I'm two years ahead of you in this journey. I got divorced after just over a decade with my partner. Social engagements to me were always ad-hoc. I suck at planning so I often found myself more alone than I'd like.
Looking back on the last two years and auditing what worked, I would say routine and lingering were the most important thing.
Trying new things is mentally draining and labor intensive, this is a fact of life for many. What worked for me was finding something I enjoyed (exercise classes) and doing it consistently multiple times a week at the same place for months. With repetition, it's very easy to make new friends. Complaining about one exercise one week turns into making comments about the music the next, and all of a sudden you're getting coffee with friends.
At the start it was very difficult, and I was very bad, but now I'm part of a community and have many close friends. Its a hour per day most days of the week. It's also a jumping off point for everything else social. It provides purpose and self-confidence. Which are prerequisites for everything else meaningful in life.
One other thought to drill deeper into regarding lingering.
I'm the type of guy that always moves with purpose. When I'm done doing something, I'm quick to leave. Looking back on my life so far, I think this has often been mistaken as antisocial.
Every event involving humans is default social. Leaving quickly precludes much of life's social whimsy.
When I started my Ph.D. program, there was a weekly seminar that I started going to. At first, I instinctively left each week immediately after the talk was over. But I noticed that a lot of people would hang around afterwards and chat. Even though I found it a bit awkward, I started following their lead -- a habit I'm very glad I developed!
I'm much the same. It's hard to notice. Coming up having onsites with three and four and five consulting clients in a "normally busy" day (you want 'high touch?' I started before smartphones!) taught me to associate just that purposeful attitude with the satisfying knowledge that I probably wouldn't end the day running further behind when I started.
It's a good energy to bring to work or to a crisis. Everywhere else? Maybe not so much. I appreciate you mentioning it here; it can serve me also, as a reminder to work on that.
"With repetition, it's very easy to make new friends."*
*Assuming you possess the necessary social skills.
I've trained BJJ consistently for over 4 years now. I think fondly of all the people there and feel accepted, but we barely talk, and I'm unable to participate in the locker room camaraderie.
This is probably not a problem OP has, I just felt the need to complain.
I think social skills are mostly just like any other skill: you have to practice them to get better at them. And while you might be more or less naturally gifted at any skill, there is a minimum level which every abled human out there can reach with some effort. You will never be a showman,a car seller or the king of the party but you can have interactions with other human beings and connect with some of them. Just like you can learn to play guitar, juggle 3 balls or do basic algebra.
Wonderful advice Geoff, that's the same kind of thing I started doing when my relationship broke down. You find your community, and the rest will come.
you hit the nail here.. repetition is key! that’s what happens at a workplace or school. You show up every day, do your thing, and have small interactions here and there. Over time, those interactions grow, and you get to know each other on a deeper level and become friends.
This can be replicated with similar activities that involve a schedule, like joining classes, volunteering, or whatever else fits that kind of setup.
Within volunteering, I think it is worth shopping around. Some organisations do not treat volunteers well, and some are great social experiences.
I would try and get something where you can see the results in front of you. I worked years ago at a soup kitchen for the elderly and felt much better for it, than working in a charity shop on a till and feeling like I was just a worker unpaid.
One thing missing from this discussion is the blast radius of the product or repo in question.
Let PMs land new widgets on internal dashboards or CSS changes in internal tooling. The same way we should be aspiring to build tools for devs to merge these same changes with minimal test plans. You wouldn't call a mechanic to help you turn on your windshield wipers.
Changes in high-risk environments should be gated for people who actually know what they're doing. That high bar should remain high.
100% agreed. I'm a Program Manager and have been writing tooling for my own internal workflows for years (like Monte Carlo-based forecasting tools), or program-adjacent low-stakes stuff (like an API to generate a WSJF score based on a fields inputted into Asana, since it couldn't do that itself).
But I'm not about to send a PR for fixing production bugs even if I have decent high level context. Nobody has better context than the devs working on it every day.
I had the same problem but with a bad time machine backup. ~300GB of my 512GB disk, just labeled the generic "System Data". I lost a day of work over it because I couldn't do Xcode builds and had to do a deep dive into what was going on.
This is super cool! I'm wondering what applications typically look like? Send a little hash like this along with a big image to show while decompressing?
Funny timing. I just migrated my personal styling app off of Nano Banana.
My main use case is editing user uploads to enhance their clothing images. A large part of it is preserving logo, graphics and other technical details. I noticed over time it felt like Nano Banana has gotten worse at this.
I have a test set of graphic t-shirts that I noticed the model seeming getting worse with it. This combined with price and the terrible experience of their cloud console got me to migrate off.
As someone who's been in the "AI" space for a while its strange how Hugging Face went from one of the biggest name to not a part of the discussion at all.
I think that's because there's less local AI usage now since there's all kinds of image models by the big labs, so there's really no rush of people self hosting stable diffusion etc anymore
the space moved from Consumer to Enterprise pretty fast due to models getting bigger
Today's free models are not really bigger when you account for the use of MoE (with ever increasing sparsity, meaning a smaller fraction of active parameters), and better ways of managing KV caching. You can do useful things with very little RAM/VRAM, it just gets slower and slower the more you try to squeeze it where it doesn't quite belong. But that's not a problem if you're willing to wait for every answer.
yeah, but I mean more like the old setups where you'd just load a model on a 4090 or something, even with MoE it's a lot more complex and takes more VRAM, right? like it just seems not justifiable for most hobbyists
With sparse MoE it's worth running the experts in system RAM since that allows you to transparently use mmap and inactive experts can stay on disk. Of course that's also a slowdown unless you have enough RAM for the full set, but it lets you run much larger models on smaller systems.
part of what discussion? anyone in the AI space knows and uses HF, but the public doesn't give a care and why should they? It's just an advanced site were nerds download AI stuff. HF is super valuable with their transformers library, their code, tutorials, smol-models, etc, but how does it translate to investor dollars?
It isn't necessary to be part of the discussion if you are truly adding value (which HF continues to do). It's nice to see a company doing what it does best without constantly driving the hype train.
I disagree, using python for a web-server and something like celery for background work is a pretty common pattern.
My reading of this is it more or less allows you to use Postgres (which you're likely already using as your DB) for the task orchestration backend. And it comes with a cool UI.
Wait until you find out about some people not writing pure python apps but also have some code in JavaScript. Crazy to mix more than one language in one machine.
Where I grew up there was no "Science Fair Circuit" like described in this article. Science fairs where a way for young kids (aged 8-10) to test silly hypothesis. There was no feeding into national fairs or anything like that.
I remember one being how fast bean sprouts grew when watered with different liquids (Water, Olive Oil, Wine, Coke, ect). An idea a kid came up with and tested with only minimal help from parents.
To me they should be about exploring independent ideas. I love the Adam Savage quote: "Remember kids, the only difference between screwing around and science is writing it down". To me this is what they should capture.
It's about preserving brand image. Destroying a product is favourable compared to selling it at a discount and making the brand you spent so much marketing appear "cheap".
Looking back on the last two years and auditing what worked, I would say routine and lingering were the most important thing.
Trying new things is mentally draining and labor intensive, this is a fact of life for many. What worked for me was finding something I enjoyed (exercise classes) and doing it consistently multiple times a week at the same place for months. With repetition, it's very easy to make new friends. Complaining about one exercise one week turns into making comments about the music the next, and all of a sudden you're getting coffee with friends.
At the start it was very difficult, and I was very bad, but now I'm part of a community and have many close friends. Its a hour per day most days of the week. It's also a jumping off point for everything else social. It provides purpose and self-confidence. Which are prerequisites for everything else meaningful in life.
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