Hacker News: bendsawyer

New comment by bendsawyer in "I am rich and have no idea what to do"

bendsawyer — Fri, 03 Jan 2025 00:29:14 +0000

Maybe you’ve got it right.

I lost it all. I spent some time grieving, did some crazy things, decided to build wealth all over again, but then didn’t. I instead picked a topic and started learning. Three degrees later I’m pushing the boundaries of a field I had never heard of in that past life.

I’m not rich, but I’m comfortable.

I’m happy.

Enjoy Physics. It’s awesome.

New comment by bendsawyer in "Ask HN: Who Has an Interesting Job?"

bendsawyer — Sun, 15 Dec 2024 17:02:22 +0000

I closed out a successful investment career to go to college (never went) and ended up a professor of engineering. Then job is mostly testing new ideas and technologies and writing about it. Its a lot of freedom to play, the ability to mentor hand selected students through undergraduate (1-2yr) masters (2 yr) and PhD (4-6 year) sets of projects. Thank to my background I don’t work too hard to find funding, and because this is my 2nd yolo career, I’m not stressed in the way many academics can be. I started my academic career at MIT, but while my work thrived the place was a pressure cooker. Note I’m at a growing regional research university. I use the time this gets back to start a lot of side projects in areas totally unrelated to my PhD. I travel a lot.

It’s fun. I’m never bored. I’d never have imagined this would be my life.

New comment by bendsawyer in "Ask HN: I have many PDFs – what is the best local way to leverage AI for search?"

bendsawyer — Thu, 30 May 2024 22:18:04 +0000

Not offline. I do not trust anyone with some data, because I have contractually promised not to do so.

New comment by bendsawyer in "Ask HN: I have many PDFs – what is the best local way to leverage AI for search?"

bendsawyer — Thu, 30 May 2024 22:16:53 +0000

I used to use this, but the LLM approach allows for much deeper interactions. Not "find all times I've typed X" but

"act as an expert in Y, looking across all times I've typed X, summarize my changing position over thee years, and suggest other terms that have a similar pattern of change, in a list."

The kind of thing I used to give to an intern over a month, with results that are not far off what that intern produced...

New comment by bendsawyer in "Ask HN: I have many PDFs – what is the best local way to leverage AI for search?"

bendsawyer — Thu, 30 May 2024 22:05:47 +0000

I looked into this for sensitive material recently. In the end I got a purpose-built local system built and am having it remotely maintained. Cost: around 5k a year. I used http://www.skunkwerx.ai, who are US based.

The result is a huge step up from 'full text search' solutions, for my use case. I can have conversations with decades of documents, and it's incredibly helpful. The support scheme keeps my original documents unconnected from the machine, which I own, while updates are done over a remote link. It's great, and I feel safe.

Things change so fast in this space that there did not seem to be a cheap, stable, local alternative. I honestly doubt one is coming. This is not a on-size-fits-all problem.