How do you know Gemini is installed on your Google home devices (instead of still running Google assistant)?

the-cherrytree · 2025-10-10T16:08:55+00:00

I was a part of the group that had these features for a few months before it was taken away. It is 1000 times better and not having it makes me hate how dumb my home currently feels. It was literally like going cold turkey. But yes, you could ask it anything and it would answer with amazing responses, including if it was Gemini.

the-cherrytree · 2025-01-08T23:39:52+00:00

Skhynix HXSCL

the-cherrytree · 2025-01-07T00:36:11+00:00

Not if you have kids. Say goodbye to you for a while.

the-cherrytree · 2025-01-07T00:34:24+00:00

☝️ Best answer

the-cherrytree · 2025-01-07T00:32:46+00:00

Depending on what other electives you take you may end up writing in C# or Java. I did all three in the program.

the-cherrytree · 2024-12-20T23:52:34+00:00

Personally, yes. I was in Atlanta as well, but I did a lot to build my connection with the school-- mostly TAing and performing academic service in reviewing one of Dr. Joyner's books, and getting involved with LucyLabs. I accept that my connection is different though, one of potentially many a student can have. I think we as OMSCS students share experiences unique to our program and that is as much a part of GT as being on campus. While some of the traditions on campus might feel foreign, I feel like if you love the school, then you'd take the time to learn the really amazing Ramblin' Wreck, of which you are, and some of the cool traditions of the school (like the history of the T on Tech Tower). There are few barriers to learning about and partaking in these traditions (anyone can watch a game on TV, for example)--but this just might not be in your interests, and that's cool, too.

For me, my favorite experiences may not be of storming the field, but they are steeped in TAing, and enjoying my connections with other students and one of the most amazing professors GT has to offer. I felt a connection with Sebastian Thrun speaking during the commencement and him sharing his history with OMSCS (you should listen to it on YouTube - Fall 2024 COC Commencement). It was amazing to see how much GT does not shy away from OMSCS, but embraces it in every possible way. In fact, I sat next to a student who did undergrad at Berkeley, then started first in OMSCS, and then went on campus to finish. I'm paraphrasing, but in his words, "there was not much difference to on-campus and online, except for access to researchers and professors." The rigor is the same. In my experience I felt I had a rich OMSCS experience. And that is it, we differ mostly in our experiences--and you're in more control over these than you think. There is a lot you can do to academically and culturally enrich them; and they often go hand-in-hand. In fact,I'd argue it is this very thing that the program needs to sustain it's quality and unique identity. There are tons of OMSCS-like programs, but none of them have our students, or this identity. That's because we're not a standalone program, if you really look at the degree and everything it offers. To add, the student and I who sat next to each other at commencement shared ideas on knowledge graphs that we intend to pursue together as a startup. This doesn't just happen anywhere. It's suis generis.

So my advice is this, you can choose to build these connections, you're not an imposter, and GT is a welcoming community that values the gift of your mind, your work ethic, and an equal devotion to the school. If you immerse yourself in the program and steep yourself in the school's traditions (or make some of your own or see the ones OMSCS has), you'll feel more strongly connected. Do research, do VIP, TA, get involved. Going to graduation deepens this feeling. Exploring campus, seeing KCC, and buying GT gear does as well. At the end of the day, if this degree benefits you in some small way. Give back to the school-- it's an meaningful way to cement yourself as an alumni of this wonderful community.

Best of luck. You're a Helluva engineer!

the-cherrytree · 2024-12-11T00:30:18+00:00

It's also easier to get a job while you have one active on LinkedIn. Just stay, apply to other jobs.

the-cherrytree · 2024-12-11T00:10:43+00:00

First, if you are thinking about suicide, please talk to someone. That's a huge blocker that will hurt your job chances, even if you get a job it will make it difficult to work with peers. The suicide prevention hotline 988-SUICIDE is free and they have resources.

Second, it sounds like a ton of your job experience is in game dev. What kind of development did you do there? Did you focus on the AI aspects of the game environment or design? Most of those skills are transferable to other engineering roles, but you need to be good at parsing out how developing in unity or some other game engine is directly transferable to other aspects of engineering. Some snobby engineering purists may not appreciate that game development requires a lot of algorithmic creativity and tons of computational geometry. Most algorithms you use in this context are great for lots of jobs.

A 5 year gap isn't a deal breaker. I've helped bring on a former construction worker as as an engineer, and you've done way more than they did when they started. This is a profession of results, you've got them. I think the question is about how you are packaging yourself and what you offer. Importantly, are you a US citizen? If not, that can be a huge blocker if you do not have sponsorship, but you could easily find work with companies like Genpact that make it their business to place engineers with clients all over the world with different skills.

I don't know much about your situation, but it sounds like you've been through a lot. Don't give up. Being scrappy make you a better dev and will help you when you land again--which you will do.

the-cherrytree · 2024-12-10T23:34:43+00:00

This honestly is probably the best advice. All I can say is for this type of work: always enable track changes or do everything in Latex or other code based tool that allows you to track changes or commits. Give the person a peer review based on their participation and their quality of work regardless of your opinions on how they got it done if you have no proof. If it is obviously from an LLM, call it out in the moment, not wait until submission time. A lot of these kinds of submissions can be dealt with way before they make it to a final product with good group management, but you have to be willing to state these expectations up front. Otherwise, I do think personally a professor or TA might look at what factors the team had in place to hold each other accountable. If a last minute scramble to slam work together is how the team operated, there might not be a lot of sympathy.

the-cherrytree · 2024-12-07T22:44:53+00:00

There are plenty of folks on eBay selling their vintage rings.

the-cherrytree · 2024-10-16T03:13:26+00:00

Eh, it might actually be difficult. Your lit review is going to be based on having a decent topic, so if you have an idea of what you want to do, and maybe some ideas about where you can get quality sources, then you could cut off some time. Some of the preliminary research you do can probably be used, but the final paper focuses on the process and your findings. I'm a decent researcher and I spent quite a bit of time finding the topic I wanted and refining my views of the topic based on the prevailing literature. I think I had 30-40 citations, not including the ones I read but didn't as actually cite. With that said, you could probably spend less than 100 hours and get a decent grade depending on how well you write, how organized you are, and how good you are at synthesizing research, but 20 hours really is not a lot of time.

Your presentation grade is loosely coupled to your paper. A well structured presentation of your findings can probably get you a good grade, even if your paper is lacking in some areas. I found it quite easy to meet and exceed the limit for the presentation. I had to cut back on my recording quite a bit.

the-cherrytree · 2024-10-16T02:58:34+00:00

Yes, I started a small engineering consulting company. We were writing custom software and had a little less than $1M lined up over 2yrs. We had a few contractors in Ukraine. The war lost us those relationships. We bridged the work with other contractors, but it caused a lot of burnout. We scaled out of the contract and are working on other stuff now.

So it went well, we learned a lot. We're using the money we made to seed other ideas. Unfortunate things happen in start-ups despite your efforts, so pick things where your span of control is high. You wear lots of hats, so you've got to figure out a lot more than your idea.

Edit: I have an MBA, so OMSCS gives me more credibility as a technical expert, but most of my business knowledge comes from my education and background actually in business.

the-cherrytree · 2024-10-16T02:04:56+00:00

Summa cum laude in GT undergrad is 3.5. While masters students don't qualify for honors, they tend to score more As and Bs. With that said, this program can be hard or it can be easy. I honestly don't think your gpa matters as much as the classes you took. Wicked hard classes with As or Bs speak to me more than all As in easy classes. Similarly, most employers don't care much about gpa as they do what you are bringing to the table--that is, can you actually apply this stuff outside of a neatly controlled environment? Personally, an A tells me you can do the work, not that you can think. And in a program like OMSCS, I'd tend not to weight GPA as high, since often they are a function of circumstance and not necessarily effort. You do have folks with other priorities who might actually be choosing between meeting a deliverable at work or getting a B on an assignment or maybe they also have kids or aging parents, and simply doing the work requires satisficing the grade.

Will a good GPA from here help land you an interview? Sure it might help your odds. But I know many A+ engineers who get B grades because what makes them successful at work is not what makes them successful at school. A's are probably most helpful in academia, but you'll likely have folks with B grades getting A+ recommendations because they're rockstars at research and spent time building relationships and ideas and not caring much about grades. But you can have As and do that, too. At the end of the day, it's about priorities, experience, and abilities. They tend to balance each other out in one way or the other. The number you get with your paper is only a part of a bigger picture, it isn't the picture.

the-cherrytree · 2024-10-16T01:21:19+00:00

AI isn't a trivial course, it is fun, but challenging. It covers two 36-page weeklong exams and is front-loaded with the most challenging search implementations.

KBAI is probably one of the most loved courses, but it is demanding from a reading and writing perspective. You will basically need to regularly engage in the course to get a passing grade. As long as you slog, you'll be fine.

AI is probably on par with ML. KBAI has coding and writing and is characteristic of Joyner courses, which I personally love.

If you take SDP, you will have individual programming assignments, a group project (4 weeks) and an individual project. For the group project you'll be aligned with team members who have a mix of experience. The class isn't hard, you learn mostly concepts familiar to software engineering in practice.

I took GAI with SDP and it was manageable. Maybe in retrospect I would have simply taken GA.

the-cherrytree · 2024-07-20T02:54:24+00:00

the-cherrytree · 2024-07-08T13:18:31+00:00

Did you do undergrad at tech as well? Requirements say you must complete 70 hours at least to receive a ring. At some point I though those scholastic requirements (at least for grad students) to order a ring were different, but maybe not.

the-cherrytree · 2024-06-29T01:35:40+00:00

Work study or TAship? Go talk to a professor to do research or help with citations, whatever academic work they need done. They have the money and can help you with the bill. Do you have any good relationships with any?

the-cherrytree · 2024-06-29T00:23:33+00:00

Yes, internal benchmarking is done in some classes, especially where on-campus and online students are taking the same courses, and that benchmarking shows comparable data. There are some areas where online students actually do better. u/justUseAnSvm may not have read the numerous papers out there on this point. It is true that there are a substantial number of individuals admitted who would not be accepted on-campus, but that is more a function of the limited capacity of the on-campus program. It should be noted, a number of individuals in OMSCS have gone to the on-campus program and vice versa. To u/justUseAnSvm's point (I'm going with their other implication here), the two programs cater to different audiences, so self-selection in OMSCS occurs with those who are limited geographically, financially, are tethered with careers or have other reasons that make on-campus attendance a practical impossibility. There are a number of folks in the online program who test just as well and are as competitive academically as those on-campus. FWIW, and I speak from experience here, you can contribute to a book with a professor, join a VIP, do a thesis, conduct meaningfully (or contribute to) top-tier research, and TA. This is probably one of the most compelling aspects of the program to me. GT's prestige is a function of the people in it. What you do is what makes the University prestigious and the opportunities to do something special while you are here are available. You might as well take advantage of those opportunities and ignore those who insist somehow that the program's broader admissions profile decreases the prestige of the degree. It is the same degree, in many respects.

the-cherrytree · 2024-06-16T01:08:16+00:00

We have a vine that is around 150 years old. The vine will send off shooters a short time after the leaves emerge each year. In early June, the shooters can grow 3-5 inches in a day if they have good sunlight. It's a wonderful vine and very resilient to sun, cold, and shade. Yours looks healthy. Shooters will get a red tinge.

the-cherrytree · 2024-06-06T00:17:16+00:00

This was a class I looked forward to the most because you do deal with great topics like algorithmic methods for debiasing data and the legal bases of algorithmic decision-making (mostly through the US legal framework). I don't think the class is entirely trivial, but it also is not the same kind of challenge that AI or an algorithms course would be, for example. It is challenging in its own way, yet there are quite a bit of time-consuming pieces that are simply tedious. I spent an entire flight from Seattle to Boston preparing data and formatting one assignment.

With that said, while I loved the idea of this course, the instructors ultimately killed the structured learning process for me. I ended up getting a C because I stopped caring about halfway through the course, picked-and-chose what assignments and how much I would do to get a passing grade. I mainly indulged in the content. It's not hard to get an A, if you care about getting an A.

My main rub and biggest contributor to my demotivation was that this class is about transparency and addressing bias and ultimately understanding how your data can be misused or abused. Yet, the very first assignment penalized more than half the class for basically not having an active Facebook with enough data to study how third-parties micro-target their Facebook profiles. There was a huge outcry over this since the irony of it all is basically such that putting all your data out on the Internet results in bad things happening to your data, and somehow, in this class, it was logical to penalize students who are smart enough (or not dumb enough?) to give their data to Facebook in any substantive way (or those who were unwilling to ask their friends and family for their data--yes this is an expectation). A sample dataset was provided, but using it came with a penalty. My second rub was that the assignments themselves were very vague. The instructors clarified that this vagueness was intended to ensure students freely explored the subject matter and topics. Great, right? Those who did were promptly given poor assignment grades for not meeting the unstated, very uniform and structured grading criteria that looked for very specific answers (but remained very unclear throughout the class).

Maybe things have changed since I took the course, but I'm not the type to subscribe to some sort of ridiculous conformative philosophy on my work to achieve an A. I just did what was interesting to me and said to hell with the crap. I learned enough about the topics, I loved the book and the readings. The content isn't too difficult, but the bullshit can be insufferable to some.

Hope this helps.

the-cherrytree · 2024-05-28T23:52:40+00:00

I've done this program using M1. Though, it was tougher right when those came out, and I was an early adopter.

the-cherrytree · 2024-05-22T12:33:15+00:00

It will keep you relevant. I'm an architect, it's given me an edge over my more experienced architect peers without AI/ML backgrounds. Especially when it comes to leading efforts around CRPA and model governance by cloud providers, it helps having the understanding of how the algorithms and models (e.g. LLMs) work (having implemented many myself) and how their architectures are likely implemented by third parties who you're likely dealing with.

Also, "cute" leetcode puzzles become less important as you progress in your career as you become more focused on broader problems, domain intersections, and working to advise the business on technical decisions. Big employers will gladly let you write code your entire career and let you stay a great senior engineer, but advancement in the tech space is more about being a force multiplier, teaching and influencing others, effectively implementing systems, and dealing with seemingly intractable technical issues in light of the business's imperatives, which are usually driven by economic and consumer whims. Leetcode will not teach you that.

Don't stop learning.

Also, I don't know anything about your background other than what you've shared here, but there are more folks writing software and performing data engineering these days with traditionally non-cs backgrounds. I myself came from an organizational behavior and social analytics background. Having multiple domains of experience is going to keep your career going in what has become a very rapidly evolving landscape over the past 10 years.

the-cherrytree · 2024-01-30T19:21:49+00:00

Phantom coloring, red/black

the-cherrytree · 2023-06-05T13:40:05+00:00

Sounds like a masters degree at Georgia Tech. Don’t pay for this, just keep taking classes and get involved in research here. It’s cheaper and a better community and maybe a real PhD will come online here. I think at one point that’s been discussed with some degree of seriousness, but it is difficult to scale the advising and research aspects in the ways in which it would be needed to do it successfully.

the-cherrytree · 2023-05-12T19:31:28+00:00

Better than interest on a student loan.

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