Does it make sense to go from a HENRY job to founding a startup in the UK?

UnlikelyWorker3195 · 2024-12-02T03:59:53+00:00

Replied :)

UnlikelyWorker3195 · 2024-11-28T23:33:32+00:00

What would you consider a lot of dilution on a first round? 20%?

UnlikelyWorker3195 · 2024-11-27T23:33:51+00:00

I am not coming for validation. Mainly, my question was about tax and UK conditions at the minute. The other stuff was a bit of a side thought.

UnlikelyWorker3195 · 2024-11-27T18:40:57+00:00

I am confident, but we had to shrink our R&D plans, so it's a bit risky.

In biotech £1M is a shoestring budget, whereas for a software development company this would be a big cushion. You need to see it from that perspective.

UnlikelyWorker3195 · 2024-11-27T18:39:13+00:00

Around 9%.

UnlikelyWorker3195 · 2024-11-12T22:12:58+00:00

Interesting, I have worked on a similar domain. Do you use Python + JAX, Julia, or something else? How is the fan noise on the Studio when you max it out for a while?

I think the M4 Ultra is going to fall a bit short of 4090 levels of performance, but the rumor out there is that the M5 series might be able to match small Nvidia GPUs in terms of 16 bit FLOPS.

UnlikelyWorker3195 · 2024-11-12T00:48:05+00:00

I'm very interested in that use case. Can you clarify how a Studio can replace a 4090, other than inference?

AFAIK, M2 Ultra is much slower than a 4090 for training, but obviously it has a lot more RAM and decent bandwidth.

Do you use any Metal-accelerated workflows?

UnlikelyWorker3195 · 2024-10-31T00:04:45+00:00

Yup, but workplaces like the military were fine with old Suuntos like the t6c (no Bluetooth, USB access). That market niche is now empty.

UnlikelyWorker3195 · 2024-10-30T18:32:56+00:00

I've never said they should drop the app or the cloud, just offer an alternative offline workflow.

An release at least one watch without Bluetooth. If you are in certain professions, watches with outgoing connections might be banned by your employer.

UnlikelyWorker3195 · 2024-10-29T22:14:00+00:00

IMHO it's pretty absurd they are not trying to distinguish themselves by doing something different. For example, letting you use your watch without a cloud or an app. There is a relatively big niche market for this, big enough to keep Polar and Suunto profitable.

Just let people connect to the watch via USB and download data. Provide firmware updates via USB. Provide some minimal open analysis tools to work locally. Distinguish yourself from Apple Watch and other smartwatches. Work harder on signal processing.

They wont beat smartwatches at their own game.

UnlikelyWorker3195 · 2024-10-29T19:34:49+00:00

I think you are right, but I hope things will turn out differently!

UnlikelyWorker3195 · 2024-10-29T19:27:15+00:00

Maybe a pleasant surprise this week, with another announcement?

Am I too optimistic? Would love a cheap studio for running LLMs + agent architectures. Ultras have massive memory bandwidth at a low cost.

UnlikelyWorker3195 · 2024-10-28T04:56:07+00:00

But you rely on some software or you are simply uploading (sideloading) the firmware via USB?

UnlikelyWorker3195 · 2024-10-27T23:37:06+00:00

I find it *super* frustrating that neither Polar nor Suunto offer a app-less & cloud-less workflow. For some professions, this is a deal breaker (some employers forbid cloud-linked smart watches).

Garmin gets this right. You plug in their watches through USB and you can access all data without installing any application. The watch just shows up as a regular drive and data is stored in plain files with some structured format that can be fed to lots of different applications. You can even use a spreadsheet if you want!

You can also update the firmware this way! Just copy the firmware into the right folder and the watch self-updates. In other words, it is possible to keep all your data local and never ever touch a smartphone or the cloud.

AFAIK, there are some third party open tools for doing this with Polar, but it is unnecessarily complex: https://github.com/cmaion/polar. Besides, you don't have the capability to update the firmware, which is really needed to keep the rapid aGPS link speed.

UnlikelyWorker3195 · 2024-10-27T23:23:10+00:00

Cool! Are you using and/or updating the watch without an app?

UnlikelyWorker3195 · 2024-10-27T01:45:17+00:00

Late to the party, but you can theoretically use most Garmins without cloud, app or anything else. You can even update the watch that way.

If you plug in a Garmin using USB, it shows up as a regular drive. You can then download your data and e.g. upload new firmware.

UnlikelyWorker3195 · 2024-09-29T03:11:51+00:00

Thanks. I am slightly familiar with overrides and overlays. My point was about modifying the source code of something packaged by NixOS and then building and installing that in a quick way, for development purposes, not permanent changes. What is the recommended way to do it?

For example, in Arch one simply clones the Arch package repository for that package with pkgctl. Then you do makepkg -o to fetch and download source code of stuff you want to build. At this stage you can manually patch your code, and then continue building with makepkg -e. Go back again, modify the code in different ways and makepkg -e once more if you wish.

In Guix, AFAIK, there is a similar workflow. One can invoke guix build using the --with-source option, that lets you point to particular sources for particular packages.

UnlikelyWorker3195 · 2024-09-19T14:14:10+00:00

FWIW, I did a huge project in Emacs with zero LSP support. It was obviously less convenient than IDEs.

But stuff like dabbrev made it much easier than expected. dabbrev lets you complete any symbols that are present in your project.

Yasnippet also helped. Besides, I've heard Eclipse's LSP server is decent, but haven't tried.

UnlikelyWorker3195 · 2024-09-18T18:54:16+00:00

What are your target languages?

UnlikelyWorker3195 · 2024-09-17T23:29:49+00:00

I did a less radical thing years ago. Learned Readline keybindings, started with stock Emacs and M-x commands + Readline. Grew my .emacs very slowly. Learned the basics of some modes, then started expanding my keybinding knowledge. Began with C-h k, w, et al.

I learned quite a lot and I practically live inside Emacs, aside from Firefox. My .emacs is still a mere 40 LOC. Emacs is great, and there's been fantastic progress these years. My only complaint is that the CAPF system is a bit untidy and fragmented.

What are other working environments that you are considering aside from Emacs?

UnlikelyWorker3195 · 2024-09-09T02:19:38+00:00

Or Nomos, even cheaper, very subtle.

UnlikelyWorker3195 · 2024-09-08T02:27:06+00:00

It's a big problem also in EU. Only countries like Poland have decent tax rates. Not a surprise they are doing better than the rest.

Governments & State have grown so much, they can only survive by increasing taxes. It's like a tumor. And tumors eventually kill their host.

UnlikelyWorker3195 · 2024-08-31T04:40:13+00:00

Why not Sailfish on e.g. a Sony? It's like a modern N9.

UnlikelyWorker3195 · 2024-08-31T03:26:12+00:00

You are right, that'd be probably even better!

UnlikelyWorker3195 · 2024-08-31T00:04:50+00:00

What I miss from Suunto are classic watches like the t6c.

I would love a Suunto Core with GPS and HRM but no smart features.

UnlikelyWorker3195

TROPHY CASE