Newtra

@Newtra@pawb.social

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google Is Killing Retro Dodo & Other Independent Sites⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  You’re right. Everything is suspiciously wordy, substance is sparse, and every headline is clickbaity. It’s like they tuned the content specifically for google, not human readers…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Francis Ford Coppola's Impossible New Sci-Fi Movie is Even Weirder Than We Thought⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  “zero commercial prospects”? That sounds exactly like the sort of movie I’d pay money for!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YouTube’s ad blocker problems are just an AdBlock Plus bug⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The funny thing is that YouTube’s code is already so laggy that we all believed this without a second thought.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What do I need to read to understand basic pytorch?⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Honestly, I don’t think that there’s room for a competitor until a whole new paradigm is found. PyTorch’s community is the biggest and still growing. With their recent focus on compilation, not only are TF and Jax losing any chance at having an advantage, but the barrier to entry for new competitors is becoming much higher. Compilation takes a LOT of development time to implement, and it’s hard to ignore 50-200% performance boosts.

  Community size tends to ultimately drive open source software adoption. You can see the same with the web frameworks - in the end, most people didn’t learn React because it was the best available library, they learned it because the massive community had published so many tutorials and driven so many job adverts that it was a no-brainer to choose it over Angular, Vue, etc. Only the paradigm-shift libraries like Svelte and Htmx have had a chance at chipping away at React’s dominance.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What do I need to read to understand basic pytorch?⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The easiest way to get the basics is to search for articles, online courses, and youtube videos about the specific modules you’re interested in. Papers are written for people who are already deep in the field. You’ll get there, but they’re not the most efficient way to get up to speed. I have no experience with textbooks.

  It helps to think of PyTorch as just a fancy math library. It has some well-documented frameworky structure (nn.Module) and a few differentiation engines, but all the deep learning-specific classes/functions (Conv2d, BatchNorm1d, ReLU, etc.) are just optimized math under the hood.

  You can see the math by looking for projects that reimplement everything in numpy, e.g. picoGPT or ConvNet in NumPy.

  If you can’t get your head around the tensor operations, I suggest searching for “explainers”. Basically for every impactful module there will be a bunch of " Explained" articles or videos out there. There are also ones for entire models, e.g. The Illustrated Transformer. Once you start googling specific modules’ explainers, you’ll find people who have made mountains of them.

  If you’re not getting an explanation of something, just google and find another one. People have done an incredible job of making this information freely accessible in many different formats. I basically learned my way from webdev to an AI career with a couple years of casually watching YouTube videos.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨we need better hobbies⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I could just be further down the path due to lucky opportunities. 20 years ago I had no ambitions beyond game programming. It was only when I got a biology-related job that learning in my free time started displacing mindless entertainment. The whole field is one big nerd snipe - there are endless opportunities where you can advance the frontier of knowledge by combining a few existing ideas and working out the kinks. The more you read, the more opportunities you see. It’s thrilling. I don’t think I can go back to non-science work.

  I think the dopamine from constant learning also helps to keep my ADHD in check. If I start the weekend with some study, I’ll usually also get the housework done. If I start with a video game or TV show, I’ll probably spend the rest of the weekend stressing about my todo list and not getting anything done.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨we need better hobbies⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I honestly don’t know what that silence would be like. I’ve spent my programming career jumping between domains, becoming an expert then moving on to find a new challenge. Now I’m building AI stuff for medicine.

  In my down time I learn languages, watch videos about physics and math, and play puzzle games.

  My brain actually won’t let me stop. Boredom = pain.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I Can't Drink Now Like I Used to a Few Years Ago (26M), is that Normal?⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Some minor/hard-to-notice health-related things can dramatically reduce alcohol tolerance and/or give “hangovers” shortly after starting a session.

  For me, inflammation is a big cause. I have (barely noticeable) cat allergies, and (obvious but hard to avoid) food intolerances & gut issues. If I don’t stay on top of avoiding triggers, my alcohol tolerance goes from multiple G&Ts giving a nice buzz, to 1-2 sips of G&T giving dizziness and headaches. Electrolyte imbalance can also cause it. I’ve found I have to add magnesium and potassium salt to my diet, or else I generally feel tired more, and my alcohol tolerance plummets. Once you start controlling these factors, you’ll start getting clear feedback from your body when you have too much or too little salt, in the form of water and food tasting different and general feelings of tension or tiredness.

  My advice: try antihistamines, easily-digestible meals, and/or sports drinks for a few days before you drink. If those help your tolerance, you probably have some health stuff going on - figure it out and you’ll probably find a way to generally feel better.