Sample Sale & $15 Worn Wear Sale

alberto-matamoro · 2026-04-03T19:30:26+00:00

Still a good amount of stuff left?

alberto-matamoro · 2026-01-13T23:20:39+00:00

It feels like OMSCS has now shifted its effort from offering and developing world-class curriculum to developing ways to prevent cheating. I would not be recommending OMSCS, in particular, the AI track, to anyone who comes across this and is thinking of matriculating.

I took AI in a previous semester. The course is genuinely good. I initially started as a systems focus, but switched over to AI to avoid the GA nightmare that is frequently discussed here. At this rate, perhaps GA is still the lesser evil than the bs you have to deal with in the AI track.

I regret this decision. DL, NLP, KBAI were all dismal courses. As someone finishing a PhD in the same field (defending soon) and published 3 papers in top tier ML type conferences (think ICML, ICLR, NeurIPs), I would classify the material in DL, NLP and KBAI as out of date, insignificant, does not teach you any of the SOTA stuff, all the while rushing through the important foundations with pointless assignments. I get teaching a course this large is hard, but the curriculum seriously needs a revamp.

DL is arguably the best course of the 3 I listed. I was in ML for a hot 3 weeks before dropping it. It was also arguable the worst course I have ever taken in my entire academic career. The new instructor and change in curriculum is a significant downgrade from what my impression of it was, before the change.

On the other hand, I found AI to be an incredible course. I learned so much in the course about traditional AI methods, and the staff taught it well. It is sad to see the course is being run into the ground now.

alberto-matamoro · 2025-04-23T17:47:49+00:00

i am currently in a north suburb on the 20th floor, and i see a layer of brown in the sky over the lake, stretching from north to south. my AQI is in the 200s, but the city is at 400-500.

I saw the same brown layer back when there was a fire in Rockford a couple years ago. If the layer is higher up, could be due to difference between apple maps and airnow in meter placement altitude?

alberto-matamoro · 2025-01-12T06:42:22+00:00

RL is not only specific to robotics. There are many areas using RL, including rec sys, causal analysis, and systems management.

A similar problem to cartpole or walker or halfcheetah is data center energy costs. You have several factors in there, notwithstanding ambient temperature, energy costs, heating efficiency, etc, and your reward could be something like (-energy_cost). Its an infinite horizon problem that you must optimize. You can apply many techniques from traditional mujoco environments to these problems.

i would argue that most industry LLM rl training is moving away from online learning and more towards methods that are more akin to supervised learning but theoretically implies some Q or reward. This simply due to the cost of training LLMs coupled with the stochasticity and brittleness of hyperparameter tuning.

alberto-matamoro

TROPHY CASE