Moya Writes Things

Biohacking My Way to Freedom

2024-01-11T00:00:00+00:00

For better or for worse, I was born with two X chromosomes.

I generally try to not think about my gender day-to-day. It’s relevant when I’m looking at cute dresses, or considering how to frame myself for a dating profile, but it’s not a detail that I want to think about on a normal basis. My gender — in an ideal world — would have no bearing on my professional ambitions, or the adventures that I seek to have, or the goals that I hope to achieve.

But the world is not ideal, the cards we are dealt are the cards that we are dealt, and gender – while a constraint that’s far more flexible than traditional social expectations have it framed — is a constraint none-the-less.

I think I want kids. Not while some ML¹ things are looming, but some day. It’ll be responsibility and it’ll be work but it’s also its own adventure; it also has its own constraints.

Freedom

I made the call to book my egg freezing consultation in January of 2022. Facebook, my employer, offered egg freezing as a medical benefit. Even years before I had planned on quitting, I knew it was something I wanted to do; the insurance cut the cost of egg freezing from about $15k down to less than $1k. Even if I was on the fence about how much I’d “need” egg freezing, under $1k was cheap enough to buy myself the optionality; it made economic sense. Plus, even if I could get a similar benefit from another firm, I was unlikely to want to limit my career prospects with “has egg freezing” as a constraint.

And thus, there I was January 2022, with the knowledge that I’d likely want to leave Facebook some point in 2023², calling my insurance to book an egg freezing consultation.

When I hung up, I felt a wave of relief. If someone had asked me how I thought I’d feel beforehand, I’d probably would’ve said “nothing” or — if I was feeling cheeky — “mild pride at completing logistics”. “Wave of relief” was not how I thought I’d feel — but there it was.

I was 28 then. Not quite old enough to have my biological clock screaming, but old enough to have heard stories of miscarriages and the woes of older friends with noncommittal partners. My professional life was decent, but I still had (and still have) quite a few things I’d happily trade a family life to accomplish. Meanwhile, dating has always been a bit of an odd beast for me: I never wanted to be someone who’d optimize just to find someone and relative inexperience, a healthy degree of introversion, and the general “figuring out what I want” meant I didn’t feel anywhere close to “finding my person”.

I recognized that freezing my eggs would buy myself a few years of extra time, but what I hadn’t realized was that it was also buying me freedom.

Freedom to explore without responsibility. Freedom to figure out myself and try more relationships for size. Freedom to choose when I wanted to make my goals happen.

And that freedom was the wave of relief.

Logistics

It’s quite clever how egg freezing works.

All the drugs in egg freezing are based on a woman’s natural cycle - there’s one set of drugs to make the follicles grow, one set of drugs to keep the “winning” follicle from causing the rest to reabsorb themselves, and a last set of drugs to cause the follicles to make mature eggs. All of these are based off of hormones that a female’s body would make naturally, just perhaps at different times.

It’s twice-a-day (roughly) injections over the course of about two-and-a-half weeks, with perhaps a blood draw up to a month ahead of time to establish hormonal baselines and check-up blood draws/ultrasounds every other day or so. Total wall-clock time is a little under two months.

After the “trigger” injection to mature the eggs, a doctor surgically takes the eggs out and puts them on ice. It’s a quick procedure — it takes less than 15 minutes and the bulk of the doctor’s office time is waiting the hour or so for the anesthesia to wear off.

There’s no “set” number of eggs that one gets at the other end. It’s probabilistic depending on the woman’s body, though generally younger women will get both more and higher quality eggs. It’s also probabilistic how well the eggs thaw, how well those fertilize, and how well a resultant embryo will implant in the uterus, not to mention the viability of the pregnancy itself. Calculators float around for these, but those are just averages.

(As a sidenote - the process for egg freezing is pretty much the same as IVF or using fertility treatments, except for what happens at the end. In IVF, a doctor takes out the eggs, fertilize them, and put them back in the uterus; with fertility treatments, the eggs aren’t taken out and are fertilized in a more “normal” way.)

Storing the eggs costs anywhere from $500-$1000 per year, depending on the storage facility.

One’s ovaries also swell to about the size of grapefruits for the back week of the drug injections. Does it suck a little? Yup it does. But a week of bloating is not that bad in the scheme of things.

Results

I ended up doing two rounds of egg freezing. I got 12 eggs the first time and 11 the second.

Two was the number of rounds I’d planned to do from the outset, but the number of harvested eggs was low for my age - I’d just barely hit the number of eggs frozen for the likelihood of a number of kids that I’d be comfortable with. (~70% likelihood for two.)

My low number of eggs harvested was not surprising to my doctor. My AMH levels, taken at my first blood draw, were much, much lower than other under-30s³.

I don’t think I would have known to get an AMH test had I not gone through the egg freezing procedure. It’s technically possible to do an AMH test at a normal gynecologist’s office, but it does make me wonder — had I not done egg freezing, would I potentially have done things the “normal” way, only to find out at say, 33 or 35 or so that my body was genetically predispositioned to be worse at having kids, at a time when I’d have less of a chance to do something about it?

Even as someone who strongly prioritizes other aspects of life over offspring, the loss of optionality would have sucked.

…And Then?

I see medical things as “engineering but on the body” and have been fairly open about bringing up going through egg freezing with folks.

On one hand it’s a bit of an odd topic, but — and maybe it’s because most of the folks I’m around are in tech — most folks respond positively. Most of the women I bring it up with either end up being curious about the procedure for themselves (hence this post), know someone who’s already gone through the procedure, or know someone who wishes they had. I’ve gotten at least one friend of mine to go through egg freezing starting from “not knowing much about it at all” and “freeze your eggs” has become part of my standard repertoire of (hopefully not unwelcome) life advice to my single late-twenties and early-thirties female friends.

The response has been positive, or at least neutral, while bringing my egg freezing up with male friends as well. Older ones may have run into their own family fertility issues; I’ve had at least a few conversations about stem cells, genetic engineering, or life extension springboarded by egg freezing as a topic as well.

(Now that I’m thinking about it, there’s definitely a little bit of genderedness about that division of topics - but I guess I can’t fault some of my guy friends for not thinking about fertility quite yet…⁴)

Biohacking isn’t really a mainstream thing. As ML and biotech get better though, we’ll only see increasing ways to get better life outcomes via medical science.

As for what’s here right now though, egg freezing is pretty awesome.

With thanks to LK and BC for proofreading + editing. Image via GPT4.

Yes, I’m scale-pilled :P ↩
Not cause of drama or hatred of Facebook or anything. But I’d been at the firm for 8 years at that point; FAIR (Facebook AI Research) also always felt like the only team remaining that I’d want to be on, I’d just switched there, and it felt like a reasonable point to explore different pastures. I am one that’s a bit scared of being stuck in a poor local maximum, after all. ↩
Doing a bit of quick Googling, it does look like having an IUD (which I have had since graduating college) is associated with lower AMH levels. IIRC, my AMH level was at 2.3 or something stupidly low like that though, which is way beyond the impact there. I actually did elect to get my IUD taken out while I was egg freezing, but not sure if that actually did anything, or if I should’ve say, taken it out 6 months before rather than just before. ↩
On that note, there is some chance that we’ll be able to get cell dedifferentiation — ie, be able to take random body cells -> stem cells -> gametes — at some point in the next decade or two, but that might not be useful depending on your timelines. Also, I’m not sure how much I’d bank on a particular technology having a breakthrough, but I’m also not following cutting-edge biotechnology that closely these days. ↩

GenAI and Obvious-ish

2023-08-13T00:00:00+00:00

For a tl;dr see the Conclusion

Intro

There are a few things that have felt “obvious” to me for the past a year and change about the GenAI space, especially LLMs. A lot of it was probably not obvious to folks in general, but via working on chatbots before it resurged again and kicking pretraining GPUs before ChatGPT for OPT175 I got to see and think through a few things before the hype cycle started.

This has all been marinating in my head for a good little while and now seemed as a good time as any to post it out. Hopefully some of y’all get some value from the perspective. :)

In this, I go through some of the categories of clear areas of attack (“Obvious-ish next-ish stuff”), group them into the trends of what folks are building (“Observations”), and provide my commentary on these and other promising potential areas (“My Opinions”). Last section probably the most interesting; rest gives context and framing, so worth a quick skim.

Obvious-ish next-ish stuff

The next steps of Large Language Model (LLM) development has been “obvious” for a bit. List of the semi-obvious things (bold for tldr):

Improve generation quality/accuracy by
- …augmenting with tools
  - external (vector) databases, search, code executors, memory, API calls in general (ex. plugins), etc, etc, etc
- …auto-manual-magical feeding generated (text, maybe regex’d) outputs back into itself (or a related smaller model) to check/verify/validate or to proceduralize things that one wants
  - ex. “let’s think step by step”, chaining (also related to tools), etc
- …prompt-hacking, as the general superset of many of the things above but also to better control behavior
- …RLHF-y things
  - “reinforcement learning with human feedback” for those unfamiliar with the terminology. Think: getting humans to annotate the generated text from an LLM to see if it’s good or not and then using that for training.
- …figure out some way to train with the above that works without too much catastrophic forgetting
Go full multimodal or otherwise improve base models
- By multimodal I mean multimodal in + multimodal out, sort of a la Flamingo’s interlaced text + image generation though also more than that (described more later)
- Long context is the big recent innovation in base models; lots of stuff behind the scenes on data acquistion + cleaning; low-level architecture improvements that largely amount to “hand-optimizing transformer code for Nvidia GPUs” as well as training with lower-precision, etc
Build tooling around the whole ecosystem
- Ex. Monitoring, alerting, debuggability; model + prompt tracking + selection and general deployment logistics; evaluations
- Ex. Anything that could be described as “doing stuff with compute better”
  - Ex. inference/training efficiency, etc
  - Ex. GPU + cluster management
Take anything and everything of the above and use it to attack some specific product vertical that other folks haven’t spelunked in

Note that this ignores large swaths of the ML landscape¹; lots of other folks also have categorization takes.

Observations

From hanging out in areas with the LLM hype:

most folks don’t touch [#2 pre-training] unless they’re at one of the known well-funded incumbents
most are doing some combination of [#1 quality improvement techniques] and [#3 building tooling] for the purposes of [#4 attacking a specific product vertical]
- …with very, very high variances in competency
- …especially with regards to understanding model limitations ²
and a smaller (but non-insignificant) portion of folks are doing [#3 building tooling] outright
- …oftentimes using a “picks + shovels in the gold rush” reference
- …or some “but hey X is hard to use!” to talk about their specific value add, where X — or oftentimes, another system that’s already built a platform around X — may be incentivized to build out the specific piece of tooling themselves.

My Opinions

On base model folks

I hear (not many, but a few whispers-in-the-wind) of folks trying to raise to build a LLM base model; my guess is it’s almost certainly too late now, especially cause the top-performers have long been accounted for. Not to say that a new player couldn’t come in and sweep everything else up, but with GPU knife wars, limited product mindshare, and the general crowdedness of the space…

(I’ve got some other hot takes but they’re not useful to share here; “oh sweet summer child” prolly summarizes the hottest of these takes though. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:)

In a lot of ways, base model training necessarily requires more people:

It’s not just the models but also all sorts of infra, safety/bias/alignment testing, etc, etc
You also need folks for a product if you need to bootstrap for more $$

To this end, I imagine culture and care-in-setting-organizational-relationships is going be the high order factor in the ceilings of the different companies. Given the high $$$$$ of funding, I imagine it’ll take a few years (2-3?) to see the first real “death” of any of the well-funded pre-training startups.

On “tools around models” folks

Most of the smaller, newer players will:

be acquired as offerings for the medium-large players
bootstrap quick enough to become a medium-large player
die

Framed in another way: Building picks and shovels during a gold rush is great, but what happens if the other person’s getting traction for their Mining Tools Supercenter?

(I’m not an expert on B2B so not going to comment on medium-large folks much but I imagine the general properties of software infra + tooling apply.)

On the “product vertical” folks

The same dynamics of vertical-specific consultancies will apply

…just as it has for every other tech boom (ML, web, or otherwise)
…cept it’ll be that much harder for these sorts of players to turn generic cause those players (base model API platforms) are already there³

Most of the things in [#1 quality improvement techniques] of the obvious-ish stuff isn’t that hard to build. It’s not trivial, but it’s hard in an infrastructure way (ex. writing regexes, making API calls), not a research ML way (ex. needing to know deep mathematics, needing to keep up with large swaths of literature). You can get by with a bunch of medium-level engineers kludging things together as long as it doesn’t devolve to spaghetti; we’re still quite a few years out from the next sort of “generational-wow” leap anyway.

To this end, I think the moats for these product companies (assuming a sufficiently technical team) will be in sales, relationships, and reputation — technology will be a part of it, but only in-so far as to keep parity with what is offered on the market.

There are lots of folks bearish on “LLM API wrapper companies” — I’m not so bearish as to think that none of them will survive, but I am as skeptical of technical non-domain experts that have picked an area without prior experience as I am of insufficiently technical domain experts.

On the topic of “generational-wow” leaps

My guess is that, even with all the RL/RLHF work, steadily tacked on prompts-among-prompts, and API-call-among-API-call systems, we’re still a few years out from a system where the reasoning capabilities of an LLM is generalized in an AGI-ish sort of way. While chasing after generalized reasoning has a lot of promising directions, there’s still a lot of “throw researchers at things and see what happens” to it, and it’ll be hard to predict when that will settle.

To that end, I think the next big “PR hit” wave is gonna come from full(er) multimodal-in, multimodal-out models. Ie, something where you give the model a physics problem with a diagram and it thinks step-by-step (both in text and in images) of how to solve it.

Or, given how Google’s Gemini is being lead by the folks that did the Atari game projects — something where it’s trained on multimodal screen-recordings of interactions on a computer, can be prompted with a task, and generates output videos of what it should look like to do said task, complete with annotations about where to click and what to type in. ⁴

Since the demos of this will be conceptually newer, it’ll be trying to squeeze out the 80 in the “80-20 rule”; to that end while there’s still research risk for multimodal, it’s also more ‘finite’ since the quality bar to beat is lower. Also while multimodal is more compute to train than language-only, this is the same sort of do-or-die scaling question these labs have already had to tackle. (Plus, the good labs are running out of raw text-only tokens to train on anyway.)

Presuming the standard “release a model with an API platform” happens, this ‘fuller multimodal API’ will increase the ease of combining of sound/text/image⁵. This opens up the potential for new “hit” experiences in ways that merely incrementally improving text performance wouldn’t.

It’s probably too early to build any ideas anticipating this (unless one somehow gets early access to the APIs…) but that’s maybe my hot take for “what would I keep an eye out on if I wanted to be ahead on things coming down the line”.

Conclusion

There’s a lot of fast moving happening in the machine learning space around GenAI. However, despite the degree of real innovation, it’s not clear if it is quite as ripe — from a company founding perspective — as some of the hype might suggest, at least for new players.

In summary:

There’s a lot of good work happening in LLMs right now, but the finite number of ways to go means the space is crowded with folks largely gravitating towards the same sets of things.
The next ‘usable PR hit’ will be more powerful forms of multimodal but it might be risky to act on it now without clearer idea of API, technical constraints, etc.

Anyway, thanks for reading! Let me know what y’all think. :)

Especially research side (ex. bias, safety, interpretability), related-but-not-exactly-ML finicky logistical infrastructure things (ex. compliance, data management, app hosting), etc. There’s definitely a nonzero bias towards the things that I’m intellectually interested-in (mostly reasoning + performance improvements…) that define how the grouping here is done. ↩
Cause one thing anyone that plays with these models realize is that these things still hallucinate up the wazoo. The more clever folks on the product side figure out use cases that work well within the limitation (ex. use cases where it’s easy to check the answer, for brainstorming/creativity, areas where existing accuracy rates are far worse, etc); I’ve had far too many conversations where that hasn’t been the case though. ↩
by “turning generic” I mean something a la snowboarding shop → ecommerce platform ↩
Or you know. Something where you put in the script/video of the entirety of Primer and have it make an understandable movie narrative chart. Though, that might be beyond the scope of even the strongest of models. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye: ↩
Note that I’ve been intentionally vague about specifying modalities here (which is a very relevant and very hard problem if you’re actually someone trying to train these models and also important if you want to use them). Also about how you represent time steps and the different “channels” of the modalities. That said, I do think I’m largely implying the normal-human-modalities of text, image, sound. The more esoteric ones can prolly be downstream fine-tuned anyway. ↩

Project/business ideas, loosely prioritized - Aug 1

2023-08-01T00:00:00+00:00

As I mention in my badge post I already had a quit by day for a while. Because of that, I could plan. Or at least, dump ideas into a notebook.


Section of a notebook that I started some point 2020 or early 2021. ¹

Not going to list all of them but I figured it’d be worth putting the better ones somewhere, plus some new ones that’ve come up in the time since².

Ideas I bothered to flesh out until I realized this post was taking too long

…intent had been for this to be a “quick fun diversion” from other things; then I realized I was stressing myself out looking into the viability of things lol.

DISCLAIMER: I’d rate this entire thing as maybe a 5/10 on the “how fully thought out is this” scale.

Reasonable Medium-Sized Projects

Quantified-self Digitized Journals (+ Customizable Journal Stamps)
- What: App + website that is a digital data companion to journals (freeform or bullet) that you may have.
  - OCR + template editing system where you can digitally mark how to structure uploaded content (ie, “always dump boxes with the label ‘art’ in the upper left corner into a file”, “interpret normal pages as journal entries indexed by date”, “record items in the box labelled ‘mood’ as an integer”)
    - Some sort of system to order the template designs as a stamp for notebooks.
  - Site provides intelligence like sentiment analysis on freeform text, correlations between different fields (ex. food/exercise with marked or sentiment analyze’d happiness, etc), summarizations + observations about what’s happened.
- Why:
  - Things I think are useful:
    - Journalling in a physical notebook, so that it’s one less screen that I’m looking at, especially as a wind-down before bed
    - Quantified self style tracking, to know that stuff is trending correctly for goals
    - Auto-magical data analysis that can figure out subtle correlations that I might not notice on my own.
  - Things that don’t exist to make the above easy:
    - If you’re going from a physical journal you gotta OCR it all, and there’s nothing that’ll nicely automagically format it for you
      - …plus you’re either making all the columns yourself every time and it’s annoying or you have to buy a journal that has fixed lines that you might realize a little while in don’t actually fit what you want ³
    - If you’re doing a digital system well.. then it’s digital and you can run stuff on top of this already.
- Commentary: This is probably a medium-sized company/small-business as opposed to some sort of large venture-backed thing⁴. That said, even if no one else built it, I’d probably make it just cause… I’d use it.

Pet + Baby Monitor w/ Behavior Detection + Tracking; Interaction Suggestions + Non-verbal Creature Translation. :P
- What: AI-powered baby + pet monitor platform
- Inspiration: Friend had a kid; she was able to pick up on some needs of the kid (ex. feeding/burping) better than her husband but her husband was able to pick up on others better than she was (ex. temperature/diaper cleaning). I’d also been doing a decent bit of petsitting for free housing and it was fine but could tell I probably wasn’t picking up on subtleties of the animals as much as I’d have liked to.
  - Plus, a dog translater is just cool.
- Risks: Hardware lol. Also definitely seems like there’s some companies (Cubo AI, Eufy, Furbo, etc) working on it… answer here might be pure software play, but still.

Useful things I don’t think I’d build

Either cause they’re features, not a business, or involve things I would (personally) probably never want to get into.

Button on recipe websites to auto-add ingredients to a Whole Foods, Instacart, [insert grocery delivery service of choice] cart.
- Did a quick Google and looks like Instacart made a Chrome plugin for this recently; there’s also this plugin from 2020.
- A straight-up button probably also just nicer though.
- Why I wouldn’t build this: Makes more for the grocery delivery provider to be the one to make this. There’d also (probably) need to be some notion of a referral kickback to the recipe site makers to make the inclusion of this worthwhile.
A weekly meal prep kit delivery service
- The term “weekly meal prep” as it’s used by delivery services as compared to once-a-week-at-home weekly meal prepping are related but slightly different. Notably, the former tends to be “pick single meals until it adds up to a week’s worth of food” whereas the latter is “make a bunch of base things, the linear combination thereof (plus simple sauces/seasonings/etc) which make for a great meal”
- Why I wouldn’t build this: I don’t want to be in the business of running a grocery store (similar to above). Also, I bet someone’s had the same thought at this, but they’re just dying under the inability to SEO cause of subtley overloaded terms… Also probably another feature for the grocery delivery services to make.⁵

Long-term moonshots that are too early to build now

AR-glasses + body sensor system that detects emotional stress; preempts bad behavior
- Think: You’re home from a busy, stressful day at work. You come home and the entire place is a mess. Your child is being needy and terrible and loud and making everything worse. You know you shouldn’t snap, but you’re overwhelmed.
- Commentary: There’s prolly a Black Mirror episode about this sort of behavior management somewhere. Also, the line between “useful”, “annoying”, and “cringe” is a fine one.

Stuff in the original notebook (# for my reference)

Legal startup where you take photos of legal contract and it tells you clauses in particular (both in the contract that you’re dealing with and against public laws) to look into (1)
Camera-enabled TV attachment that records you while working out and gives you form suggestions (2)
- Could be tied/related to a projector
- Fitness chain from this idea (3)
- …networked system where image data from AR glasses (ie in fitness classes) (4)
AR glasses apps
- …that tracks food you eat + calorie intake (5)
- …behavior + activity + time tracker (6)
  - Automated correlation analysis for this (7)
- thought on these - you don’t actually need a display for any of this right now.
Community-building as a service (7)
- I have no idea what I was thinking here; I’m assuming it’s someone that sets up social media + events and the like, white labelled somehow?
House manager (ex for cleaners, laundry, etc) as a service (8)
- This one definitely inspired by r/FATfire
breakdown.care (therapy chatbot-ish website)
- I actually still own this domain and should maybe put something there.
Civics + Staking
- Stake an amount that you want for public works to tackle an issue (ex. pot holes, police) (20)
- Social media site where you stake some degree of reputation to post/get more of an audience/etc (21)
NSFW things
- Straight up chatbot parter with stable diffision content (51)
- ^ but platform where individuals can design avatars and the partners are those (ie sketchy character.ai lol) (52)
- ^ but with therapy for individuals built in, as they develop the relationships with the characters (53)
Record-only life transcript device; subscription for analysis on top (54)
Hotel/nomad chain where you need to show minimum net worth to stay but cheap otherwise (55)
- Imo, wifitribe seems pretty decent for this
Boda borg but bigger (ex escape room + climbing wall + educational programs) (22)
- I want someone to have this be a thing. Have it be an alternative to after school programs or otherwise some form for moderately-stimulating childcare.
ML-feature-y things
- System that differents between “this is a guess of what is right” and “this is something almost certainly definitely correct” (like a confidence measure or self-calibration but more strong than that? not a fully formed thought but I always felt like LLM systems were missing that and they’re out there in smaller papers but…) (34)
More general investigation-y things
- Comparitive study of beuracracy of different countries (33)
Resurrect old OKCupid with all the quizzles lol (35)
- … but take the user embeddings and make events for folks to meet up based on interest (also physical proximity) (36)
- … also for friend dating rather than just dating-dating (36b)

In addition to all of these, I wanna make a blog post on the feasibility of someone like Elon building up an end-to-end (ie, starting from oil + minerals) supply chain for rockets in Uganda (+ estimates of needed military protection), since there’s an equator crossing there and that country is sorta stable. But that’s an idea completely divorced for the rest of these.

Number of ideas intentially set high to encourage quantity and wild ideas; did not get anywhere close to 1000. Also I hope you enjoy my beautiful chicken scratch. ↩
Doing this because ideas are cheap and to show that I can come up with interesting ideas, with at least some intuition for what would be necessary to make them work. ↩
Yes, this is a nitpick I have personally experience multiple times with different notebooks, lol. ↩
Well, assuming it didn’t turn into some larger therapy/mental health play, in which you could just imagine all the therapy chatbot integrations. For now though, I just want my journalling workflow to be smooth, dammit. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye: ↩
Actually thinking about it now, I wonder if we’re gonna see grocery delivery services straight up buying out meal-kit services soon. ↩

QR Code Art Business Card

2023-07-31T00:00:00+00:00

I made myself a design for a business card today.

Update Aug 1, 2023: Figured I’d move the write-up here, since there’s a good chance I might keep iterating on this in the future and don’t wanna spam the qr code page.

QR image generation

The QR codes were generated quick and hackishly with one of the out-of-the-box QR code + image prompt generators¹. In particular, this thread lead me to this site, though I tried a few different QR image generators. See this directory for some examples.

Here’s a sample of some of the images I liked more², from maybe an hour or two of prompting:

At one point, I decided to try one of the example prompts shown on the QR Code Monster page. The output frankly looked way cooler than any of the prompts I had written.

Being wary of the color palatte potentially not printing well (and also the difficuly of integrating such a complex background texture into a cohesive business card, especially cause I didn’t feel like running an in-painting model), I played around with replacing the “orange” and “teal” in the original prompt until I eventually settled on the simple “black” and “white”.

Final prompt:

a holistic drawing of (pc cooling:1.2) (printed circuitboard:0.2), (stunning, highly detailed, 8k, ornate, intricate, cinematic, dehazed, atmospheric:0.7), splash art, white, (black:0.3), (by Jeremy Mann, by John Constable, by El Greco:0.7), (acrylic paint:0.4), (by Zdzislaw Beksinski:0.4), (by Victo Ngai and John Romita Jr:0.8)

Business Card Creation

Bit of tweaking in GIMP later³ (including generating another image with the same prompt to use as the background) and we get the business card that hopefully (unless you came from the blog) lead you here.⁴

Since it seemed reasonable enough, I used Vista Print to physically print the cards. For those curious, that site charges ~$25 on top of the cost of the card if you want to ship faster (~1 week) and $9 for the default cheap option of ~2 weeks.

Update (roughly an hour after making this)

I think I’ve realized the simpler answer here was probably to do QR art on the back side of a business card (letting it take up whatever space it needs), then have clean lines/text on the front.

Ah well, done is better the enemy of perfect, and there’ll always be more chances to print business cards. :P

Cause while I could get a model to run locally and tweek things a la this write-up, I didn’t actually want to spend that much time doing this. ↩
As you may be able to tell, I had the idea of “futuristic city” for a good number of these. ↩
Oh the joys of being cheap while funemploymed. :P ↩
Middle bit here purposefully hidden to not doxx myself. ↩

Facebook Badge Post - Motivations + Memories (2/2)

2023-07-07T00:00:00+00:00

Note Jul 10, 2023: Made some minor edits to this after initial post; see this PR

The Motivational Things

Why?

I’ve changed, the company has changed, and (while I have seen firsthand just how good the LLMs in GenAI are going to be, the crazy amount of GPUs/compute that the team is going to get, and how great folks are not just technically but organizationally and with empathy) it’s not the adventure I want to be having at this stage in life.

I’m lucky at the moment to not be tied down to much — relationships, location, recurring responsibility — but that (hopefully) won’t last forever.

And while I can afford the risk and enjoy that certain type of freedom, I would like to.

Frankly, it’s also just sort of time. I’ve changed teams every 1.5-2 years, done 3 major area switches, and walked the research-to-production pipeline backwards; as much as I still think FB has its things together in ways that many other corporations don’t, I’ve already seen a lot of how things are done here and what FB has to offer. Also while I have no intention of being a Retiree (despite whatever the Chuckr scale says¹). I also reached the “financial independent” part of FIRE a while ago and want to explore what that means for me.

Lower order bits:

My birthday is Aug 8 (8/8). Getting to 8 years appeals to the numerical pattern matching part of my brain. 😛
I already sorta know what increasing the mean (ie climbing the career ladder) looks like and I want to play the variance from feeling that much more of the end-to-end ownership. (Or, maybe I read too much r/FatFIRE lol)
Because of all of the above, I’ve already had a quit-by date for a while now. (Among other things, I already made use of one of the rarer, but also best-optionality granting benefits² back in early 2022 so that I wouldn’t have to deal with those logistics now.)

What’s next?

I’m going to spend the next 1-3 years intentionally doing the higher-variance things (travelling, startups, projects). If something from that time works out, great. If not, I’ll have a lot of new experiences and understanding of how different environments are and how I am in those environments in kind, and that’s a sort of working out too.³

Contact

I don’t know where I’ll be or when, but would love to stay in touch.

[More direct contact info redacted]

Feel free to reach out even if it’s been ages since we’ve last interacted! I have a tendency to materialize in random cities and would love to have more folks to ping while making the rounds. 🙂

Assorted memories

Non-exhaustive; intentionally keeping them stream-of-consciousness cause they’re prolly tears-in-the-rain for anyone not-me anyway but feels somehow important to include; primarily chosen for absurdity and entertainment and spreading the links out so it doesn’t look too overwhelming to read 😛

[Note: Some of the links broken; replaced with footnotes instead]

Beautiful views from tall offices; getting destroyed in after-work Quake LAN parties; hearing the 15-min story about that time where a GK got fat fingered and took down a bunch of other sites on the internet almost every week for a year and a half; being a video-game-playing grunt in someone else’s Zuck demo; doing my own Zuck demo; “When you don’t get what you want you get experience”; offsite things: making fire, cooking challenges, bonding dinners; only sorta heat exhausting an intern on a hike; CV coordinate transform mishaps (soooooo many, and I knew I hated dealing with coordinate conventions before going on those teams too); reading through a bunch of assorted writings⁴ that give generally good work advice, lots of the early legends/stories, Great Debates, and posts that show how magical⁵ and open⁶ and vulnerable⁷ FB as a company was — even when it didn’t have to be — but maybe isn’t how things are today; corporate travel; trips to London/Paris/Zurich/MPK/Austin; landing production Haskell (ok not that cool of a memory, but I nerd chuckle at it a bit); chatting for an hour-and-a-half while massively sleep deprived and sitting 2 feet from Zuck with a dozen people mostly on the opposite side of the political spectrum from me; pulling all nighters to learn Unity to make stuff for the Quest; comradery and awesome shirts for the BB3 release; paper cramming; lots of interviewing + intern things; launching AR Birthdays after pivoting from another AR project cause we got feedback about how hard it is to build 2-sided markets from scratch; getting feedback from a VP that my Jedi write-ups were good; a TL making an offhand comment winter 2015 and inadvertently melting a gut-anxiety ball I’d been carrying for 5-and-change years; going on my first ever oncall and getting a beastiality porn spam attack (lol yup); F8 2017 - “From a (single) image” (when it definitely wasn’t); realizing how bad I was at organizing a lab notebook despite getting the importance in theory and slowly improving after a year or so; “We’ll look fondly on this short period of time in history when society was able to trust recorded media”; buying + expensing a pull-up bar after my first team switch despite being the small female on a team of fit dudes; finding places to nap; finding SO MANY people around to be SUPER COOL in amazing and subtle ways (but not having any idea how to be friends with them lol); the shenanigans that was the entirety of OPT-175B + aftermath; FBAnon⁸ (or, the better parts of it at least); FLiP ropes courses; happy hours; fbseabffs; etc; etc; etc; etc…

(But when it’s over, is it really over?)⁹

Part 1 - Badge Post Context + Thanks | Part 2 - Motivations + Memories

chuckr was a internally well-known engineer who made a work-internal scale based on how long your tenure was at the company when you quit. ↩
Egg freezing. Will write another post about this at some point. ↩
Currently starting out at the mecca that is the SF Bay Area (and hoping I don’t turn to Abomination from all the wishes + desires that the scene there can have) but we’ll see how it goes. ↩
Facebook uses a work-edition of Facebook groups for work communications. As one might expect, folks would write various career-advice-y type of things there. ↩
I don’t actually quite remember what (if anything) I put as the link to here… definitely lots of things this could be though. (The MPK Classic sweet shop would be a good contender…) ↩
Not my place to post the story, but from the person that did this ↩
Also not my place to post the specifics ↩
For a short while around 2016/2017, someone took an instance of regular Workplace (where everyone was non-anonymous) and made an anonymous version. It was… interesting. ↩
The lines here popped into my head the day before I finished writing the post… the rest of the lyrics didn’t really apply when I listed to the rest of it, but the wistful mood seemed about right :hugs: ↩

Facebook Badge Post - Badge Post Context + Thanks (1/2)

2023-07-07T00:00:00+00:00

Badge Post Context

Traditionally, when folks leave Facebook, they take a photo of their badge and leave a post about whatever information/thanks/rants they’d like to leave.

Seeing as how:

I’ve had lots of questions about “where are you going” and “why are you quitting” and
Lots of the folks I’d appreciated have moved on

I figured I’d post my badge post here.

This was posted on Wednesday, June 28th, the day before my 8th Faceversery (“Facebook anniversary”).

…and so the Journey goes On

My 8th Faceversery is tomorrow and my last day at Facebook will be Wednesday, July 5th.

There’s too much to say and not enough space, so I’m going to try to be lightly entertaining instead. 🙂

Thanks

As with many things in life, people make-or-break the experience and I’m glad I’ve had the opportunity to spend the time with so many of you.

Thanks to:

The managers, from which I have derived infinite wisdom, even when that wisdom only became apparent in hindsight: [redacted]
The LLM + Dialogue + FAIR folks, from whom I’ve learned the techniques and adventure of navigating the uncertainty of the cutting edge (among many, many other things): [redacted]
- The OPT OGs, who pulled me into that janky (but damn powerful) rocketship, and all the shenanigans that will continue to follow: [redacted]
- The LLM Team (+ Zetta folks): [redacted]
- Repartee: [redacted]
- FAIR, Cairaoke, and other NLP collaborators: [redacted]
The Computational Photography, Spark AR, and XR Tech folks, who gave me first tastes of how to navigate the bastard child that is the mixing of research + prod (and for some fun computer vision chats in general): [redacted]
All the folks from Platform/Business Integrity + Spam, who were there for me when I got my first taste of the working world: [redacted]

Additionally thanks to:

My direct interns, who are all doing amazing things (both with and despite my short period of influence 😉 ): [redacted]
The 50+ intern managers I intern directed for (special shoutout to [redacted], for putting up with a looooot of my feedback in particular, though I know that probably occurred with lots of you 😛) the numerous, numerous partners in recruiting and folks met while interviewing, interview training, and participating in debrief quorum.

Working with the intern program and the recruiting pipeline inevitably would end up in the “Extracurriculars” section of my PSC but was something that I not only greatly, greatly enjoyed but also learned a lot from. It also helped keep my sanity and staved off some “am I actually being useful” that would’ve otherwise happened when the main-line work was being wonky. So thanks for that.

I’m far beyond the tag limit and memory is fallible, so know that my thanks extends far beyond just what I’ve included here. You know who you are but - in case I’ve missed something, please reach out! I wouldn’t want to fail to emphatically regale someone with appreciation for their awesomeness.

Part 1 - Badge Post Context + Thanks | Part 2 - Motivations + Memories

Hello world!

2022-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

Why a blog? Why now?

Couple different reasons:

I’ve wanted one for a while (like, a decade and a half)
I’m finally feeling experienced enough to say something interesting
Seems like it wouldn’t hurt to have a public persona somewhere

I last tried setting up a Github Pages in 2020 and got a good part of the way there… but then stopped because I spent too much time trying to muck with the layout and overwhelming myself trying to use all of the tag/collection/etc features that Jekyll and Liquid had to offer.

I decided to simplify things down a lot this time around. I’ve also gotten a little bit better at using the relevant tools ¹ which has also sped things up some.

Assorted low-bit things

~~…I still need to click the buttons to update the relevant URLs to point to this, but I’m calling this, for the most part, done.~~ And we’re live here too.

Some point I’ll go through and make specific pages for tags, but that can be for another day. I’m happy with the layout, about page, and most of the basic navigation/UI elements so far, and I need to wrap this up somewhere. Nope, looks like figuring that out was today :P

I am apparently now 3 days old into realizing that Chrome Developer tools lets you live-edit CSS… ↩