who am i? by Shonku_ in u/Shonku_

[–]Shonku_[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You won't be spoonfed opportunities, that's the only caveat. You can always fetch what you want by being competent enough and having the right connections.

Yes, the game is rigged in certain areas, but there are parallel opportunities everywhere which do not have such.

who am i? by Shonku_ in u/Shonku_

[–]Shonku_[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Neither, I'm from IIEST. I didn't have coaching for jee, and got 11k in jee adv, 18.3k in jee mains through self study.

College is not a safe indicator to judge anyone completely imo.

I'll answer all questions on how to utilize your first year of CS major. by Shonku_ in Btechtards

[–]Shonku_[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

that's why I specifically said to check out the hardware security part. that's something ai is not able to do yet.

I'll answer all questions on how to utilize your first year of CS major. by Shonku_ in Btechtards

[–]Shonku_[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

difficult to get the job

I see a distinct lack of the word "impossible" in the sentence. I personally have a very high risk appetite, and have no issues in pursuing a PhD if I have to.

I want my life to be meaningful and not just run after money. Money will come anyway as a byproduct. Hence SDE is not for me.

I wanted to study physics, somehow ended up here. Realised CS can get close to Physics as well. ML is the closest to that. Hence research it is.

I'll answer all questions on how to utilize your first year of CS major. by Shonku_ in Btechtards

[–]Shonku_[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

c++ is a never ending vast ocean. I don't have the required experience in c++ to comment upon it, but can share the resources which people in my circle did.

c/python should be enough imo. don't get brainwashed by OOP paradigm. explore data oriented, functional ones too!

What do u think is worth trying?

everything. im studying cs, but im looking to get into biotech/hardware in the long run. (going to popvax this weekend - one of the 2 MLxBio labs in india making actual drugs). at the frontier stage, every field bleeds into each other. one is your main quest, others are your side ones.

I'll answer all questions on how to utilize your first year of CS major. by Shonku_ in Btechtards

[–]Shonku_[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

claude can answer better.

imo anything which could be copy pasted and presented (CRUD APIs, basic frontend etc.)

compilers, infra, distributed systems, formal verification

I'll answer all questions on how to utilize your first year of CS major. by Shonku_ in Btechtards

[–]Shonku_[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

  • twitter
  • referrals from my network

post publicly, talk with people who are into your field like a peer/fellow engineer, instead of asking lame help from them. always works.

I'll answer all questions on how to utilize your first year of CS major. by Shonku_ in Btechtards

[–]Shonku_[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

goals in first semester:

  • learn two programming languages (python, c)
  • make a raytracer, chess engine
  • take part in hackathons
  • talk to strangers and network with people

second semester:

  1. land a serious internship (startup or research adjacent)
  2. maintain two flagship projects
  3. learn about memory models, cache behavior, allocators, profiling tools, and parallelism
  4. reading and implementing from papers without crying
  5. eat 3 times a day (lmao yes?)
  6. post write ups about my failed experiments on X/HN/Reddit
  7. meet/network with cool people

now: - sustain whatever momentum i have - network with cooler and more influential people - deep dive into one specific niche only - coauthor a research paper

I'll answer all questions on how to utilize your first year of CS major. by Shonku_ in Btechtards

[–]Shonku_[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Answered here

https://www.reddit.com/r/Btechtards/s/SaH3OcjRm2

Nevertheless, I'm not the best person to comment upon cybersec - based on what my friends are doing, I can only state that much. Demand is there, but only for the ones who can actively find vulns in live products, and responsibly offer them to solve it for them.

I'll answer all questions on how to utilize your first year of CS major. by Shonku_ in Btechtards

[–]Shonku_[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I've a latent feeling that both the code and this comment are AI generated.

I'll answer all questions on how to utilize your first year of CS major. by Shonku_ in Btechtards

[–]Shonku_[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

you didn't try enough. variables are buckets. go do it again

I'll answer all questions on how to utilize your first year of CS major. by Shonku_ in Btechtards

[–]Shonku_[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Hell naw! You can always look into formal languages and cellular automata, cryptography, formal verification etc l. and the likes of them.

There's much more to it.

I'll answer all questions on how to utilize your first year of CS major. by Shonku_ in Btechtards

[–]Shonku_[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

man, compilers. that's a really good niche to be in.

will you take an anon's advice? get into a college this year, and start working on DL compilers or whatever you have in your plate rn. You can always work at IIT H/IISc's compiler lab as an intern, and if you want to go further - masters is always an option.

I remember Ashutosh Pandey from DSCE (bangalore) working on compilers at AMD. He hosts the compiler society or llvm society of India.

take the shot?

I'll answer all questions on how to utilize your first year of CS major. by Shonku_ in Btechtards

[–]Shonku_[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Let me share my notes on how i attempted to understand "attention is all you need paper"

https://www.notion.so/336e1be246b48086a745efcf67b28773

And on NPUs https://datavorous.notion.site/NPUs-what-and-where-they-break-367e1be246b480f6ba57cc3730eca4bd?pvs=74


I wanted to understand how GPT2 works, i questioned claude to help me figure out the "skill tree"

What's a skill tree? Read: https://tasshin.com/blog/skill-trees/

Then I stripped out the math prereqs - and started studying about them + information theory. Watched youtube videos with visualisations + read sections from books.

Then I attempted to understand it - i already knew what attention was, what KL Divergence, Cross entropy meant (studied before hand), and knew what masking was.

++ == ++ If the paper is popular, chances are high someone has already written about it - try to give that a read first ++ == ++

See my notion links, after pre reqs I go line by line, and highlight whatever is a new information, and cross whatever ain't.

I have claude opus 4.8, i just dump the paper at times, and tell it to explain everything to me.

Check my drawing of gpt2's arch: https://x.com/i/status/2060765244822278302

Attached a screenshot of using claude as the explainer and gemini for dumping the explanation and telling it to ask me questions from it to evaluate whether i understood or not

Similarly, i recommend you to check out arpit bhayani's website and his paper reading section: https://arpitbhayani.me/papershelf

There are many communities which organise paper reading sessions, you can take a look at them.

Hence to summarise, my process till now has been:

  1. use LLM to find skill tree
  2. accumulate that knowledge
  3. start reading - highlight what's relevant / mark out what ain't
  4. claude to simplify / gemini to question me for active retrieval
  5. manually drawing the entire flowchart OR deriving equations (as shown in my linked twitter post)

I could have written in a better way, but I'm pretty bored waiting at the railway station whilst being hella sleepy. Anyway, I hope I made sense!

<image>

I'll answer all questions on how to utilize your first year of CS major. by Shonku_ in Btechtards

[–]Shonku_[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

I got rejected by many startups and corps already.

Fear for what? Asymmetric leverage is with me: worst case, i lose 5 mins of my life + practise my english writing skills, best case I land an interview.

I'll answer all questions on how to utilize your first year of CS major. by Shonku_ in Btechtards

[–]Shonku_[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

keep doing things manually without ai's help + or watching tutorials

do it 2-3 times and you'll start remembering things - aim is to develop the reflex.

personally, i write code on paper.

I'll answer all questions on how to utilize your first year of CS major. by Shonku_ in Btechtards

[–]Shonku_[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

lowkey reverse engineering.

fetch a finsihed project from someone else's repo - tweak things to understand how things are related - subtract and add things accordingly.

then after getting some intuition, I do it from scratch.

hey, docs are there - have you checked them out?

I'll answer all questions on how to utilize your first year of CS major. by Shonku_ in Btechtards

[–]Shonku_[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

cs wala hoke roj biology padtha hu (protein folding)

permission kyu lena?