This is great advice and will give a good background in programming that mirrors what you would learn in a CS program.
I'd also like to suggest studying the practical side of building software that many university programs don't spend much time on. To help address this gap, John Ousterhout wrote A Philosophy of Software Design. He has retired from teaching, but captured the hard-won lessons in the book.
This type of book offers the perspective I wish I had developed more before working in software teams early on, as it would have made me a more valuable developer right off the bat. Instead, I went deep on architecture patterns and language theory, becoming somewhat insufferable to my peers (who were very tolerant and kind in return!) for the first few years. 20 years later, I can see that I was trying to hammer a CS "peg" into a business-software-shaped hole :)
I see your point about pragmatic software engineering not being valued enough in university programs. Somehow the incentives are not aligned properly, which is unfortunate. I try to be as pragmatic as possible when I happen to teach courses where this makes sense. Next semester I'll probably teach "C programming" again after a few years, which is always fun for the students, who will never see a raw pointer again in their career.
Sure. Someone on /r/LocalLLaMA was seeing 12.5 tokens/s on dual Strix Halo 128GB machines (run you $6-8K total?) with 1.8bits per parameter. It performs far below the unquantized model, so it would not be my personal pick for a one-local-LLM-forever, but it is compelling because it has image and video understanding. You lose those features if you choose, say, gpt-oss-120B.
Also, that's with no context, so it would be slower as it filled (I don't think K2.5 uses the Kimi-Linear KDA attention mechanism, so it's sub-quadratic but not their lowest).
It's a fun setup that quickly devolves into the Shakespearian! The plots don't always work, but seeing their reasoning get increasingly complex is interesting.
"When that the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept. Ambition should be made of sterner stuff. Yet Brutus says he was ambitious... and Brutus is an honourable man.
I use smaller fonts as well and when I first got an older OLED display with a pixel layout not supported by Windows ClearType, I used BetterClearTypeTuner and later MacType to adjust it. It was leagues better after tweaking a few settings and I'm very happy with text now, even on my AW3425DW, which has an older layout they moved on from in recent generations.
It is noticeable how since covid SV takes this place dramatically less seriously, largely because it used to be the case that getting to the top here got you a lot of attention in SV, but that hasn’t been the case in years.
When OpenAI announced the Triton language, I was worried I'd be confused one day while reading something because of Nvidia's open-source Triton inference server. I made it quite a long time, but it finally happened today! I was so intrigued for the first few pages and then deeply confused.
I'd also like to suggest studying the practical side of building software that many university programs don't spend much time on. To help address this gap, John Ousterhout wrote A Philosophy of Software Design. He has retired from teaching, but captured the hard-won lessons in the book.
This type of book offers the perspective I wish I had developed more before working in software teams early on, as it would have made me a more valuable developer right off the bat. Instead, I went deep on architecture patterns and language theory, becoming somewhat insufferable to my peers (who were very tolerant and kind in return!) for the first few years. 20 years later, I can see that I was trying to hammer a CS "peg" into a business-software-shaped hole :)
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