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Nick Huber


NICK HUBER


HI THERE, I’M NICK! 👋 I’M A SELF-TAUGHT PROGRAMMER 🖥️, DATA SCIENTIST 📈, AND
PART-TIME INVESTOR 💵.

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READ THIS FIRST


MASTERING LLMS COURSE NOTES – LECTURE 1

Notes on Mastering LLMs Maven course

 * https://maven.com/parlance-labs/fine-tuning


LECTURE 1

Most common tools for fine-tuning:

 * Axolotl, huggingface’s transformer apply_chat() method — formats your
   fine-tune examples into templates that the LLM knows how to use
   * https://github.com/OpenAccess-AI-Collective/axolotl
   * https://huggingface.co/docs/transformers/main/en/chat_templating
 * Many issues in development are due to templating inconsistencies (e.g. the
   special token that you put between prompt & response in the fine-tuning
   examples)
 * (May 2024 statement) With larger context windows, bigger LLMs are able to
   take in more examples in the prompt itself, which makes fine-tuning less
   important
   * Is this true?
 * You should prove to yourself that you need to fine-tune — and only do it so
   after you’ve tried using the base model, doing prompt eng, etc.
 * A lot of reasons to fine-tune are...

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Nov 19, 2023


ADVICE TO PINOYS WORKING OR STUDYING IN THE US FOR THE FIRST TIME

Someone on one of my Philippine-based teams is going to be studying in the US
for a quarter in 2024, and I offered to share some cultural advice/reflections
to her prior to her departure; I figured it might be a fun post to open-source &
share more widely, so here goes…

In no particular order — and being super explicit, even if some of this is
obvious — as that’s kinda the whole point of this post:

 * In American culture, it’s common to ask “How are you?” (e.g. when walking
   past each other on the street or seeing each other for the first time in the
   morning). If you respond with more than 3-5 words, the American will likely
   to start to feel uncomfortable, as they likely don’t really care how you are
   feeling. (That is, unless they ask a follow-up question to your initial
   response.) “How are you?” or questions about the weather are basically the
   American equivalent of saying “good morning”...

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May 2, 2021


DATA ANALYSIS IS A FORM OF SOFTWARE ENGINEERING

When I started getting excited about data science 7 years ago, I was also at the
same time just learning how to program. Like…not how to program k-means from
scratch, like how to draw circles in Javascript.

As such, I was learning multiple technical concepts at the same time:

Since then, I’ve collected some wins under my belt as a data scientist. But my
best learnings actually came from making mistakes – writing inefficient Hive
queries, making low-accuracy or over-engineered models, being overly academic
about metric definitions, waiting too long to show business users intermediate
progress, etc.

One of the biggest conceptual errors I made starting out in data science was
thinking that data analysis was somehow a different, special, disjoint field
from software engineering. I’m taking a few hours to write up – and draw up! –
my past and current beliefs on this topic.

If you’re...

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Apr 4, 2021


GAME THEORY, ASYMMETRIC OPPORTUNITIES, AND HOW I LOST $40 MILLION

I love incentives. I enjoy thinking about what motivates people, what motivates
myself, and, in general, how people make decisions – large and small. A special
case in the study of incentives is game theory.

Many things that are not (literally) games – love, international relations,
negotiations – can actually have their underlying mechanics modelled, and often
accurately predicted, within a game-theoretic framework. Game theory is
especially helpful to model situations in which individuals’ incentives are not
atomic – that is, they interact with one another – which is quite often the case
in the real world.

A fundamental building block of the field is a payoff matrix. A payoff matrix is
where an individual’s decisions are mapped to “payoffs,” or return values, for
an individual taking a certain decision in a moment in the game. For example, if
you have $100 at the start of time, and...

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Mar 14, 2021


WORKING FROM HOME, 2020-2021: A YEAR IN REVIEW

Amidst the dramatic events of the pandemic, I’ve had one constant source of
unexpected joy: the productivity, personal growth, and freedom I’ve discovered
from working from home.1 I wanted to write up my experience to put all my
thoughts on it in one place.

Compared to working in an office, working from home feels like being liberated
from a million nuisances and inconveniences of the day-to-day grind. I have so
much more flexibility and control over my time now that I find it difficult to
quantify. Since high school, my most productive times have always been late at
night, when all is still and quiet in the house, and I’m able to deeply think
about things uninterrupted for hours at a time.

I still remember fondly staying up late to write (and re-write) my college
application essays, trying to fuse together ordinary public school experiences
into a unique tapestry that a distant...

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Mar 13, 2021


15 WAYS I’M UNIQUE

I recently read Y Combinator co-founder Jessica Livingston’s post on how to Grow
The Puzzle Around You. It describes in beautiful detail her unique, often
behind-the-scenes contributions to the enormously successful startup generator,
and her journey to becoming a non-traditional technology investor.

In the conclusion, it implores the reader to “write down” your truly unique
qualities – “and don’t edit [them].” That is, ignore the temptation to add
positive/negative labels to each, and instead focus on the rock-bottom truth in
the features themselves.

Because, what’s important is understanding yourself, so you’re then in a better
position to leverage your unique strengths for the benefit of others. The
overall goal is to "puzzle fit around you” as the title says, but to do that, in
my reading, you first must have a solid understanding of yourself at the
metaphorical center.

So, here...

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Mar 13, 2021


INTERMITTENT FASTING

Recently, I started having crippling lower back pain. When I woke up in the
morning, I would often struggle to stand fully upright. If I were to walk for
longer than a few blocks, I’d need to rest from the tightness/total exhaustion
in my lower back.

After consulting with various doctors, I came to the conclusion that the
simplest explanation was the best – through quarantine, I had ballooned to 106
kg (234 lbs). While I have an athletic build, I’m only 6 foot (183cm) and, from
a typical college weight of 80 kg (180 lbs), this was quite a shock.

Over the past 2 months, I have started intermittent fasting (IF).1 That is, I
only eat from noon to around 8pm. The appeal to IF over other diet regimes to me
has always been twofold:

 1. The simplicity – the rules are so clear: eat at these times, don’t eat at
    these others. It doesn’t require a change in diet, which has downstream
    requirements...

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