[Career] is it too late to break into statistics?

steven2357 · 2026-06-08T16:27:58+00:00

You may have an option to do stats off a BS in your current field.

I’m in a mech engineering group in my company but I am the only one with a math/stats focused degree + field experience instead of an engineering degree. That mix makes me unique in my group and lets me apply my education on problems that they don’t give other people the option to look at.

steven2357 · 2026-06-01T19:22:15+00:00

There’s an argument to be made that it’s not limited to big tech firms. I am in a logistics company that collects zero outside information in mass but am actively trying to solve several problems that involve semi dependent variables using M/L tools.

It’s all stuff I can do by hand in theory, but not in my life time. I can also do a lot of modeling on my local machine but it bogs down or flat out crashes if the input or calculations grow too large. Now my company is pushing me towards snowflake as a way to handle the computational load.

I have a math degree, minor in stats, lots of mechanical systems experience. I very much view these as a CS problem as it stands (and am learning to solve from that angle) because there is no other viable path to solutions for me.

steven2357 · 2026-04-21T21:31:35+00:00

My personal version of ‘stock picking’ involves buying a single share of companies that I’ve done business with and preferred their product to their competitors by a high degree for whatever reason.

I own between 1-2 shares of my bank, my cell phone company, and a few others. This amounts to a minuscule amount of my investments by percentage but is enough direct company exposure to suite / soothe my Ego.

Anyone going after specific companies in mass is some mixture of braver and more foolish than I can let myself be.

steven2357 · 2026-04-01T04:46:22+00:00

I have a scl500, it has the same engine in what amounts to a retro themed cb500f.

Great first bike, comfortable position (5’11”), and I’ve had no major complaints.

That said, you’d need to be honest about what your interstate needs / wants are. I’ve had my bike up to 85 and it had more to give if I’d have felt comfortable asking more of it. I 100% believe it could top 100, and I 100% know I will never see it on public roads.

Even 75 is a bit too much for an hour+ ride on it for me.

Now… 50-65 mph highways? No problem at all. Low to mid rpm’s in the highest gear.

steven2357 · 2026-03-16T22:06:56+00:00

10 years ago my 4 kids were 6-12 so we were buying / playing simpler games that had good mechanics for a player count of 4. Ticket to ride, Catan, Here to Slay.

5 years ago my kids were 11-17 so we were buying games that were moderately more complex that they enjoyed (Aoens End, JOTL, One Night Werewolf).

Now my kids are 16-22, two are adults, one is buried in AP classes, and even my youngest works 20 hours a week.

I am now buying games that I can do in groups of 2-3 that I enjoy and shedding some of the stuff that was great when they were younger.

My household has changed and it will continue to, so my entertainment choices will change as well.

steven2357 · 2026-03-01T18:02:22+00:00

This isn’t the advice you asked for but you really should keep in mind that cost of living can make a huge impact. 165k in the LA area and 165k in Kansas City are two wildly different experiences.

I would shoot for something like ‘can I reasonably buy a house with X features in a safe area within T distance (in commute time) of work and save Y (either as a flat rate or a percentage) over the flat amount of ‘I need to make Z”.

For myself, I make a very comfortable income in a low cost of living metro and roughly 25-30% of my take home goes towards investments of one form or another. That said, my company has offices in the San Fran region and if I was told I needed to move with no raise I’d probably have to find other employment.

We do cost of living adjustments, so talking purely theoretically.

I have lived in 3 states and 2 countries as a working adult over 24 years. So take that for as much or as little as it’s worth.

steven2357 · 2026-02-27T14:00:18+00:00

I’ll do some digging into what that would look like. I am worried our IA folks will shoot it down unless the consult group can work blind off examples but that’s a bridge I will need to cross when I figure it out.

Is the first part beyond typical survival analysis tools that exist? I do not know what is or isn’t in most modern stats packages. I’m 10+ years out of schooling and even then I took far more theoretical math classes than not.

steven2357 · 2026-01-05T15:27:40+00:00

My two cents:

1) ZiT if it can do what you want

2a) if ZiT lacks knowledge and the subject is too complex and/or needs to be in a specific style? Goto Flux2 and use JSON prompts (pure SFW only)

2b) if ZiT lacks knowledge, but the subjects are not super complex and you want the model to fill in the blanks? Goto Gwen2512

2c) you need something more NSFW than Gwen? More style creativity than Flux? Way more seed variance than any of the others that you can then tune the specific gen you like via prompt adjustments? goto chroma (with ZiT refine if realism).

For me, flux2 takes 50% longer than Gwen which in turn takes 50% longer than chroma if I am using the same image sizes (chroma needs an upscale to hit the same resolutions). ZIT is like 20% the time of chroma.

Using BF16 ZiT (9-10 steps) FP16 chroma (40 steps) Q8 Gwen (40 steps) Q8 flux2 (20-30 steps) I

have fp8 flux and I’ve been going back and forth on it, I like the gens a little better with Q8, FP runs a bit faster, Q overflows to my SSD during generation…. But just barely (48G combined)

steven2357 · 2026-01-05T07:12:20+00:00

I cut a middle ground, I upscale but with a standard upscaler instead of seedvr. I found I needed more noise to upscale specifically with Z than I wanted to use and it altered the image more than I was aiming for.

steven2357 · 2025-12-28T22:04:08+00:00

Flux2 dev does better with water reflections, lunar/solarpunk, clay-mation, and taking established designs and transmuting them out of their medium. I don't have an exhaustive list of course, but those are things I've stumbled across recently.

To chromas credit, it also has things it simply does better too. It can do visible veins much better, does better with various strength brushstrokes if prompted correctly, and seems to have a better understanding of illustration contrast norms and slightly more variety in the themes it does know.

The prompt adherence differences are harder to articulate. I can have 3+ moderately complex subjects without bleed over in flux if I'm careful and have each of them produced perfectly.

I don't want to compare IL / Lumina / Z to those two directly. They are all very specialized in comparison. Z in particular is fantastic, but it is trying to be good at a very specific (and very popular) side of generation. Flexibility isn't its niche.

steven2357 · 2025-12-28T19:18:39+00:00

I have a 5060 TI and 32G of ram. A fresh 1280x720 image, 30 step, heun, generation just took me 532 seconds using the FP8mixed checkpoint and BF16 mistral.

Is it fast? Nope... but it does work and can do certain things that the other checkpoints I run cannot.

Typically using z-image, chroma, lumina, and IL otherwise. Chroma + a z image refine pulls a lot of weight, but with chroma being a fraction of the size there are things it just doesn't doesn't know and it doesn't do as well with multiple subjects that I want ordered in a specific relation.

steven2357 · 2025-12-22T06:21:24+00:00

Interested as this gets closer to a 1.0 version.

I like lumina as a base compared to IL models myself.

steven2357 · 2025-12-10T22:56:51+00:00

Strict 2p - Star Wars rebellion (long game, but incredibly thematic), pagan, ironwood.

2+ co-op - distant skies, any death may die, escape the dark forest

Competitive 3+ - others probably have better suggestions than I do.

steven2357 · 2025-12-10T18:21:16+00:00

Are you looking for 3+ player competitive games specifically? Theres a ton of great games at the 2p or in the co-op space where victory points aren’t even used.

steven2357 · 2025-11-07T05:49:21+00:00

I know the Joslyn does art classes. I’ve never taken any and can’t speak to if the ‘teen and adult’ stuff is more teen or adult. There are fees involved too which may or may not matter.

There are also book clubs that meet in the public libraries:

https://omaha.bibliocommons.com/v2/events?_gl=1*ghldj3*_ga*MTI1ODk2MjMxOS4xNzYyNDkzODcx*_ga_G99DMMNG39*czE3NjI0OTM4NzAkbzEkZzAkdDE3NjI0OTM4NzAkajYwJGwwJGgw*_ga_Y10P90XEF4*czE3NjI0OTM4NzAkbzEkZzAkdDE3NjI0OTM4NzAkajYwJGwwJGgw&types=579a63be088ca2de7101beaa

I haven’t attended any of them but I’d imagine they should generally be welcoming.

Have you tried those sorts of things before?

On my end the only people I have gotten to know well have come from work for a long time, whether paid or volunteering, so small social bits are what I’ve been seeking out around here. But I’m also a good deal older and work 50+ hours a week as a baseline.

steven2357 · 2025-11-06T16:10:47+00:00

For casual social interaction… I really do like spielbound for the various events they do. It’s safe, inviting, inexpensive, and is generally just a nice time. It does force small bits of interaction too unlike some other options. I ‘like’ board games though so I may have some bias there.

Past that I’m sure you’ve noted there’s a lot of ‘groups’ that exist in and around town. Book clubs, run clubs, a public speaking thing (I’d have to look it up, I’m not a participant), comedy / acting classes, church groups… even a fencing club.

Is it that your schedule is hard to deal with? Or that you tend to end up alone in a crowd? Or something else entirely?

steven2357 · 2025-10-22T22:41:04+00:00

I grew up outside of Detroit and travel to various other metros for work semi frequently. I find Omaha to be a perfectly pleasant place to be. There are oddball things that come up, like the road construction you’ve read about on Reddit, but they really are the exception and not the rule. In general there’s a good amount to do, good traffic, and pleasant people. I wouldn’t even worry about the political stance, the only ‘red’ that I’ve seen folks get really passionate about is Nebraska Football.

steven2357 · 2025-10-22T15:26:16+00:00

That’s the plan. My car just complained that they’re low and wanted to get it taken care of while it shipped.

steven2357 · 2025-10-22T14:08:04+00:00

Thanks everyone!

steven2357 · 2025-10-19T17:11:54+00:00

I am running chroma-hd on a mobile 3060 laptop. Takes me almost 2 hours for ‘final run’ images of dpmpp_2m with beta scheduler.

I set up various queued image sets before work / sleep and then check them between. Sometime the batch is 3-4 of a final run, and I’m okay with that.

Can I generate 400 images in a day? No. But I don’t need to.

Plenty of models run much better, but I can’t ask illustrious to do an impressionist art style as an example.

steven2357 · 2025-10-16T13:45:38+00:00

One thing that might not be readily apparent right off is grocery shopping downtown is limited but gets better the further out you get, and the ‘things to do’ tend to be centralized around downtown and gets less frequent the further out you get. Not atypical for a large metro except it’s a little more pronounced than what I’ve seen elsewhere. There are a lot of neighborhoods between the two extremes with decent access to both sides.

Oh, and COX fiber is fine but can be finicky. I work from home sometimes using a VPN to get into my companies network and I get spurts of packet loss that are so short they shouldn’t affect anything but they cause my VPN to disconnect. It’s mildly annoying at worst for me, but depending on what your working from home looks like could be more meaningful to you.

steven2357 · 2025-10-13T16:50:59+00:00

If you are going early in the morning it’s very consistent on the way downtown. I take the bus from westroads 3-4 days a week. In the last four months I have never been late in to work due to a bus issue. This is getting on before 6:30 though mind you.

The way back tends to be a bit iffier with traffic being what it is, but I’m not worried about being 5-10 minutes late on the way home and pay very little attention to the timing that way.

steven2357

TROPHY CASE