Andrey Klochkov

@ShiboChenTech @bernhardsson There is support, and there’s a team at Google working on making it better. A few months ago when I used it, it was still pretty immature. You had to use Jax if you were serious about using TPU.

@bernhardsson Does pytorch support TPU or do you have to use TF? I guess it's just too much risk and admin overhead to go after these businesses. TPU is a net positive asset within Google, but once they spin out, Google will have to pay more & the spin out also faces risks. Loss-Loss

Google should spin out its TPU team into a separate business, retain a big stake, and have it go public. Easy peasy way to make a bazillion dollars.

@ryansolsten The payments take many forms -- taxes, insurance, copays etc, but in the end of the day as long as healthcare as a whole is business, taxpayer will pay, and pay a lot because that's what businesses are for.

@ryansolsten Insurance companies, healthcare companies, pharmacies, producers of medicine, etc are all businesses and as any other business they have to create value for shareholders. As long as that's the case taxpayer will pay a lot for healthcare.

I pay around $300 per month for health insurance for myself. I went to a doctors appointment to establish primary care and had one lab done. I now owe $696 out of pocket. For one appointment. What is the point of this?!

@wordgrammer @teodorio There’s a twist though. Some very popular instance types with GPU are easily available under sagemaker and impossible to get otherwise.

@teodorio Overhyped wrapper around virtual machines sold at a 40% markup. Target audience is business execs who think you “have to have a special web service to deploy a machine learning model”. Every engineer hates it but they are powerless before the 70 year old MBA who picks it

Is the gold standard for ML inference just to set up a Python server, use it to host your ML model, and then have another server (written in a faster language w good concurrency) that talks to it through http requests? Or do you all just use SageMaker

Best description of sagemaker I’ve seen

@waitbutwhy How does time travel work?

If a time traveler from 2124 appeared in front of you and you were able to ask them just one question before they vanished, what would you ask?

@jaltma The social aspect is strong with team sports like soccer. Most other things people recommend are lacking in this regard.

In my opinion a good hobby has gear you can nerd out on, increasing levels of skill or knowledge that are never finished, is meditative and creates flow state, and naturally creates social connection.

@chemikadze I did some 1C programming as a side hustle ages ago. It didn't look or feel like anything else. It's as horrible as it looks.

Pretty much any big data, then cloud and now AI conference: Mulaney then shared an anecdote about how he and his son, who is nearly 3, like to play baseball in their front yard. “We’re just two guys hitting Wiffle balls badly and yelling ‘Good job’ at each other,” he said. “It’s sort of the same energy here at Dreamforce.”

It’s similar to TF in so many ways. It’s a low level tool that’s hard to use, with awful docs and many ways to do the same thing, outdated functionality etc. There’s with a bunch of half finished half broken higher level libraries on top. I think it’s destined to be used only by Google itself, and googles own MLEs will want to use open source alternatives like torch.

Someone needs to say it: As someone who started using it in its early days (2019 when I interned at Google) and tries it again occasionally - JAX is terrible! It might be due to my software engineering skills, but it's very hard to debug, and the speed improvement isn't worth it

@cloneofsimo argparse works but it's pain to read the code with lots of args. simple_parsing makes it much better. You define a dataclass with regular attribute comments, and it's automatically your CLI interface, with support for config files for defaults.

genuine question, why bother with argparse when you can use torchrun with click? Seriously, every distributed torch codebase uses argparse, do people just not know click exists or is argparse more robust for some reason? Sorry if I sounded arrogant AF, i'm genuinely questioning about software engineering cause im not exactly SWE

I can't for the love of me understand how people bear to stay in tech for decades everything is just so broken and dysfunctional I joined [FAANG] three years ago and I probably thought of quitting every. single. day. since. parasitism is just a hugely underestimated problem - the parasites will stick to nice things like a leech and add weight to them until the thing can barely move at all they will mix with their host until they become undetectable, because there is no one sane up there who can see it all to eliminate them - it's just too big, too indirect, the information is too sparse the organization is so broken, so crippled, the incentives are misaligned everywhere, there is no leadership, no vision, no passion, no energy, I swear 2/3 of the company could get axed and things would move *faster* than before, if the right 1/3 remained I haven't shipped anything that mattered this whole time, I push 20x less code than I did before, and I still get promoted people jump from project to project leaving them in an arguably worse state than before, or milk projects for a promo before jumping ship immediately after launch, leaving it to the next loser to maintain and yet things... continue... to work the stock continues to rise I continue to make ridiculous money to pretend my work has any meaning to act like nothing is happening and to think about quitting, every day without ever doing it.

This is hilarious. A slipknot cover with a bajo, slide whistle, a tuba, an acoustic guitar, etc. The clown mask is the cherry on top. Leo is the best. youtu.be/sCxmDu5cRM0?si…

Average Home Depot experience: 19 year old needs to page the store manager to ask which aisle the light bulbs are in Average Ace Hardware experience: 79 year old walks you through every aisle of the store and after 4 hours you know how to build a house from the ground up

@svpino Oh man, non technical people in tech companies who are going from meeting to meeting daily is a disease, managers or not. AI demos all over the place are annoying and dumb. Everything else from your list can stay.

What. The. Actual. Fuck. Are you actually sitting there telling me that, in 2024, a significant open source project is using fucking Autotools instead of something like Cmake? See, this is why I retired early from software engineering. Because for every new job I took, the same conversation would occur in slow motion over the course of a year or three. Foobar, Inc: Welcome aboard, Devon. We were really impressed by all the awesome super-smart stuff on your resume! Devon: Thanks, let's have a look at this codebase. {Sound of Devon throwing up a little in his mouth.} Devon: Pieces of this code appear to have been thrown together by howler monkeys over the course of a seven-day cocaine binge. Foobar, Inc: Oh, that would be Fred. Yeah, he's self-taught, and his code's a little unorthodox, but — Devon: He has clearly never taken a single computer science class in his life, and his code is a crime against god, art, and nature. Foobar, Inc: But he's just so fast. He got our whole version 1.0 written over just seven days! Devon: I totally believe that, and it's the reason why we need to — Foobar, Inc: Yeah, we wish more programmers were fast like him. Nowdays, everyone seems to take forever to do anything. Including Fred, for some reason. Weird. Devon: Have you ever heard of something called "technical debt"? When you write hasty code, you introduce bugs and accidental complexity. It's like borrowing time from future you. You have to pay it back, with interest. Foobar, Inc: What an interesting concept. You are clearly very smart. But we don't have time for you to be an abstract philosopher king, pontificating about theoretical concepts which obviously have no bearing on the real world. We have new features to write. That seems to happen so slowly nowdays for some unknown reason. Devon: It's because you are drowning in technical debt. Foobar, Inc: What an interesting abstract philosophical concept that has no bearing on our reality. You are clearly a really smart guy. But we can't test your theory, because the CEO expects 5,763 new features in next month's release, to fulfill promises he made to Important Partner Business, without consulting us at all. Devon: This tech debt needs to be paid down sometime. You can't just put it off. If you do, the interest will inflict itself on the timetable for every new feature you write. Has someone tried explaining the concept of tech debt to the CEO? Foobar, Inc: We can't do that. He's a boomer. Also, he has the power of a god, and the emotional stability of a single mother with a crack habit and an Onlyfans account. We find it easier to smile and present him with rosy scenarios, and then lay off a few scapegoats when we don't meet goals. If only we could understand why everything takes so long these days. Software engineers must be lazy. Not like Fred. Let's put Fred in charge of the whole department. Maybe he can shake things up. Devon: Hey, I spent a week re-architecting the BazTranslator component. It runs sixty-three times faster, and you can include new conversions by inheriting from this base class and overriding just these two virtual functions. Foobar, Inc: How DARE you, sir? You were supposed to be writing new features! This is why progress is so slow. You spent a whole week without adding any new functionality! Don't you understand we are in crisis, here? Devon: You are always in crisis. Have you tried reading this book of essays by Fredrick Brooks? Foobar, Inc: Get that thing out of my face. Why are you being so difficult? You should watch out. You're acquiring a reputation for being difficult to manage. You should tremble in fear now. Devon: I could have a new job with one phone call. I am trying to help you, you silly people. Foobar, Inc: Then stop being an abstract philosopher king and write features as fast as you can! Like Fred! Why can't you be more like Fred? Devon: Fred made a whole set of structs containing raw untyped pointers so he could reinvent polymorphism in C, because he "doesn't like C++". Foobar, Inc: Yes, isn't he clever? We love Fred! Devon: And segfaults, apparently. {Sound of major project hitting an iceberg, burning down, falling over, and then sinking into the swamp.} Foobar, Inc: Another project failed. Clearly, it's your fault, wasting time with all your weird philosophy and refactoring code. We're going to lay you off. Devon: I am actually relieved. Appros of nothing, does your family carry a lot of credit card debit? Foobar, Inc middle manager: Of course not! That stuff will kill you! Why do you ask? Devon: No reason. {Sound of Devon retiring from a high-paying engineering career and writing a science fiction novel in his bedroom for nine months.}

I used to find writing CUDA code rather terrifying. But then I discovered a couple of tricks that actually make it quite accessible. In this video I introduce CUDA in a way that will be accessible to Python programmers, and I even show how to do it all in @GoogleColab!

@VicVijayakumar @xitijpatel @tiffani It's the hardest when you talk privately with people and almost everyone agrees with you, but then no one speaks out. It makes you look like a combative person that has problems with working with others. Whereas a lot of people agree, just quietly.

@__mharrison__ I do machine learning in 2023

@waitbutwhy Yeah, it's easy to see dicks "I paid for X, I'll do whatever" on a plane. People who ask are OK, especially when they don't recline when I say no. Also people who make it straight when I tell them reclining their seats creates an issue for me or my children.

Times when it’s a non-dick-move to recline your seat on a plane: 1) When there’s no one behind you 2) When there’s a young child behind you 3) When you’re in business or first class 4) When it's nighttime on an overnight flight 5) When you notice that the person behind you is reclining while violating 1-4 above (they’re being a dick to someone else so it's fine to do the same to them) It's your right to recline other times too but you're not being a non-dick.