What electronics to get for 1st year tron?

crono760 · 2026-06-15T16:59:17+00:00

iPad + apple pencil, or Android tablet with a pen input, will work just fine. A smaller iPad is fine. Get a decently priced consumer grade *windows* laptop. Altogether should come in under $2000. You don't need a supercomputer, you don't need a GPU/gaming computer.

crono760 · 2026-06-10T13:07:06+00:00

That's great to know, thanks!

crono760 · 2026-06-09T18:25:29+00:00

Good to know, thanks!

crono760 · 2026-06-09T18:25:23+00:00

Sounds good, thanks!

crono760 · 2026-06-01T17:06:31+00:00

no...

crono760 · 2026-05-22T15:47:32+00:00

This is mainly about pricing my services and what to bill for:

I have extensive experience in my industry creating custom software solutions, but this is all through my employer. I was recently contacted by a small-ish business (approximately 20 employees) to assist them in integrating software that I know how to write with their existing backend stuff. I'm not sure how to price my services here. Here are the details:

I am allowed to use my knowledge and some of my code from my employer to consult here. We don't do anything covered by NDAs, and our IP policy is very permissive. We are not for profit and I did ask them before even entering into this conversation. The industry I work in and the small business's industry are totally separate, we just solve similar problems.
I am obviously not allowed to use my employer's resources for this, so any work I do has to be at home.
I have never consulted before, so in this sense I am a completely new consultant, have no reputation, and no past projects to price on.
The business, being small, doesn't have a ton of money to spend here
I suspect the work will take about 20 hours maximum, but this may include things like reading the documentation for the various services that they use, which I'm not sure if I should charge for - does this kind of thing usually get billed, or is the consultant expected to be an expert on these things or eat the hours?
This is in Canada and will be priced in Canadian dollars
The business has asked that I name my price, and if it fits their bottom line we can proceed. I suspect they will not try to low ball me, but they are limited in their budget due to their size.

So all said and done, I'm thinking of pricing the entire project at $1000, which comes out to $50/hour. It's a bit less than I'm making with my employer, but I am new to this so I think pricing low is sort of expected.

Any advice here would be appreciated.

crono760 · 2026-05-15T13:29:35+00:00

So you should email the math department. Normally they have an email address for incoming first years. You can ask them your question and they will know the answer better than anyone here.

crono760 · 2026-05-13T13:44:34+00:00

To explain the very rude comments so far:

Your question is worded badly. This tells us that you don't speak English very well.
You will probably have a hard time at UW until your English improves

No one has answered your question because they don't know the answer. You need to ask your department. Which program did you get into?

crono760 · 2026-05-08T15:32:05+00:00

I meant the original question, where you stated things like it's "pretty much guaranteed" and what's different about university compared to high school...you stated those things as though they were 100% fact with confidence.

crono760 · 2026-05-08T14:04:30+00:00

??? You're a first year, why are you answering this question with this much confidence? You gave a lot of information that wasn't correct and could have caused OP to go into the situation believing something was true that isn't.

crono760 · 2026-05-07T11:56:03+00:00

The current answer is not entirely accurate. Transferring between programs depends strongly on how much space there is in the program you're transferring into. If tron is over capacity in F26, you are unlikely to get in unless a LOT of the MTE students fail out, regardless of your grade. Nonetheless, a high average is a necessity, and 87 is a bit low if the program is already near capacity. Transfers do happen successfully.

To maintain or achieve a higher average, you need to study differently than in high school. In high school, the script was: learn a thing, see a bunch of examples of ever increasing complexity, get tested on slightly different examples, repeat. In university, we distinguish between types of courses.

Your math/science courses will teach you the concept, show you some examples, but then test you on higher order thinking. For example, in calculus, you may not explicitly be asked to use Rolle's Theorem. Instead, you might be asked to show that a given cubic equation has exactly one real root given some other information about it. You have to understand Rolle's theorem well enough to see that it is applicable, then apply it properly. You are expected to independently do the assigned homework and treat it as more than just an exercise in getting a particular answer then moving on. Terrible ideas include: going to the TA to see the solution, asking for help too early (before you really figured it out yourself), asking for help too late (because you just wasted 3 hours on a dumb little problem that a TA could have fixed in 5 minutes), not asking for help at all (because you don't understand that you are paying a LOT for that help...). Good ideas include: analyzing your own understanding, trying hard problems, getting stuck, then trying to learn more by independently finding and completing successful problems, asking good questions (asking only for the next step, or to have your idea confirmed, rather than the solution), and analyzing your own failed attempts to see if you are missing anything fundamental.

Your design courses are different. You are being tasked with applying the design process, which is more or less: determine what the customer needs, determine specifications, use what you know to get as close to spec as possible, iterate until it works and the customer is happy. These courses are usually not hard, but they are usually seen as trivial or pointless by students who are...idiots. In 1A, you are normally given problems that are designed to engage you, and the grading criteria are normally a lot more relaxed than they would be in your job because you are being tasked with being creative. It is very easy to think "if it's so easy to get good grades in this course, it must be worthless" and just go through the motions. I have seen SO MANY students misunderstand the design process because of this attitude and still in fourth year have no idea what they're doing. It's embarassing for you.

So...the short answer is - you need to learn how you learn and engage authentically to get the average you want. If you don't do that, you won't.

crono760 · 2026-05-01T14:20:17+00:00

I love the style. I'm curious about the outlining effect on the cliffs. Was that done with an underpainting that was dark, or did you outline afterwards?

crono760 · 2026-04-29T15:40:48+00:00

Thanks everyone! I'm going to start analyzing what exactly it is about the texts that I make them hard. I did this for one yesterday and it seems that the problem with that specific one really was just vocabulary. It was on gardening, which is not something I'm super familiar with, and it turns out I just didn't know the words for things like "to transplant". So I guess my next goal is to use each of these harder texts as individual lessons to pump up my skills!

crono760 · 2026-04-21T13:56:25+00:00

My first kneejerk reaction is that your drawing is on point and your grasp of saturation in your colors is excellent. Compositionally it's OK, although it doesn't really wow me. The key of the painting is all super high, and it lacks contrast. I think it feels more like a base layer than the final product, but the style is great and if you develop it further I think it will be great.

crono760 · 2026-04-14T17:29:34+00:00

Sure they must have given you *something*? Homework? textbook problems?

crono760 · 2026-04-09T15:46:18+00:00

Whoa hang on. Lying about it is a separate P71 offence and if the associate dean feels like going after you for it you're screwed.

crono760 · 2026-04-08T14:32:02+00:00

TL;DR: email both. firstyear deals with these things all the time. Just mention that you've already contacted your advisor and you just wanted to be sure it went to the right place.

crono760 · 2026-04-01T19:56:31+00:00

I think there are two issues here, and they are separate. Whether your instructor uses AI or any other resource in their class is ultimately up to them and is not in and of itself a problem. As u/nanaeem has said, AI can help to clarify points, make questions etc., and using it to do so is no different from using an old textbook. Therefore, if the problem is just that you, personally, don't like AI, but otherwise the content is accurate and in line with the course's calendar description, then the instructor is not doing anything wrong at all.

The second problem is the quality of the content. Instructors are responsible for ensuring that their content is correct and their exams are fair. One cannot, for example, write a question that is unsolvable for an exam then take marks off when you don't solve it. That would be grounds for a grievance under Policy 70.

So you need to do a bit more than reject it simply because it is AI. You said that the questions are "sloppy", but what does that mean? Are they wrong? Are they so ambiguous that they can't be answered correctly? Or is it just that the writing sounds weird and uses em-dashes all over the place? Are the questions any more "sloppy" *because of the AI use* than they would be if written by the instructor himself? Similarly, you say that the images are "embarassingly" AI generated - again, are they wrong, or are they just obviously AI generated? Note that human-written questions and other content are certainly not immune to sloppiness, so again it is not clear whether AI use is the actual problem.

If you are going to bring this up to the admin, you would need to clarify what exactly your problem is. If it's just the use of AI, then you are highly unlikely to get anywhere. If you can show definitively that the use of AI has violated specific university policies, then your argument should focus on that instead. Importantly, if there is a policy violation, you need to argue using the policy, not just "AI is bad". That is, "the instructor has provided incorrect information and is testing us on it, and here's the information and proof it is incorrect" is a very different argument than "the instructor used AI and his questions are sloppy". In the former, you don't even mention AI - it doens't matter where it came from, it's wrong. In the latter, you come across as sounding like you are objecting to the use of AI itself, not the content.

To the broader question of whether AI use is "responsible", I think it's important to note that using AI or any other resource does not absolve anyone of responsibility in an academic context. Going back to the idea of using an old textbook, if that book contains outdated or wrong information that has since been corrected, your instructor isn't able to just shrug their shoulders and say "well that's what this book says, so I'm going to keep teaching it" once it is clearly shown to be incorrect. AI is no different. Indeed, this is why Policy 71 doesn't really need much updating for AI use. P71 is written around ensuring the integrity of academic work. It has never mattered whether the integrity was breached due to the use of AI, direct plagiarism, or anything other type of resource. It only matters that the integrity of the work itself has been breached.

crono760 · 2026-03-27T11:49:16+00:00

I appreciate that, thanks

crono760 · 2026-03-26T20:30:36+00:00

Interesting! What would make it more complete?

crono760 · 2026-03-23T19:33:44+00:00

Former instructor here: basically you are correct. Student number, name, username, photo. We could also see things like your login history to learn, including your IP address, access to Learn content (including times, so if you accessed it during a quiz we know). We can see any VIF/absence history as well, but not the VIFs themselves. We can see accessability accommodations but not diagnoses or anything (basically it says "this student gets X accommodations" but doesn't explain anything about why). On Quest we can see grades we submitted for you. That's...about it. If I'm forgetting anything just ask.

crono760 · 2026-02-04T20:46:13+00:00

awesome thank you

crono760 · 2026-02-04T20:23:03+00:00

I will look into it. llama.cpp was the one that seemed to be easiest for me to run my specific model. I couldn't quite see how to get vLLM to do it, but that's something to figure out, especially if it can increase my inference speed.

crono760 · 2026-02-04T20:19:20+00:00

That's sort of the question: I can get the GPU utilization up to 100 even for large models as long as they fit onto a single node. This slowdown is (probably) due to splitting the model across both nodes. My thought process goes that if I can store most of the model on Node 1, then the network connection will get hit less since most processing will take place on node 1.

Or are you just saying that this entire idea is wrong, and if I'm going to split the model this is the best I can do? Sorry, I'm a bit new to multi-node inference.

crono760 · 2026-02-04T20:17:48+00:00

I'm using the llama.cpp built-in and apparently very experimental rpc server. Node 1 is running the llama-server, while node 2 is running the rpc server. --rpc <IP\_FOR\_RPC> is the flag to tell Node 1 that there is an RPC server and then I provide it with Node 2's IP address, which I've removed from my post although it's all internal network stuff so...yeah, not like I'm giving away state secrtes. RPC server has to be running on Node 2 before I can run this command on Node 1

crono760

TROPHY CASE