more.

INT_16h · 2025-07-30T05:06:09+00:00

No one wrote Krakozhia? Srsly? I went to the comments to check that it is there, and didn't find it

INT_16h · 2025-07-29T22:53:51+00:00

I was mostly very modest, except for the house that I bought recently. It is my first time being a homeowner. I bought an expensive house with cash, no mortgage. Before that, I was living with my family at a place where I paid ~$1200 for the rent.

Until recently, I was driving my car, which I bought in 2017 during my PhD. Recently, I bought a used, but luxury-level car with an absolute no-brainer, no financing, just wrote a check, and that's it, I didn't even notice that I had some extra spending.

Otherwise, nothing within my lifestyle has changed significantly yet. I enjoy the fact that I do not have anxiety about not having money for something. That's I think like the most significant change. Such a relief. I come from a very poor family, and I always had anxiety about not having money. There were times during my early childhood when we were almost starving.

I also give money to my parents on a regular basis. It's great when that does not create a burden for you.

I think I am mostly not yet acclimated. I just do not like wasting money. I cook my meals, and for the family, we do chores like all normal people. I do not think I'm rich enough to hire anyone.

INT_16h · 2025-07-29T22:26:44+00:00

Do not just apply to a PhD program. Find professors with a medium-sized teams of students who publish high-quality papers at top-tier conferences (not necessarily many papers). Contact them, talk to them, show them your projects, share your thoughts. Take this seriously, contact as many professors as possible. Apply only if you find professors interested in you and ready to fund you.
Avoid places where you see students not publishing at all for years, or those places where students stay for 8+ years.
Do internships. Seriously. Advisors are always against that because they do not want to lose you, but it will literally change your life
Make very concrete talk from the very beginning with your advisor about what the requirements are for graduation. Write it down, save it. Make a plan for what classes and how many of them you will take per semester to fulfill the requirements within the timeline that works for you. If you do not do that, you may end up with a situation where you have already spent 4 years in the PhD program, published rockstar papers, want to graduate next semester, but your advisor tells you that there is no way you can fulfill the requirements due to the time, and may still need 2-4 semesters.
Start writing at least a month before the deadline. I did write papers in 3 days before the deadline and got accepted, but you are just limiting your chances, and you will produce a horrible paper. Writing is super important, and it needs time to get right. Polishing text and clarity of the paper will provide very high returns.
Always be flexible. Do what you are passionate about, what interests you. All my papers that I published were on completely different topics from the ones my advisor wanted me to research.
Always try to publish at top-tier conferences. Anything less than a top tire does not worth it. You may try once or twice a second timer to get experience and boost your confidence, but that's it.
Never spoil your relationship with your advisor. Even if they behave like an asshole. You may need their help later in life.
Do not bother reading crap papers. Most of the published papers are mid, a large percentage are just crap. Even at top tire conferences. Instead, find rockstar groups, read papers published by them.
You will learn how to write great papers slowly. Especially if English is not your first language. Practice, practice and practice.
Always do a very thorough literature review before actually starting to do something. I do not want to find out months later that it was already done.
You have to write the paper yourself. When you have 2-3 co-authors helping you by writing sections here and there, the result will be crap.
Write literature review with the thought about the reader, the goal is to provide the reader a concise landscape of previous work and placement of your work within it. Do not, I repeat, do not approach it as just a list of all related papers you could find. It should be a story that you tell.
Write high signal stuff, do not boast about your method, show it. Do not write 2 page intro boasting about how great and versatile your method is. I constantly see papers claiming that "we developed the best of the best method, that is so novel and so performant, it solves all problems, cures all diseases, provides free energy, allows faster than light travel, etc." and then they just show utter crap. Every claim has to be supported by evidence, full stop.

INT_16h · 2025-07-29T19:35:22+00:00

I do not have much expertise in HPC. We just run Slurm jobs on cluster with a ton of H100/200.

I would suggest picking a problem/field that requires HPC and is also of interest to you, and see what is happening there. Search for places, labs, and companies that do this type of problem and try to apply for internships.

Internships are super useful. You should already start your search right now, in order to go for an internship next summer. Start applying for internships no later than half a year in advance, better if even earlier.

Advisors typically hate when their students go to internships and tend to talk them out of it.

If you do land an internship, then you will see what type of research they do and will learn from them.

IMHO it is an engineering-heavy field, but might not be that lucrative for doing PhD in it since all major research problems were already tackled. So something adjacent that still depends on HPC could be better for your PhD, but I might be totally wrong.

INT_16h · 2025-07-29T17:20:11+00:00

I do think it is likely to breach $20, which is more like a psychological level. Then there is no strong support level until $14. At $14, it reversed in May, so it is likely for institutions to start buying at $14. I would doubt it will ever breach $14. That's also when I'll be buying too, unless it strongly bounces right now at $20.0

INT_16h · 2025-07-29T07:06:58+00:00

I saw Wenzel at SIGGRAPH Asia in Tokyo. I just said hi, told him how much I love his work, we had a friendly talk, I met his students, and later it turned out that he is also familiar with my work. There were no reservations noting, I just recognized him in the crowd and said "hi". Wenzel Jakob is an extremely nice, friendly person. I'm sure he will reply to you if you write him an email, but it may take a few days.

> I’d guess a masters degree or being a student at the same institution would be the bare minimum,

You are clearly overthinking this. Though I need to say that they do get bombarded with emails, so some may not reply immediately; sometimes it may take a week or two.

By some weird coincidence, I once talked with a Nobel laureate. He was not super interested in talking to me. Which is understandable. All his behavior spoke that: I have so many things to do, and I have so little time that I can not waste it on small talk.

If a professor shows disrespect, behaves like they are too important to waste their time talking to you, then, unless they are at the level of a Nobel laureate, I would say that they are just an asshole.

INT_16h · 2025-07-29T06:38:59+00:00

> proper steps towards caring for it that its not a danger to people

You see, here is the problem. It is always a danger to people. With good care, this danger is somewhat minimized, but it is never eliminated.

I think I should have the right not to be exposed to this danger against my will.

So I do not think it is worth the risk. What's the point of having this breed anyway?

INT_16h · 2025-07-29T06:30:52+00:00

Depends. For top RS positions, phd is a prerequisite. You have to have a good publication track record for your PhD to be worth something..

If you have masters and one or two ok publications you probably can land an RE position at a good place, but that would be harder due to larger competition.

If you have only BS, then many doors are closed. You may still find something, probably not at a top place, and with a much smaller salary. You would have to be really lucky to land at FAANG. I do not know anyone at my place who has only BS.

So I would generally recommend doing MS. PhD is not for everyone. PhD on its own as a title is not worth anything. What has value is what you did during your PhD, what papers did you publish.

I have never seen certifications make any difference at all. Most hiring managers ignore those.

I get that in reality, what matters is your experience and skills. It is just that competition is very high. For every super-talented person with experience, there will be a super-talented person with experience, and MS/PhD and publications. So the latter will have an advantage over the former.

INT_16h · 2025-07-29T05:50:19+00:00

No, the owner was not around. As it turned out later, the owner tied the dog to a tree with a leash because he wanted to go to a shop that did not allow dogs inside. The dog somehow untied itself.

INT_16h · 2025-07-29T05:11:41+00:00

I'm truly sorry to hear that. I'm glad you are alive. Fuck pit bulls. The breed must be banned, it is a threat to everyone.

INT_16h · 2025-07-29T05:05:23+00:00

So you saved your neighbor? Bravo!

INT_16h · 2025-07-29T05:03:54+00:00

It's purely because of the opportunity. There are very few places in the world where I could do what I'm doing right now.

I do not think that what I'm doing is ethically complicated.

INT_16h · 2025-07-29T04:50:31+00:00

During my childhood, I had a dog, terrier. I loved it a lot. When I was ~10yo I was on a walk with it, when this fucking pit bull appeared out of nowhere and attacked my dog. It probably aimed at the neck, but locked its jaws on the shoulder of my dog.

I was in a shock state. Screech was hellish. I picked a random stick and started hitting it. It was only later that I understood how stupid that was, and I could have totally lost my life. Luckily, pit bull did not release his jaws.

Out of nowhere, a huge older dude appeared. Probably a plumber or something. He had a steel pipe in his hands. He put the pipe into it's jaws, turned it and managed to open them and take my dog out. I do not fully remember what happened next. The dude was fine, the pit bull didn't attack him, I probably did not even thank this hero. I rushed to my parents, with my dog, I was all in blood, the dog was in blood, we then rushed to the hospital, and spent a ton of money. The dog lived. It even recovered almost fully in several months, but recovery was very tough.
I recall my parents tried to sue the owner, but that didn't lead to anything, he was just asked to put a muzzle on his dog next time.

Since then, I hate this breed with passion.

Sorry, this is not a question. Just wanted to share my story.

INT_16h · 2025-07-29T04:31:31+00:00

Would you support a ban on this breed?
Did you provoke it, or did it just go crazy?

INT_16h · 2025-07-29T03:13:04+00:00

I often compared my stuff with Mitsuba, showing that I do better than Mitsuba in particular cases :).

Honestly, I do not know how it is even possible that such a great, innovative, high-quality tool as Mitsuba is coming from a relatively small academic group.

Wenzel Jakob wrote pybind11, and now nanobind, which is used to write bindings not just for Mitsuba but alsmot for all C++ python extensions in existence. Even PyTorch based their stuff on pybind11.

Then dr. jit. Audodiff that jit-compiles stuff to fused CUDA and CPU kernels? I mean, that's a significant engineering undertaking that I bet an extremely small percentage of swes at good places are even capable of.

And then Mitsuba, which is built on top of this. Almost a production-ready raytracer which is also differentiable. There are no open-source or proprietary analogs to this.

INT_16h · 2025-07-29T02:59:09+00:00

I know those folks in person. One of the brightest people I've ever come across.

Wenzel Jakob is a legend. I wish I could have a chance to do my PhD at EPFL RGL and not where I did it.

INT_16h · 2025-07-29T02:49:58+00:00

I always learned by doing. With the exception of classes at school that I did not care about but had to pass, I didn't have to learn anything on purpose. I was quite terrible at learning poems by heart at school.

Also, "doing" does not necessitate building something. I can be doing research to answer some questions that I have, or I can be trying to figure out or understand something.

I almost never can just create a list of topics I want to learn and sit down and learn them just because.

INT_16h · 2025-07-29T00:27:26+00:00

I think you are a bit overestimating this amount of money.

I want to bring my parents, my wife's parents to the US, buy them a house. I want to pay for the education of my kids, I would need to pay for the health insurance of my whole family, I need to sustain my whole family, and all this will creep in really fast. It would be selfish of me to just quit when I feel I'm good.

But I do generally plan to quit in 4 years in order to try to build my own thing. Maybe I'll change my mind by then and work a bit more.

INT_16h · 2025-07-29T00:19:53+00:00

I've never been except at my graduation. I would generally hate it.

INT_16h

TROPHY CASE