Back in university, my friends and I had a trick when it came to exams in advanced physics and math courses: we’d try to sit exams with a postdoc or, better yet, a PhD student rather than a seasoned professor. Professors, with decades of experience, could gauge a student’s depth of understanding after just a few questions, accurately assigning ( Read more... )

For a long time, there was no decent local LLM that understood and spoke Russian well. I've tested many fine-tunes, and they all behaved significantly dumber when answering in Russian than their respective English originals ( Read more... )

I just lost several hours today debugging the following ( Read more... )

All numbers below are my estimates. Let's divide s/w engineers to two halves - 50% of "good" and 50% of "bad". For simplicity, I don't account for average ones, ignore the continuum and reduce the problem to one dimension. These three omissions make results almost absolutely unreliable, but still fun ( Read more... )

Is it a good time to move?

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Exactly 20 years ago I was setting up my work space in my first cubicle:

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20 years ago I started working for Nortel as a contractor. One of my first assignments was to write a script in C to automatically stress test creating tons of entries in a pre-SQL database (developed in 70s) that was storing cellular network configs ( Read more... )

I was recently working on a problem, where one of the performance metrics I measured was ~100x higher than expected. It is almost impossible to make a 100x optimization, unless something is severely broken ( Read more... )

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Any idea why the same item on Amazon.de costs me 7% less than it costs my wife? We are using the same link, but see different prices... Of course I ordered it, but what the heck?