No, I got multiple cases of managers with speech impediment, I also saw a blind tech lead and a deaf one (who also happened to have a small speech impediment).
I also saw a bunch of C-levels being total sociopaths but that's another story :)
I've worked with multiple blind coworkers and they were all amazing. They weren't amazing because they were blind, but they sure didn't let it slow them down.
This was the same interview where some guy was asking me about "big-o" - like the thing that you teach 19 year olds and I was saying that parallelization matters, i/o matters, quantization matters, whether you can run it on the GPU, these all matter.
The simple "big-o" number doesn't account for whether you need to pass terabytes over the bus for every operation - and on actual computers moving around terabytes, I know, shockingly, this affects performance.
And if you have a dual epyc board with 1,024 threads, being able to parallelize a solution and design things for cache optimization, this isn't meaningless.
It's a weak classifier - if you really think I'm going to be doing a lexical sort in like O(n^3) like some kind of clown, I don't know what you're hiring here.
> but big-o comes before all of those other things
If you're attempting to quantify algorithmic scalability with big-o, without those in mind, you'll often be wrong. There was a great post here a few years ago going into this, and how memory access "complexity" is what usually matters, and what dominantly shapes the scalability curve. It had nice examples showing how the expected big-o scalability curves were often completely wrong, outside of toys.
If you're not trying to quantify algorithmic scalability with big-o, then have fun coming up with a fun collection of symbols to put next to your code, and petting your spherical cow!
algorithmic complexity is 100% absolutely orthogonal to the stuff you've mentioned
what you're describing is something different than big-o, in the sense that is commonly understood, and what your interviewer almost certainly intended
I understand what you're describing and talking about but it's not big-o
I would guess that you haven't had any kind of formal cs education? no shade but like there are some important topics covered in those curriculums
I have. I understand big-o, I understand that it’s just algorithmic complexity. I understand big-o is not a performance scaling model, because algorithms run on real hardware. That's fine. Some people enjoy petting spherical cows, and some people work with the nuances of reality. That's also fine.
The performance gain from compression (replacing IO with compute) is not ironic, it was seen as a feature for the various NAS that Sun (and after them Oracle) developped around ZFS.
Systemd got better with time and I got better with it over time, which makes it acceptable for me now. I still miss SMF from Solaris years later though. I'm sure there are better systems out there but when the ubiquity is not there it's really hard to adopt them especially in corporate environments. And then you have to learn 2 things if you want to use something else at home, which is already too much for me...
> For now, it is very simple: there is a VM (running on FreeBSD and bhyve, on hardware I manage) where I have installed SmartOS. The physical host also runs the reverse proxy (in a jail). Inside the SmartOS VM, there are a series of zones: [...]
That is a weird take, to install SmartOS inside a VM for anything else than a PoC. SmartOS is meant to run on bare metal and host its own VMs / zones. It works either way of course but it's funny for an "Illumos cafe" to not go full on Illumos on the setup.
You're right, but 'for now' is the key! :-)
To launch a new project, not funded by anyone, I'm using some "spare" hardware space. The final idea is to make it a full illumos setup (on bare metal).
Yeah, I see no issues with it. Only if everyone complained would donate 100 USD, then I am pretty sure it would have a fully illumos setup. Speaking of, I have not checked, but I hope you make it easy to donate.
> That is a weird take, to install SmartOS inside a VM for anything else than a PoC. SmartOS is meant to run on bare metal and host its own VMs / zones. It works either way of course but it's funny for an "Illumos cafe" to not go full on Illumos on the setup.
And yet we live in a world of cloud computing running OSs in VMs.
This doesn't look like they're bleeding users, but of course you might think differently. It looks likes a couple of big companies changed vendors, that's all.
Oh maybe, what we see is the effects of the election, which is also plausible.
Sorry, "tons of" was an overstatement, but still they've been losing customers overall (and revenue, although they manage to grow earnings through price increases).
For $10k, you too can get the power of a $2k desktop, and enjoy burning your lap everyday, or something like that. If I were to do local compute and wanted to use my laptop, I would only consider a setup where I ssh in to my desktop. So I guess only difference from saas llm would be privacy and the cool factor. And rate limits, and paying more if you go over, etc.
$2k laptops now days come with 16 cores. They are thermally limited, but they are going to get you 60-80% the perf of their desktop counterparts.
The real limit is on the Nvidia cards. They are cut down a fair bit, often with less VRAM until you really go up in price point.
They also come with NPUs but the docs are bad and none of the local LLM inference engines seem to use the NPU, even though they could in theory be happy running smaller models.
You'll end up with a portable desktop with bad thermals, impacting performance, battery life, and actually-on-the-lap comfort. Bleeding-edge performance laptops can really only manage an hour, max, on battery, making the form factor much more about moving between different pre-planned, desk-oriented work locations.
I take my laptop back and forth from home to work. At work, I ban them from in-person meetings because I want people to actually pay attention to the meeting. In both locations where I use the computer, I have a monitor, keyboard, and mouse I'm plugging in via a dock. That makes the built-in battery and I/O redundant. I think I would rather have a lower-powered, high-battery, ultra portable laptop remoting into the desktop for the few times I bring my computer to in-person meetings for demos.
Huh? Bleeding edge laptops can last a lot more on battery. M3 16'' mbp lasts definitely enough for a full office day of coding. Twice that if just browsing and not doing cpu intensive stuff.
Even the M4 Max is not "bleeding edge". Apple is doing impressive stuff with energy efficient compute, but you can't get top of the line raw compute for any amount of financial of energy budget from them.
I'm genuinely interested in what kind of work are you doing if bringing m4 max is not enough? And what kind of bleeding edge laptops are we even talking about (link?) and for what purpose?
One life trick I learned way too late is that you're allowed to have fun, on your trade or on the side. One should enjoy a few light-hearted or relaxed moments every week. For some reason I was convinced that one should seek productivity at every moment, which is the fastest way to burn out.
Another life trick I've learned is that you are also allowed to:
1. Say no and disagree with people
2. Walk away from any relationship (personal or
professional)
3. Do what you like, believe what you like (as long as you are not harming yourself or others).
4. Move
5. Hire experts to work for you (if you can afford it)
6. Spend your money as you please
7. Engage in conversation with strangers
8. Drastically change your life (new career, new field of
study, etc)
9. Talk to strangers.
It took me a long time to realize that being an adult means taking control of my life, make decisions and being okay with their consequences because _I_ made them.
For most people 8 is difficult because it took them ages to build up to a salary that pays as well as they do now, and they simply can't afford to do that again.
Enjoying life here and now is such an important aspect. For me, bouldering is such an activity. It demands maximum focus on tiny details in order to climb a piece of rock, which is completely pointless to do. Pure fun.
I also saw a bunch of C-levels being total sociopaths but that's another story :)
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