pgbovine

6 ms·

1.
by pgbovine 2y ago
so exciting to see these ideas out in the world! i'm now imagining a Scratch-like playground for kids to explore end-user programming / AI in an accessible way, like some of the example apps you've shown there's been a r
2.
by pgbovine 3y ago
also, while i have your attention here, since you wrote that related post on (not) vector db's ... what would you recommend for a newbie to get started with RAG? let's say i have a large collection of text files on my computer tha
3.
by pgbovine 3y ago
very cool idea! i was also very interested in this problem during grad school ... prototyped an approach by hacking CPython, but the code (python 2.6? from 2010 era) has long bitrotted: https://pg.ucsd.edu/publications/
4.
by pgbovine 3y ago
Your work is an inspiration as always!! My n00b question is: what do you think is currently the most practical path to running a reasonably-sized (doesn't have to be the biggest) LLM on a commodity linux server for hooking up to a hobb
5.
by pgbovine 3y ago
Cool work! You and your team may be interested in these two recent CHI papers from Microsoft Research, both on very relevant topics to what you've been doing: 1) “What It Wants Me To Say”: Bridging the Abstraction Gap Between End-User
6.
by pgbovine 8y ago
as the son of a university professor (mother) and an entrepreneur/MBA/businessperson (father), i totally second this observation. +1
7.
by pgbovine 8y ago
ping me by email (see profile) if you want to brainstorm privately; my two cents is biased toward academia if you have an above-average setup (don't know until I see your CV!); startups come and go with each hype cycle.
8.
by pgbovine 8y ago
i totally know how you feel since i have felt that way in the past as well :) here's something relevant: http://pgbovine.net/practical-reason-to-pursue-PhD.htm my two cents: find something where the grants align with y
9.
by pgbovine 8y ago
totally agreed! things can change even from one year to another with the same advisor. for instance, i'm not the same advisor to my students that i was last year, or the year before that, or the year before that. (i've only been
10.
by pgbovine 8y ago
you've inadvertently answered the question for me, to a first approximation :) i think that academia is a great launching point for a wide array of scholarly activities that the free market (i.e., industry) doesn't directly pay fo
11.
by pgbovine 8y ago
thanks! that's a hard problem! i frame it in terms of critical path: http://pgbovine.net/critical-path.htm if you can't get on someone's critical path, then you have to make it very easy for them to help you
12.
by pgbovine 8y ago
no way! (i'm glad i did it the first time, though)
13.
by pgbovine 8y ago
thanks! AMA. (no guarantees that i'll be able to answer via text, though; maybe i'll make a video later. been trying to minimize my computering time off-hours due to increasing wrist pains ... PSA: take care of your wrists, everyo
14.
by pgbovine 8y ago
overnight successes are usually 10-15 years in the making; so much goes on before the public release
15.
by pgbovine 9y ago
see here for US-oriented details: http://pgbovine.net/professor-job-titles.htm
16.
by pgbovine 9y ago
Lecturers are part- or full-time teaching faculty (usually not tenure-track, but some schools like UC's have tenure-track Lecturer tracks) e.g., https://profiles.stanford.edu/48960
17.
by pgbovine 9y ago
yep, this is often confusing for folks coming in from other countries: http://pgbovine.net/professor-job-titles.htm
18.
by pgbovine 9y ago
oh noes, not that guy again! this was written over 4 years ago before i became a professor, so YMMV :) i haven't looked at this for years; this is a more updated (and complementary) take on some of these issues, how that I've advi
19.
by pgbovine 9y ago
btw this may shed some light on your situation ... tl;dr unicorn jobs don't exist (for long) http://pgbovine.net/unicorn-jobs.htm
20.
by pgbovine 9y ago
If you're cranking out papers, then you should have enough papers to finish soon; in that case, just finish your Ph.D. and move on. Tell your advisor that you want to graduate within the next year, and that you have the papers to do so
21.
by pgbovine 9y ago
creator of http://pythontutor.com/ here ... skulpt is great and i know one of its maintainers quite well. one use case that's important is using it to distribute self-contained zero-install tutorials onto computers suc
22.
by pgbovine 9y ago
agreed! i cover this topic here: http://pgbovine.net/PG-Vlog-26-what-does-academia-mean.htm
23.
by pgbovine 9y ago
relevant paper: https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~jfogarty/publications/works... This is an example of research as illustrated by Figure 5 in that paper (known functionality, novel techniques)
24.
by pgbovine 9y ago
What does "academia" mean to you? Are you an undergraduate student, a grad student, a postdoc, a research scientist, a professor (and if so, which level)? Relationships to software creation differ at each level.
25.
by pgbovine 9y ago
If you're doing needfinding for a project idea to enhance learning, my suggestion is to focus on a single DOMAIN of learning first rather than trying to make something to help learning in general, since it's such a vague and broad
26.
by pgbovine 9y ago
does altruism count as vanity? people often feel good sharing information with others and helping others. perhaps that's still "vanity", but i don't think so.
27.
by pgbovine 9y ago
to reinforce one's own understanding. you're motivated to get things right if you know that other people will be reading it, rather than, say, writing something in your own private notes.
28.
by pgbovine 9y ago
This is something I've thought a lot about in the past. This short vlog episode of mine may give you some ideas: "For Aspiring Creators, Content Means Everything" http://pgbovine.net/PG-Vlog-9-content-means-ev
29.
by pgbovine 9y ago
I, too, wanted a Unicorn Job of this sort: http://pgbovine.net/unicorn-jobs.htm After some trial and error bouncing around in industry/postdoc/etc., I've found that being a PI in a field where I have to raise
30.
by pgbovine 9y ago
how could they need hundreds (or are they at thousands?) of software engineers? supporting hundreds of millions of users (and probably tens of millions of paid users) is non-trivial

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