I would recommend looking into decoupling your social needs from your job.
Even in the time before wide spread WFH this was an issue, during good times it feels great to go into work and get all your social needs met but when layoffs come or companies collapse suddenly that great work friend everyone loves gets let go and in a few more weeks they effectively don't exist anymore.
It's great if you can meet people at work and create a real friendship (I've certainly done that). Now that you're remote you can put more time into keeping up with those people. Schedule lunches, video calls etc.
Get to know your neighbors better, join local interest groups, schedule video chats with friends you haven't chatted with in a while that live far away, and make sure to get lunch with local friends whenever you can.
It will be a bit of transition but ultimately you'll have a much richer social life and honestly enjoy work more as well since you have more outlets in the day that have nothing to do with your 9-5.
Call it what you want but that advice comes from experience. I worked remote for many years before pandemic and had plenty of issues with isolation.
Sometimes in life socialization comes easy and requires no work, but that's not always the case. This is a common problem people face once they leave high school/college. The truth is that real social relationships, the ones that keeps us more fulfilled take work.
I realized that to not feel lonely all the time when working at home I had to put some effort into making sure I reached out to friends, scheduled lunches and calls (which can happen during that 6 hour period, that's one of the benefits of WFH), make sure I went to local meetups etc. The end result was that from that effort I made some fantastic friendships that were much more fulfilling.
Even in the OP's current work environment a little more deliberate effort can go a long a way. I'm sure other coworkers feel the same way, if they pair programmed in the office why not reach out and schedule some pairing sessions? I've know many remote places that do this. Schedule virtual coffees during the day where two people can just chat, again something I've seen at many remote places.
Yes, for decades people could get a basic level of socialization for no effort, but like most no effort things that socialization goes as easy as it comes.
Having been in a similar situation to OP, that was the lesson I learned so that's the advice I'm giving, which I hardly think is tone deaf.
What's tone deaf and patronizing about your responses is that you assume that your personal working style is the best and only one for every person. Imagine not understanding that different people are different, and as a result may have working styles that are different too.
Where are you getting that I'm assuming that "personal working style is the best and only one for every person"? I am recommending what worked for me. It's a bit different than the question the OP ask's but, given a similar situation, it's what has worked.
I suspected you my be projecting a bit of your own insecurities here.
Unfortunately HN has become an increasing hostile place, and I think rather extreme reactionary response to a simple recommendation is becoming the norm.
In a weird way, thanks for finally waking me up to the realization that is community is not what it was and not one where I should be spending time anymore.
I have no idea why these two users are taking such an uncharitable view of what you wrote. It's sad and offensive.
HN, by the mere fact that it is a discussion community, is about sharing perspectives and opinions. No one here is forced to read or believe anything anyone else says.
I appreciated your comments and would hate to see you go.
I'd much prefer to work alone and in silence than in an open office, or cube, or commute...
I can focus on what I'm doing when I'm alone. It's definitely preferable when writing things like code or copy, which is majorly stressful if other people are in the room.
If I feel like chatting, I can go to the cafe, talk to a neighbor. Even meeting the same UPS guy every day is kind of nice and makes me feel like my home is part of a regular community.
It feels much more natural than spending a good portion of my day on the freeway or in an office and just using my home for a place to sleep.
That nice but doesn’t answer the question. WFH for a lot of people sucks. Especially roles that aren’t right software engineer. Many roles are very hard to do remote (product, UX, etc)
I can’t wait to return to our offices and go back to normal. WFH works for some people and some projects but not all.
Plus being around people that aren’t your family is nice too.
>I would recommend looking into decoupling your social needs from your job.
I absolutely hate that this is the standard answer that comes up everytime someone mentions not being happy with WFH.
Not only it doesn't answer the question, but it's just a slightly more polite version of "just make friends, duh" which is not helpful at all.
To many people (myself included) 2-3 hours of social activities in a day is not enough. I need to be around people, and while it's great to meet some friends in the evening it doesn't change the fact that I just spent 10 miserable hours alone in my appartment.
In addition to that, I find there are many disadvantages to remote work: I hate doing over the phone what could have been a nice in-person chat, I hate how tedious it is to show/explain things that would have been easily demonstrated in person, I hate how difficult it is to grasp non-verbal cues, etc.
I don't know a single person IRL who likes full time WFH, but judging by how popular it is here, it seems I shouldn't assume that everybody is in the same situation. Conversely, don't assume everybody can turn his miserable WFH experience in something awesome just "by doing stuff in the evening". Btw no offense but I had to laugh at your suggestion that a vido chat is a social activity.
Wow, what a patronizing response. Some people work better alone, some work better with others around. I'm in the later category - I prefer working with people who I would never consider friends over working alone. It has nothing to do with using work for my social life and everything to do with how I work best.
What if you answer the question instead of telling other people how to exist?
A variation of this comment shows up in every FB related post, and it seems completely absurd to me that anyone holds this view seriously.
The idea that interacting on Facebook is somehow "keeping up with friends" is itself perhaps the greatest victory of Facebook's own marketing. The idea that 'liking' a picture and leaving a public comment is a sincere human interaction is ridiculous. It's social noise used to replace interpersonal connections and is being pitched that this is somehow better.
If FB suddenly disappeared people would likely go back to texting each other images and calling each other more often, in private where they could more openly admit their struggles and non-public views. People would stop pretending that they had more than 30 "friends". Daily likes and emojis would be replaced with actual video calls, less frequent but longer, more intimate conversations.
This isn't speculation as it's how everyone I know who isn't active on facebook communicates. When I call my distant friends and family the interactions are entirely different than the public facing, image maintaining, completely non-intimate communication that happens on any "social" media.
You're not keeping up with what's happening when you interaction on facebook, because what's really happening is struggles and concerns that you don't necessarily want to share in public with everyone you know. Real human connections involve being vulnerable around someone you trust, which is fundamentally in opposition to the foundations of how something like facebook works.
> If FB suddenly disappeared people would likely go back to texting each other images and calling each other more often. In private where they could more openly admit their struggles and non-public views. People would stop pretending that they had more than 30 "friends". Daily likes and emojis would be replaced with actual video calls, less frequent but longer, more intimate conversations.
Not really, you assume this is to keep up with current friends. Not past co-workers who you're friendly with. People you were friends with when you were 20-years younger. People you went to college with but were only friends and not still talking 10-years later. Basically, people whose phone number you don't have and can't find.
Actually, no they haven't they lost contact with people. People started to be able to find each other when Facebook took off. Remove Facebook and people will suddenly not be able to do that.
A variation of this comment shows up in every FB related post, and it seems completely absurd to me anyone holds this view seriously.
Before FB, people shared these details once a year with the annual Christmas card or Thanksgiving call. Now, they can share these details with friends and family in essentially realtime, and communicate in realtime. You can say the same things you would in a card, or a call, without waiting months. Hell, if you really want you can call someone through Facebook.
It's crazy that people on HN are so convinced that there aren't people out there with more than 30 friends. Spend more time out of the office away from your computers, and you'll have way more than 30 friends in short order.
It's crazy that people think that emojis have replaced longer intimate conversations. Most of the people I know that use Facebook for sharing with friends can and do have deeper conversations (and plenty of them) with friends IRL (or on the phone) because the minutiae gets shared on FB or Instagram.
Maybe you can't keep up with people through Facebook, but literally billions of people have been using Facebook for this quite successfully.
Here I disagree with you pretty strongly. Once someone is comfortable with differentiable programming it's much more obvious how to build and optimize any type of model.
People should be more concerned about when to use derivatives, gradients, hessians, Laplace approximation etc rather than worry about the implementation details of these tools.
Abstraction can also aid depth of understanding. I know plenty of people who can implement backprop, but then don't understand how to estimate parameter uncertainty from the Hessian. The latter is much more important for general model building.
i am not sure what you are disagreeing with. chain rule is basic calculus that precedes understanding hessians. my argument is, if you can not understand what the chain rule is, you will not understand more complicated mathematics in ML. do you think i am wrong ?
EDIT: also uncertainty estimation is the stuff of probabalistic approach to ML. i would say that people who do probabalistic ML are quite mathematically capable (at least to my experience)
> chain rule is basic calculus that precedes understanding hessians.
It doesn't have to be that way. The hessian is an abstract idea and the chain rule and more specifically backpropagation are methods of computing the results for an abstract idea. When I want the hessian I want a matrix of second order partial derivatives, I'm not interested in how those are computed.
For a more concrete example, would you say that using the quantile function for the normal distribution requires you to be able to implement it from scratch?
There are many, very smart, very knowledgeable people that correctly use the normal quantile function (inverse CDF) every day for essential quantitative computation that have absolutely no idea how to implement the inverse error function (an essential part of the normal quantile). Would you say that you don't really know statistics if you can't do this? That a beginner must understand the implementation details of the inverse error function before making any claims about normal quantiles? I myself would absolutely need to pull up a copy of Numerical Recipes to do this. It would be, in my opinion, ludicrous to say that anyone wanting to write statistical code should understand and be able to implement the normal quantile function. Maybe in 1970 that was true, but we have software to abstract that out for us.
The same is becoming true of backprop. I can simply call jax.grad on my implementation of loss of the forward pass of the NN I'm interested in and get the gradient of that function, the same way I can call scipy.stats.norm.ppf to get that quantile for a normal. All that is important is that you understand what the quantile function of the normal distribution means for you to use it correctly, and again I suspect there are many practicing statisticians that don't know how to implement this.
And to give you a bit of context, my view on this has developed from working with many people who can pass a calculus exam and perform the necessarily steps to compute a derivative, but yet have almost no intuition about what a derivative means and how to use it and reason about it. Calculus historically focused on computation over intuition because that was what was needed to do practical work with calculus. Today the computation can take second place to the intuition because we have powerful tools that can take care of all the computation for you.
> Today the computation can take second place to the intuition because we have powerful tools that can take care of all the computation for you.
and that tool is backprop. if you do not understand what the chain rule is and what it is doing, that tool will be magic to you and you are blindly trusting its correctness. seeing that alot of risk is involved in using AI models in real life, blindly trusting your model is not a good approach
i agree that simply regurgitating rules of calculus is pointless to understanding. but thats definitely not what i mean when i talk about the need to understand the chain rule
ML is a mathematically intensive subject. there is no going around this fact
but that's my point. knowing how to compile a program does not make me a compiler engineer. in that sense feel free to use ML tools, but don't be fooled into thinking you will get a job as an ML engineer if you do not know what the chain rule is, or why we need to take a derivative in order to optimise a loss function. in fact, don't even be fooled into thinking you will get into a ML uni degree if you don't know what the chain rule is. i actually don't understand what is the problem. spend 10 minutes reading up on it and i am sure you will get it. i think an unwarranted phobia of mathematics is what is at play here
If by understand, you mean understand and not regurgitate it when asked as a trivia question - I agree with you. However, there are different interpretations of the chain rule.
Given the current state of automatic differentiation I'm not so sure it's even necessary or particularly useful to focus on backpropagation any more.
While backprop has major historic significance, in the end it's essentially just a pure calculation which no longer needs to be done by hand.
Don't get me wrong, I still believe that understanding the gradient is hugely important, and conceptually it will always be essential to understand that one is optimizing a neural network by taking the derivative of the loss function, but backprop is not necessary nor is it particularly useful for modern neural networks (nobody is computing gradients by hand for transformers).
IMHO a better approach is to focus on a tool like JAX where taking a derivative is abstracted away cleanly enough, but at the same time you remain fully aware of all the calculus that is being done.
Especially for programmers, it's better to look at Neural Networks as just a specific application of Differentiable Programing. This makes them both easier to understand and also enables the learner to open a much broader class of problems they can solve with the same tools.
Backpropagation is a particular implementation of reverse mode auto-differentiation, and it is the basis for all implementaions of DL models. It is very strange for me to read this as though it is very obvious and commonly accepted fact, which I don't think it is.
> to read this as though it is very obvious and commonly accepted fact
I'm not entirely sure what you're referring to by "this" but assuming you mean my comment, I think what I'm saying is very much up for debate and not an "obvious and commonly accepted fact". Karpathy has a very reasonably argument that directly disagrees with what I'm suggesting [0]. Of course he also agrees that in practice nobody will every use backprop directly.
Whether it's JAX, TF, PyTorch, etc the chain rule will be applied for you. I'm arguing that I think it's helpful to not have to worry about the details of how your derivative is being computed, and rather build an intuition about using derivatives as an abstraction. To be fair I think Karpathy is correct for people who are going to be learning to explicitly be experts in Neural Networks.
My point is more that given how powerful our tools today are for computing derivatives (I think JAX/Autograd have improved since Karpathy wrote that article), it's better to teach programmers to learn think of derivatives, gradients, hessians etc as high level abstractions. Worrying less about how to compute them and more about how to use them. In this way thinking about modeling doesn't need to be restricted to strictly NNs, but rather use NNs and example and then demonstrate to the student that they are free to build any model by defining how the model predicts, scoring the prediction and using the tools of calculus to answer other common questions you might have.
edit: a good analogy is logic programming and backtracking/unification. The entire point of logic programming is to abstract away backtracking. Sure experts in Prolog do need to understand backtracking, but it's more helpful to get beginners understanding how Prolog behaves than understand the details of backtracking.
but with backprop you do not worry about computing derivatives by hand. backprop and AD in general means you do not have to do that. maybe one of us is misunderstanding the other
i am saying that if you want to work with ML algorithms on a more deeper level you must learn backprop
if you want to implement some models on the other hand, you can just follow a recipe approach
I'm a bit surprised that nobody has mentioned how much we have failed as technologists that a story is being shared by png images of text... brave new world indeed.
Just because this is an older problem doesn't mean it's not a problem.
Yes, people that loved fixing up cars would have complained about "kids these days" not knowing how to fix a car. I was certainly one of those kids.
However seeing this happen with a field I know makes me realize those people complaining about people not knowing how to take care of their cars were right.
And while this is true of "any new tech", it's a relatively recent phenomenon as tech has only been advancing this rapidly in last 100 years or so.
It is a bad thing to be increasingly alienated from the tools you rely on for your day-to-day existence. Of course it's in part because cars and computers have both been increasingly designed by their manufactures to be difficult to take apart and understand. Tools that you don't understand increasingly control you rather than the other way around and I personally think this is a trend worth resisting.
It's good to point out that this is an issue and even better to encourage more people to be curious, and learn how things work. Another example that I'm surprised of is people's homes. I know a shocking number of home owners that cannot fix a single thing in their own home without calling a "professional" (and it's increasingly surprising how many professionals also don't understand what they're doing!) This was extremely evident during the freezing temperatures in Texas where many people didn't know how to shut off the water to their homes.
One of the best parts of the "hacker" mentality is to encourage people to not be scared of their tools and the things they own. While things have gotten more complicated, you can do a large amount of repair and modification on your own for almost everything. It honestly feels very liberating (not to mention saving you a lot of money) to snake a clog 12 ft deep in your drain, replace your car's serpentine belt, restore old hardwood floors, repair broken refrigerators from parts, etc.
I don't think that's as relevant as the current demand for VCs to unload their investments as fast as possible before the next major economic catastrophe.
It boggles my mind that we're set to nearly double the record number of IPOs this year, and last year was the highest number since 1999, yet in general no one finds this at all interesting or alarming.
I don't think I have any special insight here, but it seems like a lot of the companies this time have actual products, revenue, and a plausible path forward. I've also read that during the period from 2008 until about 2019 there was an unusually low number of IPOs.
> It's not the wackos we should be worrying about.
It's really amazing to me how easily the "left" was able to be tricked in the same death of critical thinking as the "right".
The "stick to the libs!" angle is far more responsible for the rise in support of Trump leading up to the election. People on the "right" were manipulated for decades into reducing their political beliefs to defending themselves from a fictitious adversary (this is why I put quotes around these terms). If you listen to any radical Trump supporter you'll quickly see that a large part of their logic is based on a deeply held belief that roughly half the country is mind washed, irrational liberals that seek to destroy their way of life.
This rewriting of people skeptical of the vaccines as "wackos" serves the same purpose for the "left" and mainstream progressives have gobbled it up without hesitation. They now see roughly half the country as a bunch mind washed, irrational "wackos" that are a threat to the foundations of our society.
Both the "left" and "right" (terms which honestly don't make any political sense any more, evidence by exactly this irrational support for corporate suppression of voices on the "left" and it's dissent on the "right") are currently structured so that any real, meaningful political discourse about the future of the country is dissolved into two insane groups of people throwing rocks at each other.
If you find yourself defined by either of these major narratives, then you are being played.
What angle about vaccine skepticism isn't summarized as "it might negatively impact you so maybe don't get it".
The vaccine is totally the tragedy of the commons. If everybody gets it you are just making your life worse by also getting it.
If nobody gets it it is bad for everybody.
The reality is sometimes everybody collectively deciding to take one for the team is exactly what we need. Vaccination is one of those situations.
There are exceptions, I don't mean to imply otherwise, but those are not what is being talked about.
"Maybe we shouldn't vaccinate those who have been infected to vaccinate someone else" is being used to justify those who were presumed infected to not get vaccinated. The nuance is getting lost in a painful way.
I don't think that's a complete characterization of the anti-vaccine "movement" or "meme." It's also rooted in distrust of the government science institutions. For instance, many people are taking ivermectin at some risk to themselves, since prolonged human consumption of ivermectin may have adverse effects.
You're sketching a number of false equivalences. Left-of-center-in-the-US and Right-of-center-in-the-US each have their problems but that's bad argument for those being the same problems.
I don't think it's a conspiracy theory to say a substantial portion of anti-vaccine arguments have come from profit-driven fraud. That's pretty well document. That was the point of origin of the original study and various fraudsters have ridden that 'till today. Of course, there are those with nuance positions on the vaccines this will hurt them and hurt informed. Oppositely, the liars have effectively killed many people at this point.
There are a few actual fraudsters on the left but most active health-craze fraud is concentrated on the right in New Age circles (which can generally no longer be considered left).
Which is to say, the left-of-center has a number of problem (absurdist moralistic posturing, say) but straight-up-lying isn't equally divided here, among the politically respectable, it's concentrated on the right.
Not to mention that industry itself only accounts for 6% of Arizona's water usage [0] so we're talking about one single structure increasing the industrial usage by ~10%.
Industry is a surprisingly small portion of water consumption in many places. In many states, household water use (including lawns) can handily exceed the water used by industry.
Using this water for domestic chip making is arguably a very reasonable use of water. If we’re going to start cutting water usage, let’s start with things like golf courses in the desert instead of critical chip-making infrastructure.
I feel a bit of tension. I'm not a big fan of people using water to grow grass in the desert, but I'm also not a big fan of making tens or hundreds of thousands of people sacrifice so that one large corporation can profit.
Yeah, I know that chip manufacturing helps everyone by improving our economic independence, and that's not a small thing, but we're already writing Intel a big check and they obviously benefit from the profits of the chips they will manufacture (assuming they manage it correctly and it doesn't just get left behind for cheaper foreign manufacturing the moment the market economics change).
Maybe chip manufacture really benefits from being somewhere arid, and that's probably just pretty incompatible with water conservation?
I used to get so mad about people growing lawns here in Phoenix until I discovered that Burmuda grass will tenaciously grow with little irrigation, and that some kind of vegetation is better for water retention in soil than bare dirt.
As I mentioned in my longer comment elsewhere, Arizona is seismically stable, and fabs don’t need specialized structures when using advanced process nodes.
The biggest misuse of water resources and poor land management comes from our conventional, commercial farming practice. Healthy, living soil can do a lot ecologically including water conservation, but we farm in a way to continually deplete soil.
Changing how residential homeowners do landscaping can help as well.
I switched out my whole yard to zoysia (which is one of those creeping vine grasses like Bermuda). I picked it over Bermuda because it grows in thicker. I went from watering at least once a week to maybe once or twice a year if at all. That is in a area with an ok amount of rain.
I liked this type of grass as it grows relatively slowly which means about half the amount of mowing needed to be done. Low water (less than Bermuda), kills most weeds (less pesticides and weed killers), less mowing, those are the upsides. Downsides are turns yellow in October and does not turn green until the end of april (not HOA friendly), and like most creeping vine grasses is invasive and hard to get rid of if you do not like it, it also grows very poorly in shaded areas. Aggressive trimming is also needed when it reaches walkways, streets, driveways, and the side of your house.
I also spent a good amount of time building up a decent bed for the grass to grow in with mulching and proper aeration. Another thing I did was to make sure I had a good mix of the correct type of insects, moss, worms, and transplanted from local areas potting soils for other bits in the soil, trying to keep area and the type of grass in mind. As the original builder had scraped off the good stuff, leaving me with clay and rocks and rye grass, then took it to another site before I bought the place. This helped tremendously with the soil. Though I could have done better on my homework with that.
Depending on where you live, what sort of rain you get, and the soil types, this can be a 1 year job or a 10 year job. It really takes time to do.
But yeah, there's lots of different types of grasses that are OK to have in arid climates. But most lawns in my region (socal) aren't these special grasses. Subterranean irrigation can help too.
Yeah, I agree that my framing was narrow. Corporations of course benefit society.
> paying suppliers for the parts that go into the useful things getting produced
I suspect this is overstated considering how much of these parts likely come from abroad, especially from oppressive countries that subsidize their manufacturing via pollution and pseudo slave labor. But still there are certainly American wholesale and logistics jobs which are supported.
Its fucking lawn grass. Its one of the most worthless things in the world and a complete waste of resources. At least chips do something other than sit there wasting water.
I agree. But the idea of asking tens or hundreds of thousands to give up their frivolities so a single corporation can profit strikes a nerve in me, however irrational it may be. I'm not reflexively anti-corporation--corporations are economically necessary--but I guess I'm touchy about the question of whether people exist for corporations or corporations for people.
The article didnt say water prices are increasing. They get most of their water from recycling what they use. Regardless filling a pot of water for pasta would go from a fraction of a penny to a fraction of a penny even if intel increased their water use ten fold
As resources start collapsing, more and more major world powers will begin to keep their own resources for themselves.
China didn't say they were targeting a net reduction in building coal, only that they weren't going to be building coal for anyone else.
This is likely due to the projected increase in demand for coal in China and a realistic assessment about how resource constrained they are.
And to be clear, while collapse of fossil fuels, something people have been concerned about for decades, will be better for the planet, it will still mean a rapid decline in our standard of living and essentially the collapse of modern industrial society.
Renewables are rapidly winning versus the cost/benefit of fossil fuels.
China also announced a partnership with Australia that would replace existing coal trade agreements between China and Australia with a massive solar farm in the Australian desert and planning for the worlds largest planned high voltage DC corridor between continents.
Even in the time before wide spread WFH this was an issue, during good times it feels great to go into work and get all your social needs met but when layoffs come or companies collapse suddenly that great work friend everyone loves gets let go and in a few more weeks they effectively don't exist anymore.
It's great if you can meet people at work and create a real friendship (I've certainly done that). Now that you're remote you can put more time into keeping up with those people. Schedule lunches, video calls etc.
Get to know your neighbors better, join local interest groups, schedule video chats with friends you haven't chatted with in a while that live far away, and make sure to get lunch with local friends whenever you can.
It will be a bit of transition but ultimately you'll have a much richer social life and honestly enjoy work more as well since you have more outlets in the day that have nothing to do with your 9-5.