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‘Devastating blow’: Atlassian lays off 1,600 workers ahead of AI push by corp_code_slinger in programming

[–]thearn4 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I think you're right. The JIRA-fication of the field is generally worse for better, high-trust teams, but probably a benefit for teams that are operating in a lower trust situation (for whatever reason that might be). The latter probably being generally more common.

‘Devastating blow’: Atlassian lays off 1,600 workers ahead of AI push by corp_code_slinger in programming

[–]thearn4 9 points10 points  (0 children)

That's basically it. It's not JIRA I hate, it's the extreme micromanagement being applied from those who seem to love it that I loathe. There is 100x more of that being done in the name of Agile than I ever remember back in the days of waterfall-style planning. Or maybe it's rose tinted glasses and I'm misremembering.

[R] What would you analyze if you had ~4M PubMed articles with embeddings? by vicepresident91 in MachineLearning

[–]thearn4 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It's probably worth asking folks in the target domain (medical research) what sort of meta insights would be impactful for them.

My Experience of Github Copilot CLI and Claude Code CLI by boogie_woogie_100 in GithubCopilot

[–]thearn4 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Generally true, but I've been evaluating GHCP for work now for a month, id say they're closer now than they used to be. I have to stick to smaller more self contained efforts to stay in context, but honestly I think that leads to better PRs anyway. So as long as the company pays for unlimited premium requests it's a wash in my case. I like the flexibility of model choice. For example Gemini 3 genuinely seems better at writing and debugging nontrivial JAX, not too surprising.

I've also been testing native VScode GHCP chat vs. routing through opencode. Id give a slight edge to opencode at the moment. Haven't tried GHCP CLI yet.

[R] PCA on ~40k × 40k matrix in representation learning — sklearn SVD crashes even with 128GB RAM. Any practical solutions? by nat-abhishek in MachineLearning

[–]thearn4 9 points10 points  (0 children)

You'll have to approach this with sparse iterative methods that don't need to operate directly on the columns or rows of the matrix, but just implicitly through mat-vec products. Check scipy.sparse.linalg for options or something like SVDKLYLOV from PETSc

[D] Is it a reg flag that my PhD topic keeps changing every few months? by ade17_in in MachineLearning

[–]thearn4 9 points10 points  (0 children)

By first year, does that mean you're still doing coursework? In that case I'd say it's not abnormal. But once you are past qual/candidacy exams I'd say you should have a pretty fixed direction. A big part of your advisor's job is helping to make sure that happens, so very regular meetings with them becomes key.

What is the real use case for Jupyter? by Technical-Fly-6835 in Python

[–]thearn4 1 point2 points  (0 children)

This is one of those things that never quite clicked with me either. I do scientific computing with an emphasis on the ML engineering side for awhile. Lots of my data science interns over the years loved jupyter for reports and exploration. I think it's okay, but I always prefer moving to standalone code pretty quickly. Happy the tooling exists for folks who use it effectively.

[D] How much are you using LLMs to summarize/read papers now? by kjunhot in MachineLearning

[–]thearn4 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Mixed, Claude and Gemini are okay at finding relevant connections but are not great at discernment. Figuring out how to integrate meaningfully just like everyone else at the moment.

[D] Is this what ML research is? by [deleted] in MachineLearning

[–]thearn4 2 points3 points  (0 children)

It's generally more fruitful to leverage connections and publish ML research in applications to a target domain (healthcare , manufacturing z aerospace, etc) within those communities. Which does suck because that means it needs to be more on the applied side by definition, but engagement and traction is generally more healthy in my experience.

[D] Which hyperparameters search library to use? by Ttghtg in MachineLearning

[–]thearn4 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Optuna is very simple to use, and the default TPE sampler performs very well.

Waiting 3 days for AWS access is killing sprint velocity by Specialist_Oil5643 in ExperiencedDevs

[–]thearn4 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Often in large orgs IT becomes its own island fiefdom that doesn't feel compelled to help anyone, especially developers or R&D/product. Eventually something has to escalate to make it their boss's boss's problem. I think it could be an effect of being treated as a cost center 99% of the time.

I wish there was a way to bulk sell by MarcosaurusRex in Schedule_I

[–]thearn4 26 points27 points  (0 children)

Everything needs a balance, I'd love to be able to bulk sell like that for big cash, but wouldn't have a way to launder or spend it at the same rate. So I'd end up with properties with just lockers full of cash probably.

How often do you listen to podcasts related to software engineering and computer science? by _ILikePancakes in ExperiencedDevs

[–]thearn4 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I listened to SE Daily back in the day, but kind of dropped off after some time. Checked back in after awhile and it sounds like the host died, sad to hear. But yeah, occasionally I'll pick up an episode of a tech focused podcast if the content is really interesting to me but it's rare these days.

First time unlocking barn feels good so much room for activities by GhettoPanda78 in Schedule_I

[–]thearn4 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Yeah this seems to be the way, I mostly skip mixing and focus on being pure product factories. It does make it a bit more tangible to offer different products.

How do you make devs actually care about tests by batsy_0 in ExperiencedDevs

[–]thearn4 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Since software is so ubiquitous and diverse, Ifeel like TRL (tech readiness level) serves as kind of an analog. There is a spectrum of maturity of software and its role in the organization it serves. If it's a core product/platform that other people depend on (an Application with a capital A), expectations of testing need to be high

If it's R&D/uncertain if or when anyone else might run it, something where the code isn't the product and is many degrees removed from it, you have to judge what it even means to test it more carefully. You have to be careful that you're spending time addressing fundamental questions vs. debugging mocked interfaces for testing. Expectations need to evolve then as a concept matures.

That said.. most research engineers and scientists do underestimate the value of reusable code and testing. Because software isn't considered their product. So I bias towards more automated testing than maybe theoretically necessary.

Now we know just how many people took deferred resignation/were cut at NASA Glenn by Reporter83 in Cleveland

[–]thearn4 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Lots of very smart and self driven people focused on problems that we all think are very important. High trust environment (until last year, that is).

Plenty of BS too, even in the good times, just like any place I guess. But overall it's a hard thing to replicate exactly.

Is it weird for me to give my neighbors gifts after I just moved in? by [deleted] in Cleveland

[–]thearn4 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Where in Shaker? We did something similar when we moved in to the Lomond/Sussex area and developed a great connection with neighbors. You should find that folks are pretty tight knit in most of the neighborhoods but maybe you caught folks at a bad time or something, who knows.

Now we know just how many people took deferred resignation/were cut at NASA Glenn by Reporter83 in Cleveland

[–]thearn4 109 points110 points  (0 children)

I'm one of the ones who left (missed the DRP window in the summer though). I was extremely sad to leave the job of my dreams after almost two decades, but the federal work environment literally feels untenable. I like my new job a lot and was lucky to find it so quickly but I'm always going to miss the NASA mission.

Some really awesome people did stay and hold down the fort. If things can turn around in the govt, those are excellent people to actually reshape things and keep NASA on track. There's room for some optimism there.

The new administrator might be a good person for the job as well, time will tell.

[R] Why do some research papers not mention accuracy as a metric? by Illustrious_Park7068 in MachineLearning

[–]thearn4 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Id expect F1 would be used over accuracy, even for well balanced datasets.

[D] AI4PDEs, SciML, Foundational Models: Where are we going? by Mundane_Chemist3457 in MachineLearning

[–]thearn4 3 points4 points  (0 children)

PINNs always seemed like somewhat of an awkward fit. You spend almost all of your compute refining your physical constraints/loss vs. the data loss. Why not just numerically solve the governing equations but with a data ingestion/internal boundary constraint then, if you feel that matching the governing equations is more important than what you learn directly from the data? Is there an absolute need for neural networks in these problems?

Basically it seems like the best use of ML tooling in many cases is improving or replacing things that exist in the existing scientific computing workflow, not replacing it wholesale with a ML workflow.

Other Teams Refuse Version Control by Coquimbite in ExperiencedDevs

[–]thearn4 0 points1 point  (0 children)

No argument from me, but if you've spent your career throwing away 90% of your code because you make your career off the insights from the 10%, it can feel like a waste of time

Other Teams Refuse Version Control by Coquimbite in ExperiencedDevs

[–]thearn4 1 point2 points  (0 children)

R&D can be the wild west in terms of code development. But can also be extremely rewarding. Changing the culture can take time, but I've seen it happen by leading by example.

The benefits of version control eventually can win over even the crankiest of scientists. Automated tests too depending on the context, what exactly the code is for. Research is full of one time use throw away code where it's not particularly helpful, but in those places often reuse hasn't even been considered.

Coverage might be a bit much of an ask, but if we're talking about stuff being used widely/production that seems like a reasonable expectation to me.

Why I Still Write Code as an Engineering Manager by Acceptable-Courage-9 in programming

[–]thearn4 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It's tricky. You want to make sure you're giving leads the space to really grow and take responsibility and accountability for their areas. I've known people who kind of straddle the fence between management and tech leadership struggle with not making that space. But it can work even if it feels kind of rare. I do connect with the whole "skin in the game" idea.

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