Articles for category: Growth

Worth the Travel?

Is your work worth the travel? Is what you are getting out of it – paycheck, experience, knowledge, teaching, training worth the travel? Does it get you all of those things or just some? Is it worth more in the long run vs the short run? If it takes 2 hours to get there, but you get compensated with meals, does that make up for the travel time? What if you need to stay late on Wednesdays? The only person you can decide whether your job is worth the travel is you; you’re the only one who can make that

Training an LLM for a Marathon

Training a Language Learning Model is much easier than training to run a marathon. You assemble your data, you set your parameters (depending on the scope, you do a bunch of other things), and then you click “Train”. And it runs, for however long it needs to run, it runs. It does its job, you walk away and let it work, let it run, let it train. Everything we do today is not nearly as clean or as easy as clicking the “train” button – if it were, I’d be selecting different models and hitting “train” all the time. Want

1 week ago

Greg Thomas

What Meetings Do I need to be In?

You only ever need to be in the meetings that you actively contribute to. If you are not contributing to the meeting, you do not need to be there. If the reason you are there is so people can do their job, then you are using your meetings to solve a very different problem that cannot be solved by you being in a meeting. Take a run of your calendar and eliminate everything you don’t contribute to. If you’re missed, they will reach out; chances are, you’ll get some time back in your day.

1 week ago

Greg Thomas

Ecosystems Aren’t Built

Ecosystems evolve; they aren’t built. The frog, the lake, the bugs, the fish – they didn’t just get together one day and decide to jive and make a system. They evolved into it, one begat the other, something was enticing that spurned interest. Over time, it grew and evolved. Ecosystems don’t evolve overnight either; it takes time. As much as we don’t want it to take time, it does, it always will, there is no way around it. That’s the beauty of an ecosystem, always evolving, always growing, no start, no end – it just happens over time.  

Throwing Solutions at a Problem

It has never been easier than it is now to throw multiple solutions at a problem. Solutions you can validate, attempt, and see what they do. That’s what you are up against now: systems that throw solutions at problems, not ideas, not blue-sky thinking, not options, but the actual solutions. You probably can’t throw multiple solutions at any one problem, but you can come prepared, ready to work, ready to put together a solid list. You can throw your will, design, purpose, and value at the problem. Harder to measure, but easier to see in the end.