I stay mostly on the westside but id say more density of shops but at the same time less busy? if i had to guess, things were really going well before covid. then add delivery app and now a bunch of coco delivery robots really slowed down foot traffic.
things still go viral - pop ups are very popular with the young crowd. owalla was giving out water bottles and the line was around the block and i didnt see the end of the line
The tech scene is not doing so well imo. people say gaming is cyclical but idk tbh. AI adoption in graphic design and coding is really going to squeeze an already stressed gaming labor pool. entertainment industry is much the same.
i cant name one young rising startup that was hot like snapchat. so that was disappointing when i was job hunting.
Been in LA for 2 years now and went to college in LA 10 years ago so have some data points to compare.
Startups in LA are interesting. Back in the day, there was a lot of Ad Tech / advent of big data. This is when Snapchat and Hulu were coming up. I’d go on Angellist and see who was hiring and who’d be down to meet.
Now, especially post covid, I feel sparks of excitement. I missed the crypto hype in LA so that was probably wild and weird. a16z opened an office in Santa Monica and do their speedrun accelerator. Focused on games and media it seems.
upfront hosted some cool cowork and mingle events too.
Two meetups I regularly go to is AI Tinkerers and MLOps. Generally it’s the same small crowd. I went to a Ruby meetup which was cool too.
Less of a young startup crowd. Maybe people got older and rich and retired early.
Awesome! Coffee + LLM-assisted programming. I had a similar experience coding an iOS app without experience with objective c using chatgpt. Great learning tool
I've had a few of these interviews. Some do it well by showing genuine interest and maybe they have expertise in the area and it's fun chatting about the project. Other's see it more like cross examination or make it adversarial. I personally get nervous and tense up when I feel attacked. Maybe it's a good way to opt myself out of working in those environments.
The big icon with the streak and it turning red toward the end of the day really helps. Recognizing that some days you won't want to learn but just getting through it is ok. It's a really slow process if you're not deliberate but slow is better than none IMO.
Joking aside, I worry when I start working again too. I think recognizing that struggling is learning and aiming to get into the rhythm/habit of struggling even when you're tired - even a little bit - compounds. I'm also toying with the idea of cohort-based learning
I started looking at Kaggle again and autoresearch seems to converge to many of the solution vibes there.
Wild ensembles, squeezing a bit of loss out. More engineering than research IMO