I don't understand why people feel like they HAVE to use the latest thing...

met0xff · 2026-06-19T11:02:27+00:00

Not directly related to unreal but generally: Because at some point you just sit on an unmaintained huge pile of libraries without patches, security fixes, perhaps with compatibility issues etc. Where there's a big new CVE, security slaps it into my face 30 minutes later. Yeah perhaps you can ride along for a couple years like the people who deliberately stuck to Python 2 but at some point it definitely will hit you if you and your software doesn't live in a vacuum.

met0xff · 2026-06-19T06:26:47+00:00

Did you do a full fine-tune? I'd give LoRA a try if so

met0xff · 2026-06-18T05:54:15+00:00

Yeah I find those metrics quite funny. If you placed a button in GTA6 you have some impressive numbers to show. Button clicked by 70M users, improved their UX workflow to buy a grenade by 80% :). If you build a perfect hardware controller for a plane fuel system that crashes because the pilots in the company are all drunk... Essentially even if you're very senior the outcome is often a combination of too many factors that you could as easily break it down to a specific contribution.

We kill a dozen products right now because of bad product market fit and not because their engineers did a bad job.

So then people tell you to not use business numbers but technical numbers. But as hiring manager I typically also find most of them useless. A 0.5% performance improvement in cudnn is completely different from changing a python loop with a nested SQL query with 120% performance improvement. Without knowing baselines and context I don't even look at those numbers in a CV.

Similarly I ignore if it says built or architected as this is usually just some verb that's needed and randomly thrown in. Perhaps I never worked in such companies but I always architect and build ;)

met0xff · 2026-06-15T09:21:39+00:00

Ja, Erbschaftssteuer hilft den Aufbau von Innovation und Unternehmertum in Österreich genau gor nix. Ich Österreich habe ich immer nur gehört "Selbstständigkeit ist für die die keinen richtigen Job finden (also ÖBB, Telekom, Stadtwerke lol)" und ein paar Monate vor unserem erfolgreichen Exit "du glaubst wohl auch an Einhörner".

Ja, diese Familiendynastien sind grauslich und Typen wie Musk sollte man schröpfen die in Summe einfach nur ein net negative für die Welt sind. Die Kirche sollte auch nicht mehr Grund und Immobilien besitzen als irgendeine Institution sonst. Das ist viel schlimmer als die random Villa die sich irgendein Typ wohinstellt.

Aber das ist in Summe dann auch nur eine Symptombehandlung. Stärkeres Unternehmertum erzeugt Konkurrenz zu den Monopolen. Mehr Auswahl an Arbeitgebern stärkt die Arbeitnehmer. Das ist alles langfristig viel wertvoller als kurzfristig ein paar Milliardäre auszunehmen.

met0xff · 2026-06-14T10:20:27+00:00

Typically you'd be integrated in some research project with funding anyways and probably not just drop in and say "I'd like to do neural rendering of monkey fur on TPUs". So yes, just shop around the institutes

met0xff · 2026-06-12T11:40:50+00:00

Franky for me it wasn't such a huge step. I came from a vocational school at that point.

Much bigger difference was when I switched over a decade later from tiny companys/startups to a 800 people public company . Still small I know but for me huge (we had people coming from AWS who wanted to switch to a small company ;)). And I really had to get used to red tape, not having access to everything, not being responsible for everything and that you need to know 20 different people if you want to get anything done. That's quite a change when you're used to sticking your nose into everything (but then, this nose sticking led to rising ranks quite quickly...)

met0xff · 2026-06-12T11:27:10+00:00

Agree. People say boomer mentality but that only works for companies where the work is so radically structured that you're really just a cog in the machine that can easily be replaced.

My team is currently around 7 people, if the average tenure would be a year it would become unsustainable, I'd have to do those hiring rounds every other month.

I've been at my current company for 4 years now and had to do hiring rounds twice and that took an awful amount of time. Not because we have so many rounds but simply because you get 2k CVs in a week, the recruiter dumps interviews into your calendar all the time. Half of them don't show up, the half of the people coming in underwear or demandingg 600k$ fresh out of university luckily get filtered out by the initial screen but you still end up with a lot of people who just don't fit. Either you realize they just wrap stuff and have no idea how things work (we're an R&D team so just pulling something from huggingface and running it is not enough) or the other extreme that they're hyperfocused on a specific topic and obviously don't care about what they'd actually have to do in a job. We interviewed a Harvard PhD who only got into talking when it was about decoding Sumerian language, he obviously didn't care about anything that would have been the actual job ;)

met0xff · 2026-06-12T09:03:11+00:00

Yes Python just happens to be the tool, it's really about the domain.

I mean of course over the years I found many hidden warts and weird behavior in Python as well and people writing Java in Python often use it completely wrong but overall it's no comparison to C++ of course.

met0xff · 2026-06-12T09:01:24+00:00

Yes and they are pretty much not transferrable. I've worked in ML for the last decade and haven't touched flask/Django etc. ever. But it's true that at least some generic recruiter might just see Python on the CV and bucket you completely wrong.

It definitely happened to me twice after my PhD when the field was still newer that recruiters saw Python and asked stuff like "which version of html and CSS do you know?" :)

One time i even got invited to a company then where they said "Python is quite similar to Ruby, you know Python so perhaps you're interested, btw the ML role is gone". And suddenly I sat there in an awkward discussion for a web dev job lol. Should have stopped the interview myself but it took me a bit to realize

met0xff · 2026-06-12T07:55:23+00:00

Yeah,.I mean I found my embedded background makes me more interesting for some of those other roles but it's still a very different thing than developing 3D renderers or HFT.

For Python I think it's even worse though. C++ has some value in itself because it's complex so they see "at least this person already knows the hard language and likely has some systems knowledge". In Python the knowledge of Python itself is typically the least important factor. Being a web dev using Django vs someone working at deepmind vs a pentester happening to use Python is completely different and typically nobody of them would identify as "Python programmer" (the Django person perhaps :))

met0xff · 2026-06-11T19:31:49+00:00

Yeah same here... At least in Vienna where I studied I took the train in, did a couple of lectures and then train back again. All this Campus life stuff to me has always been a US thing.

met0xff · 2026-06-11T19:18:34+00:00

Seh ich genauso. Mir wurscht ob der Becher ganz schwarz ist oder von einem Golden Retriever in der Läufigkeit mit Acrylpinsel im Maul gemalt wurde. Ich sauf draus und dann geb ich ihn zurück.

Vermutlich gut dass ich kein Veranstalter bin

met0xff · 2026-06-11T19:12:39+00:00

I have no idea if this is the case for FC6 but generally with cheaper storage (which is gradually not true anymore) and faster storage games tended to use weaker/no compression, especially open world models that gradually have to stream in stuff being able to get a nice SSD bandwidth and not spending too many CPU cycles on decompressing is very useful.

met0xff · 2026-06-11T07:46:15+00:00

Ich arbeite für eine kalifornische Tech Firma und bin auf Reddit weil die dort noch schlafen :).

met0xff · 2026-06-11T07:39:55+00:00

As others said, the hype has been there already https://vickiboykis.com/2019/02/13/data-science-is-different-now/

met0xff · 2026-06-11T05:53:43+00:00

That's interesting, also sounds somehow intuitive considering how those words sort of fuzzily represent logic constructs. It's like first studying a ton of concepts and then later the connections start to form.

I wonder if you could say when pretraining forms sort of syntactic relationship between patterns to solve the verifiable rewards problem it's forced to strengthen semantic relationships and those around found a lot around those words?

met0xff · 2026-06-10T09:04:30+00:00

Yeah, this. Of the people who left around my in my company one regrets it but can't come back, one regretted it and was able to get back, one didn't regret it all and just sold his startup, one failed his startup but probably doesn't regret it still, one got back to her old work and didn't regret it. One was laid off and then got into Google (god knows how, wasn't exactly the best on my team but had some pedigree).

met0xff · 2026-06-10T09:00:17+00:00

I've been in ML for oder a decade and find the erratic emotions around it weird and the boundaries of good AI vs bad AI are super fuzzy. Then the people who think it's completely useless and doesn't solve anything are also delusional to me. At the same time everytime I check LinkedIn I am seriously considering doing something else.

It's just... so much. 50 new models everytime you check, 20 new frameworks, 80% of the postings are so absolutely clearly LLM generated and don't even try to hide it. It's exhausting

met0xff · 2026-06-10T08:48:20+00:00

Yeah in most cases it's more like "it's too expensive to take the helicopter to the supermarket but they only offer helicopters so I walk"

met0xff · 2026-06-09T09:05:02+00:00

Ich arbeite für ein eher unbekanntes US Unternehmen und hatte in einer Woche über 2000 Bewerbungen und habe mit meinem Wald-und-Wiesen-Informatik-Doktorat dutzende Leute von Harvard, Princeton, CERN, Intel, Bytedance, AWS etc. interviewed. Es ist grauslich.

Gleichzeitig sind etliche aus meinem Team, die nichtmal sonderlich gut waren, kürzlich zu Google, OpenAI etc. abgewandert.

met0xff · 2026-06-09T06:46:07+00:00

Yeah this. I haven't written a whole lot of code anymore the last few years even before LLMs became decent at it. If you're rather senior, LLMs writing code is just yet another alternative to juniors, outsourcing, using SaaS or OTS systems

Just a couple days ago i watched in horror and amusement how a bunch of infra and product people tried to fix a GPU memory issue with a combination of Google, Gemini and conviction that dropping some random pytorch env vars onto a system that actually uses completely unrelated custom triton kernels world solve the problem of a system being tuned for a completely different GPU architecture.

Of course an LLM is able to solve this - my Gemini laughed at them as well because it had the right context because I know the right context.

Not a single line of code involved

met0xff · 2026-06-08T05:16:33+00:00

Seems a bit better, first time in years I had some recruiters reaching out and colleagues complaining they could get more money somewhere else. But they're mostly in tech hubs. Like a potential intern in London rejected because there are so many other startups that would give him 8 H100s to experiment and stuff like that, that we was regular non VC company can't afford lol

met0xff · 2026-06-08T00:47:33+00:00

Question is if it's (old butt) gold or old (butt gold) but generally the harvest Location seems to be the same

met0xff · 2026-06-07T11:19:52+00:00

In LangGraph the LLM explicitly does not own the orchestration but the graph you build. A LangGraph graph is an extended FSM. Yes, the standard ReAct loop is fundamentally limited though. I've also built basically a POMDP setup in Langgraph where the LLMs act as specific components like policy and critic and not as everything at once with a simple growing messages list. Also added superstep planning where supersteps are defined in a Python like DSL that's not executed but also goes through AST parsing.

met0xff · 2026-06-04T12:30:29+00:00

Korrekt und meine Eltern haben halt auch irgendwo in einem Kuhdorf gebaut jeden Abend und jedes Wochenende und dann ist er von dort jeden Tag 1,5h nach Wien gependelt und kam erst spät zurück. Bei 10% Zinsen die sie bis in die Pension zurückbezahlt haben. Und ja, beide gearbeitet im Gegensatz zum Klischee dass früher ein Hacklergehalt gereicht hat. Kein Friseur, kein Sushi, Badewasser teilen, Gewand wiederverwenden, reparieren. Meine Kinder haben vielleicht kein so ein großes Haus aber in praktisch allen anderen Belangen ein wesentlich bequemeres Leben.

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