The article is AI slop but impressively the author has managed to convince the AI to make a ridiculous double counting error which functions as excellent rage bait. I expect a dozen similar comments to have appeared while I type this.
I've got bad news for you on the whole humans dying thing. Seems like actually literally everyone is going to die. Turns out that this has actually been happening for a really long time - possibly since day one - and we've got no idea how to fix it.
Usable certainly. But my impression is that useful models still need a bit more than 16GB. Something like Qwen 3.8 27B is useful but squeezing it into 16GB requires fairly aggressive quantisation which will make it unreliable (e.g it'll get stuck in loops) and won't leave enough space for a long context (which qwen 3.8 really likes)
I'm (more than) twice that age, but I've spent time learning this exactly this from videos by Andrej Karparthy and from books by Sebastian Raschka.
I didn't do it because it was useful to me in a practical sense. It's because LLMs are fascinating and I want to know how they work. From that perspective it's been a great experience. I have afirm grasp of the basics. This makes it much easier to understand frontier concepts like compressed latent attention. I can follow the field and understand it.
Not sure I would have got as much out of it at seventeen. I have a lot of background and experience which made it much easier to learn. I wasn't struggling with the linear algebra or with python. I already knew pytorch and neural networks. That helped a lot and I covered these tutorials fast and could skip over large sections. A few evenings and the odd weekend day over a couple of months was enough for me.
For seventeen year olds the tutorials are good enough to make it possible to learn this but it would have taken a lot longer to understand. On the other hand I would have learned a lot more. I think I would have learned a lot of valuable stuff.
However I also think 17 year old me was studying for his A levels and probably this was right choice in terms of maximising future opportunities. I'm not sure I think learning about LLMs instead is sensible. Indeed it might be bad advice. But I can absolutely agree with the sentiment.I think 17 year old me would have wanted to do this too.
This video is excellent. I'm a huge fan. Also the video is zero commitment and instantly available which makes it a good way to check you are interested.
The book by Sebastian Raschka is slightly less accessible but very reasonably priced and the experience of working through a book is a lot nicer than skipping back and forth in a video (for me). Sebastian's blog posts on recent architectures are absolutely great too.
I've read Raschka's "Build Your Own LLM from Scratch" book and really enjoyed it. I haven't tried the code yet, but the code from his previous Python ML book worked great.
actually just use chatgpt. There is a new mode of learning thats now avaiable that doesnt require you to read about things that are already discovered leaving you with a shallow knowledge.
you can now play the inventor and start with question "i want to build next token prediction software" and go as far as you can with your current knowledge while brainstroming with chatgpt as a rubber duck.
dont not start with a course on probabality , linear algebra or calculus . do not watch 3 hr videos or 3blue animations .
I think ChatGPT is a great way to get depth on a topic. You can Q&A for a while until you get it, and it won’t get impatient with you.
That said, I think traditional resources are a better way to get breadth and to frame the topic. Just chatting about something can be a little disorienting imo.
If you see someone incompetent being promoted then it's more likely:
1) You are wrong about them being incompetent
2) The person promoting them is also incompetent and has mistakenly promoted the wrong person.
I have literally never seen or heard of anyone promoting someone to limit the harm they can do. It's something bitter people tell themselves to help them feel better about being passed over. It's not the explanation you are looking for.
The older I get, the more I recognize how often these takes are just sour grapes from watching other people succeed.
It was most obvious when I was doing volunteer mentoring for early-career cohorts. A lot of people will comfort themselves by imagining that the real reason they didn't get a promotion or a job was because the company was doing something stupid: Peter Principle, Gervais Principle, Dilbert Principle. Some people would read an article about one of these things and for the next 5 years use it to explain every time they didn't get their way.
The saddest examples were when people would be passed over for a job and then spend the next month stalking the person who got the job across LinkedIn and social media, theorycrafting explanations for why that person was less qualified and why the company made a big mistake hiring them. They had no idea what the person was like but they'd be convinced it was nepotism or some other -ism that lost them the job, not their interview performance.
That said, I have worked at a couple companies where promotions into management had nothing to do with reality and everything to do with selecting people who were in the right social circles or, in one case, part of the right religion. When you're at a company like that, sadly the only solution is to leave. You're never going to win it from the inside.
Perhaps they weren't incompetent in their prior role, but some people have difficulty transitioning from a technical role into a managerial role, so they become incompetent at their new role.
I've seen it in action a few times specifically in government.
It's extremely difficult in my country to fire people in government. Managers want them out of their team but have no way to shift them. They are taking up one FTE in a key area but the person is just swinging the hammock doing just enough to keep from any proceedings.
Finance won't give them more headcount.
So they promote them to another useless department instead. Done.
I know it's been done because I have been to drinks with the senior managers who did this a decade ago when I asked what the deal was with XYZ manager that had been there for years and was truly one of the worst managers I've ever heard of. They intimated a few others were the same across the org.
Off topic - the manager mentioned was comically hilarious in laziness and lack of care. He once invited a new hire to a meeting, and attached the minutes of the meeting including the conversation that had not happened yet (they'd never even met yet) with statements like "Joe Foo agrees to let manager know if work is too much" etc etc.
It was a template he sent out and he never even came to those introductory meetings. Just you agree and then neither of you actually meet.
Government can be a different world so I understand when people think people are just inventing insane theories to justify their own ego, but these things really do happen in certain industries and types of companies.
This reflects my own experience too. Generally speaking, incompetent people don't get promoted in the same way you normally understand promotion. They don't get their boss's job. They don't stay in their boss's boss's reporting line.
They move to a nominally higher level role in a different department, often a cost centre, generally to some role which serves the organisation just by existing (e.g. a legally required role, or something that serves some certification purpose, or so that sales teams can say 'we have a dedicated person in our X office for doing that').
I can relate to all of these. One way to get rid of them is to put them on a "special project". Something low stakes and inconsequential to keep them busy.
I think there's a third explanation: the person being promoted may indeed be incompetent at the job they have been doing, but be good at the skills required of a manager. I've seen that one happen. Management has very little in common (in terms of skills needed) with doing the work, so just because someone is bad at their current position doesn't mean they'll be a bad manager.
I'm so happy to see this reply chain at the top of this thread. I really wish we could stamp out the snobbery of software engineers thinking they understand everything about everything because they understand Rust. As the current topical example, AI companies saying they can replace XYZ professions with LLMs. Doctor's for instance, don't just do diagnosis and data processing. A huge part of the job is sympathy and understanding. Although I'm sure someone will say that AI can fake that too.
To add an anecdote to the list, the best development leads I've worked with weren't the best developers on the team.
Or vise versa. That ass kisser with no work life balance might be a fine IC but you make him a manager and he'll act like a slave driver and burn the whole team out acting like that.
Yeah, and i’m going to take a stab in the dark and guess that it’s the first one much more often than anyone here would like to admit.
Developers love to act like they understand every other profession and skillset, just by intuition. It’s not incompetent to do things that you wouldn’t do, or to do things that upset you, or to do things that don’t put your desires first.
I've seen a few senior developers who weren't great programmers, but could communicate effectively, manage up and down, etc. So long as they were willing to defer to others on harder technical topics, they usually made pretty good team leads when/if promoted.
The person the company owner promoted ahead of me had me fired. I was principal designer for the company's main solutions.
He couldn't design or write software solutions. He then stole source code I wrote along with product designs I created and went to the competition. Was taken to court and settled. Competitor never hired him. Schadenfreude!
Never underestimate ass kissers and yes-men. It works wonders on narcissistic people.
There's a subtlety to (1), in that people can be incompetent at things that don't matter, but competent at things that do, and people often latch on to the wrong incompetence.
For example, a software engineer might be fairly mediocre at programming, understanding systems, debugging, etc, but might have really good people skills and be great at effecting change in the organisation, and that person might be worth promoting into management.
A learning experience for me was working with people nearly twice my age with decades of experience yet who were at my level, or much less experienced people who were at my level. Promotion and level are not a judgement of skill as an engineer in an abstract sense, they're a judgement of value to the company – you can be great, but if you're not using that in your current role your level may not reflect that.
I got out right told the reason I wasn’t getting promoted was because I was too valuable where I was which was getting a critical project back on track.
I resigned the next day and since the company had a mandatory gardening leave period by boss couldn’t override, that project went back off the tracks.
Making that decision was stupid but I can understand why they’d arrive at it, telling me was the true fuck up, they could have just said we decided to go with someone else and I’d have brushed it off, I didn’t mind what I was doing in the role I was in.
Whatever people skills really are that guy did not have them.
Literally heard that someone wasn’t promoted to a VP role because they were too good at their job as a Director and promoting them would lose their competency.
So; instead of having a competent VP leading a team of absolute incompetents and changing the direction and capabilities of that entire org, we lost a capable leader to another company.
Leadership politics and maneuvering is fucking stupid.
Yep, I’ve seen that, too. I’ve also seen people give up a promotion after they decided that managing a team wasn’t what they were good at. A wise person understands themself and knows not to chase the brass ring if that’s not actually what makes them tick.
As a former manager once told me, "if you aren't replaceable, you aren't promotable either." It makes sense for the company even if it sucks personally, but it's something you can also address yourself.
Yeah, I think this is the most defensible steelman of the concept: Incompetent people aren't deliberately sought out for promotions, but there is a disincentive to promote some of the most competent people. Sometimes. For some very context-dependent notions of "(in)competent."
Yeah, but do they do this on purpose (e.g. to avoid promoting someone who might outshine them), or they just do the random thing because they are incompetent?
I suspect there is a lot of bias in action, for example extraverts genuinely believing that other extraverts are competent even if they are not.
This does occur but not in a way that often creates this situation.
Someone in management who has failed to meet goals will often have a position created for them with no reports. This is normally an advisory role to not impact them negatively for future roles and to give them runway to leave.
I’ve seen it twice and only in higher level roles.
It just happened at my company. He produced problems in his team (at least from what I have heard) and now produces problems/friction for whatever team must interface with him and depend on him.
I don't think anybody thought he's competent. The role didn't exist before, though (Chief of Test or something) and doesn't have real leverage. So he's in the meetings saying stuff but my feeling is that people mostly work around him and he generally doesn't know the answer to questions that fall within the scope of his role.
I feel bad for him to be honest, would be a very tough spot/role to be in anyway and he seems not be able to enable himself being actually productive.
Another option that I've seen repeatedly is people with excellent technical competence being put in positions of management or leadership, where they are incompetent with the requisite skills for those roles.
I heard about a very incompetent engineer at the start of my career.
Always asking dumb questions. Asking other people to create "sample projects" for her.
She is now a principal PM manager where I work now. She has no idea I know her from our prior company 20 years ago, but surely it is the same person. You do not get to that level without what it takes.
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