pgbovine
Joined 17 years ago
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Comment · 1 year ago
Comment · 2 years ago
also, while i have your attention here, since you wrote that related post on (not) vector db's ... what would you recommend for a newbie to get started with RAG? let's say i have a large collection of text files on my computer that i want to use for RAG. the options out there seem bewildering. is there something simple akin to Ollama for RAG?
Comment · 2 years ago
very cool idea! i was also very interested in this problem during grad school ... prototyped an approach by hacking CPython, but the code (python 2.6? from 2010 era) has long bitrotted:
https://pg.ucsd.edu/publications/IncPy-memoization-in-Python...
https://pg.ucsd.edu/publications/IncPy-memoization-in-Python...
Comment · 3 years ago
Your work is an inspiration as always!! My n00b question is: what do you think is currently the most practical path to running a reasonably-sized (doesn't have to be the biggest) LLM on a commodity linux server for hooking up to a hobby web app ... i.e., one without a fancy GPU. (Renting instances with GPUs on, say, Linode, is significantly more expensive than standard servers that host web apps.) Is this totally out of reach, or are approaches like yours (or others you know of) a feasible path forward?
Comment · 3 years ago
Cool work! You and your team may be interested in these two recent CHI papers from Microsoft Research, both on very relevant topics to what you've been doing:
1) “What It Wants Me To Say”: Bridging the Abstraction Gap Between End-User Programmers and Code-Generating Large Language Models (https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.06597) -- they try to tackle a similar problem as what you described above
2) On the Design of AI-powered Code Assistants for Notebooks (https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.11178) - uses Mito as part of their case study
Comment · 8 years ago
as the son of a university professor (mother) and an entrepreneur/MBA/businessperson (father), i totally second this observation. +1
Comment · 8 years ago
ping me by email (see profile) if you want to brainstorm privately; my two cents is biased toward academia if you have an above-average setup (don't know until I see your CV!); startups come and go with each hype cycle.
Comment · 8 years ago
i totally know how you feel since i have felt that way in the past as well :) here's something relevant: http://pgbovine.net/practical-reason-to-pursue-PhD.htm
my two cents: find something where the grants align with your interests, or find a brand-new faculty member who has startup money so isn't as bound by grants in the near term. and if things don't work out, simply leave and go to industry -- with a marketable skill set like what you get from being a CS major, there's no way for you to lose. go wherever has work that you like more.
Comment · 8 years ago
totally agreed! things can change even from one year to another with the same advisor. for instance, i'm not the same advisor to my students that i was last year, or the year before that, or the year before that. (i've only been at this for 4 years, and each year is incredibly different from the prior one.) circumstances change, resources change, and constraints change.
Comment · 8 years ago
you've inadvertently answered the question for me, to a first approximation :) i think that academia is a great launching point for a wide array of scholarly activities that the free market (i.e., industry) doesn't directly pay for: research, public policy, outreach, teaching, mentoring, industry collaborations, etc. i can work with whatever companies i want (even ones that are actively competing with each other at the moment!) and be seen as a "neutral" party; i can share knowledge via teaching and research again with a "neutral" voice without being seen as a spokesperson for a particular company or other special interest group. you're right, though -- there's a whole lot to the story. maybe someday i'll write something up!
Comment · 8 years ago
thanks! that's a hard problem! i frame it in terms of critical path: http://pgbovine.net/critical-path.htm
if you can't get on someone's critical path, then you have to make it very easy for them to help you with very little time commitment. e.g.,: http://pgbovine.net/how-to-ask-for-help.htm
Comment · 8 years ago
no way! (i'm glad i did it the first time, though)
Comment · 8 years ago
thanks! AMA.
(no guarantees that i'll be able to answer via text, though; maybe i'll make a video later. been trying to minimize my computering time off-hours due to increasing wrist pains ... PSA: take care of your wrists, everyone!)
Comment · 8 years ago
overnight successes are usually 10-15 years in the making; so much goes on before the public release
Comment · 8 years ago
see here for US-oriented details: http://pgbovine.net/professor-job-titles.htm
there's been a rising tide of academic HCI work in a similar space, wonder if there will be cross-pollination of ideas along these lines (many more papers i'm sure but some off the top of my head): https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.11473 https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.09128