The former. I would not expect any candidate - especially a new grad - to have actually used GasTown style setups unless they were coming from another company with money to burn on those sorts of multiple-agent scenarios. I barely run more than one or two Claude sessions at once because it slams into the usage limit so fast.
I could steer the conversation to explore if the candidate had insight into why GasTown or other "swarm" models exist though. Do they know what a system prompt is? How context is managed/affects output? How harnesses can delegate to simpler models, and when to use different classes of model? I wouldn't expect anything particularly deep here, but bonus points for a solid understanding/experience of the tooling and how to get the most out of token budgets is valuable.
To the parent point: even if you refuse to use LLMs for whatever reason, I would expect any coding applicant to have at least tried them. I'd assume the person is living under a rock if they said no.
Specifically for wikis, is there a reason you wouldn't use Kiwix? For non "official" releases it's more complicated, but there are some services to generate the ZIM files. The desktop reader app is pretty good in my experience.
Also, I would anticipate at least a 5 year lifespan for a current generation card. The 3090 is still respectable simply because it has 24GB of RAM which, for years, has been the limiting factor for ML at home. If you got a 6000, sure it’s going to cost 7-8k, but the resale value is likely to be very good. Even the 3090 is 50%+ of RRP still. And if you’re not doing LLMs, it’s an interesting value proposition for “classic” CNN vision model training. You can fit enormous batch sizes on 96 GB. The biggest reason to upgrade is perf/watt has about doubled (eg 4000 pro Blackwell is half the 3090 for similar).
People tend to assume the capex is thrown away but as we’ve seen with RAM, don’t be so sure you won’t be able flip it if you need to.
Ironically, AI is really great at making legacy repos work. I have Claude do it all the time.
It’ll fix up environments, bump versions, fix compiler issues and outdated code, give you a better user interface (or create one to begin with). I usually point to this when people question if AI has productivity benefits, because it’s a massive time saver for me. I have spent hours in the past trying to chase down some obscure platform-specific GCC error on Stack Overflow.
Ideally pay it forward and PR the things you fixed.
> By the way, why didn't this happen with 35mm movie projectors? They couldn't blend adjacent frames either, because they are just shining light through individual pictures on a sheet of celluloid, yet I don't remember seeing this kind of stutter in movie theatres back in the day!
Normally you’d shoot at 180 degree shutter angle (exposure time is half the frame time). This produces a “cinematic” blur that doesn’t look choppy, especially when projected at the same rate. So if you’re shooting 24 fps video, try shooting at 1/48. This is slow compared to most handheld still photography, which is why you start to need ND filters on cine cameras, especially if you also want to shoot wide open.
Stutter is particularly noticeable for fast panning landscapes where there’s uniform motion across the entire frame. Very obvious if there are “gaps” in the blur because your brain will want to interpolate. If there are static/foreground objects, you probably won’t notice.
In 2016 they introduced document scanning, and I've used that a lot to digitize old papers, lecture notes, all kinds of things. It works well and has a good UI for tweaking corner locations and other things.
It reminds me a little of set dressing in movies. Every sophisticated character owns a chemex, but they use a french press to make coffee onscreen. Harks back to the days of Notting Hill when we had to believe that Hugh Grant ran a failing second hand bookstore while living in a well-decorated house in central London. Do we think the author uses his Teenage Engineering pocket operators, or are they window dressing? Do we need Godel, Escher and Bach as the backdrop for a completely unrelated photo?
People can be multi-dimensional. I’m a sysadmin/developer, yet I played in a symphony orchestra, and still play bass, take photos and read world classics, sci-fi and occasional philosophical books.
Why can’t he make music, read music history or biographies, or do other things?
Do all “software engineers” need to interface with a computer 7/24, Matrix style?
Of course you can, I think the author has taste, is clearly interested in design and I enjoyed looking through the images to see what I recognized. I should say that it obviously looks good, for the same reasons that movie sets look good and why we hire set designers/dressers.
It's also fair game to critique these photos from an artistic perspective. Some are clearly intentionally staged and I argue that the messaging is a little clumsy. Sure, it's hard to avoid if you've filled your space with expensive design objects. Another comparison is cooking blogs where the photographers add visual clutter that looks good on instagram, but is impractical and unrelated to the food being cooked. The space itself is very nice, though you've got to be absolutely anal about keeping clutter down.
I have GEB, TAoCP, Stevens, Crandall/Pomerance, Tannenbaum, Aho/Sethi/Ullman, Schneier, K&R and a bunch of other books on my shelves next to me. About 1000mm worth in total but I could probably trim it down to about 600mm if I stripped out the random extras related to old projects (Rails/JavaScript/Mysql/etc) or stuff you just don't need a book about (Git).
Putting them anywhere else in the house would either be more "showoff" or just less practical. It's true that I rarely ever pick them up but the few times I do I'm glad they're right next to my work desk.
The end result is the same though. If your application is rejected in the US, you could stay while you appeal, but if you're ultimately rejected then you have no choice but to re-apply through consular processing anyway once your status runs out. Good if you have a job in the US, but you're kicking the can down the road.
> A refused green card application might be the end of being ever in usa.
Do you have evidence for your other claim? The main thing you need to prove for a non immigrant visa or VWP is that you won't overstay or have intent to immigrate at the time of application and upon entry. Otherwise it's up to the consular officer like usual. You would need to declare the refusal/denial of course.
What will get you denied is "inadmissibility" if you don't submit a waiver. If you're inadmissible that usually means some serious violation and you've got other problems.
As far as I know, people have been successful in re-applying for EB green cards after being rejected when they've assembled a better packet.
If you apply for immigration status and are rejected, sure you can apply for immigration again if you gain much better qualifications. I haven’t seen many successful examples though.
People are deemed to have immigration intent for small things like they don’t have enough ties to their country of residence. An application for immigration is definite proof you had intent to immigrate. You can wait like ten years, but time doesn’t work in your favor (immigration gets harder every year, people get older and handcuffed elsewhere…).
I mean this in the kindest possible way while still being critical: I really wish people would stop making definitive statements about things that, I'm sorry to say, they don't understand. This is just wrong. The end result is absolutely not the same, for multiple reasons:
1. Decisions by consular officials largely can't be challenged (with some exceptions). Decisions by USCIS can be challenged in immigration court and/or federal court, depending on your case;
2. Thanks to Trump v. Hawaii, the president has the broad power to ban the granting of visas to people overseas. There's currently a ban on 39 countries. That cannot be challenged. It can be challenged in the US;
3. When you apply for an immigration benefit in the US, the USCIS field office that deals with it is determined by where you live. It used to be the case that if you were outside the US, you could get an embassy appointment in the country you were residing in. This administration changed that such that you can only use the embassy in your country of birth/citizenship. So, if you're a Kenyan citizen living and working in France, you have to go back to Kenya for your consular interview. That might take wait times for getting an interview from 1-2 months to 1-2 years, depending on the embassy. It's also a huge hassle and expensive, possibly;
4. The GP is correct here. When you apply for any immigrant visa, meaning you or a spouse, sibling, parent, child or employer files an I130/I140 for you, you've demonstrated what's called "immigrant intent". That means that for people from many countries they are unlikely to ever get a nonimmigrant visa ever again. USCIS thinks you're tryign to sneak into the US to adjust status rather than consular processing. They also think if you enter the US, you won't leave. Obviously citizens of Norway are treated differently to citizens of Nigeria. I'll let you ponder why;
5. If you accrue unlawful presence in the US (for which the rules are complicated), you may get a 3 or 10 year bar on returning to the US. In addition, because you have overstayed a visa (or have entered without inspection), you may simply not ever get another visa again anyway. It's unclear from this memo if the 3/10 year bars will apply here. We won't know until we see how it's implemented;
6. Certain people may be in limbo because they don't have the option to leave to consular process. I'm mainly thinking of people who have made an asylum claim. There are people who have filed for asylum in 2015 who don't have a ruling on that case yet. 11 years is a long time. They might meet someone and get married and then seek to adjust. This is a complicated process that comes with its own perils but generally they adjust status and then withdraw their asylum case or, in some cases, seek cancellation of removal from immigration court. Do they have to leave? They may not have travel documents. They can't really go back to their home country. This may create a situation where they can't adjust and they can't leave so they're in limbo. Also, if the asylum office decides your asylum case was "frivolous", you may have a permanent bar on ever receiving an immigration benefit. That's much more difficult if not impossible to challenge overseas;
7. What makes you inadmissibile isn't necessarily serious. It can be a simple mistake. For example, if you marry a US citizen then working without authorization is forgiven (mostly; it's complicated) but you have to be really careful how you answer questions on the forms and to officers. So you might answer "no" the I485 question about working without authorization even though you did a few Ubers 7 years ago, which is forgiven, but you've now made a false claim and that may make you inadmissible needing a waiver. A good lawyer will argue that it wasn't "material" but this USCIS much more than any previouis is having a stricter interpretation of any of this;
8. As another example, "crimes", particularly "aggravated" crimes or crimes of "moral terpitude" can make you inadmissible. But what are those? There are guidelines but there's some grey areas where USCIS has discretion. For example, being convicted of a crime with a potential sentence of more than 365 days will make you inadmissible. But sentencing guidelines can be whack such that if you speed as a 16 year old, you might get charged with something and, not knowing any better, get offered a deal for probation on a crime of reckless driving that can technically be up to 2 years of jail time by the sentencing guidelines. Well, guess what? You're now guilty of an aggravated crime and can not only have your green card denied, you can be denaturalized and deported. No, this isn't a made up example.
IANAL but I know what I know and, more importantly, I know what I don't know, which is a lot. But what's particularly frustrating to me is the people who have no idea what they don't know. The above just scratches the surface.
IANAL. If you adjust status in the US you can also apply for AP/EAD if your original visa/legal status expires. You can't do that if you opt for consular processing.
Nothing new there, but under the new rules the former is no longer an option and you'd need to leave immediately. On the plus side consular processing tends to be cheaper and often faster (AOS and all the approvals vs the consular processing fee and a plane ticket).
I could steer the conversation to explore if the candidate had insight into why GasTown or other "swarm" models exist though. Do they know what a system prompt is? How context is managed/affects output? How harnesses can delegate to simpler models, and when to use different classes of model? I wouldn't expect anything particularly deep here, but bonus points for a solid understanding/experience of the tooling and how to get the most out of token budgets is valuable.
To the parent point: even if you refuse to use LLMs for whatever reason, I would expect any coding applicant to have at least tried them. I'd assume the person is living under a rock if they said no.
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