It has been an eventful year. It has been almost three months since the previous post, and a lot of things have been happening.
In the time that I was away on a cruise, my company did a round of layoffs. It took me a while to realize what had happened when I came back, as everyone had long faces. At least everyone who were left. Two people on my team were immediately affected, both of whom were working remotely. One additional person was on paternity leave, and wouldn't find out he had been let go until he came back a month later. This is the first time I've experienced a layoff in my entire career, and while I was not directly impacted, it is indeed a new experience.
Around the middle of the year, my manager had told me sternly that I needed to come into the office everyday. He specifically said that it wasn't too late yet, but if I didn't make an immediate change, there would be consequences. Looking back, I think this was the moment when he was low-key trying to warn me about the possible layoffs. I took his warning to heart and started coming into the office everyday. Shortly before the layoffs, he had discreetly asked me whether I had been coming into the office. When I told him I had been coming in everyday, he looked relieved. I credit him with helping me avoid being laid off. It's not an easy job market out there right now.
Along with the layoffs was a whole reorg where the teams were shuffled around and rearranged and I got a new manager. I had worked on a project with her earlier in the year, and do I had some brief interactions with her before, so that helped with adjusting.
Generally speaking, the atmosphere of the past few years has felt like 1999, at the peak of the dot com bubble. I feel like the bubble has been popped and is now deflating. Everyone is now crowding into AI.
Speaking of which, I have also been experimenting with AI for the past few months - Ollama and ComfyUI. It has been an interesting experience. There have been times when I have been genuinely impressed. But, it's not every time. It seems the theme is to do multiple attempts and iterate the prompt, and repeat until you get the result you're looking for. I see value in AI, but I don't think its value is as great as the current valuations placed on AI companies, though. I think most of the current AI companies will fail.
I have been using a RTX 3060, and it has been working surprisingly well. I had bought it during the pandemic, but never got around to installing it. I finally decided to install it onto my server (it wouldn't fit in my desktop), so that I could start using it to play with LLMs. I feel like I hit a sweet spot. It has more RAM than the RTX 3070 (12GB vs 8GB), is cheaper than the RTX 3070 ($350 vs $500+), and is a full PCI-e x16 card, as opposed to the RTX 4060 and RTX 5060, which are only PCI-e x8 cards. While it is slower than the RTX 3070, that just means it takes longer to run the same task, but given that it has more memory, it is actually more capable than the RTX 3070. For the next step up, I will have to look at the RTX 3080 or above cards. For now, though, those cards are too expensive to me and I can make do with what I have.
Finally, I have gotten myself into a pickle and am now digging myself out of this hole I've fallen into. Life for the next few years will be harder, but I consider it a valuable life experience all in itself. Perhaps one day, after I've come out of the other end of the tunnel, I can laugh and joke about this and remember this period of time fondly, but right now, it is an admittedly difficult time. I have friends who are also going through difficult times also, and now I can somewhat relate. All things considered though, I count myself fortunate. However, having said that, I think I was going too hard too fast. It may be that age has caught up, but I plan to take life at a more manageable pace going into the future.
