Son was back for Thanksgiving. He has not meshed well with his roommates that much and says they are agreeable. One is in a frat and apparently, throws up every night or so. He thinks the whole idea is stupid. It is not for him. He went to a few gatherings of sorts and decided it was not him and he would rather wait and find his own people. Has made a good friend and through him another one that are just as nerdy and geeky. They are thinking about rooming together next year but a lot of things need to fall in place. He goes climbing almost every day and has made a few acquaintancesâŠbut why do they wear beanies? His question, not mine.
He loves the campus because it is so organized and the food is good with Bama bucks that he can spend at local restaurants too. Goes to the library to study. Classes have been okayish mostly. He hates his non-honors classes as they are too large and can have its fair share of riff raffs. Apparently, the dorm internet sucks??
A little part of me wants him to come back close to home and both wife and I love seeing our daughter at least every weekend. He says he is content at Bama. I think living alone and so far away is helping him mature. He is finding his own way.
The biggest negative for him is that most clubs that are active are either religious, frats and a couple of niche ones like ChemE car etc. The ones he joined have been duds. More like resume polishers in his opinion. He will try to seek out a service club next semester to see if they are more active.
Dating has been hard as the male to female ratio is 9:1 in engineering. He rarely ventures out of the quad. So far, so good.
My S23 is in a triple at his LAC and says he has never used his desk. Or studied in his room. He reserves study rooms in the library and even reads his non school reading for fun there instead of in bed before retiring. I hope he can get a single or at least a double next year (although he is not complaining about the triple).
My son said one of the first bits of advice he got from the older students was to study at the library, and heâs done that since his first week. He said it gives him more focus and less distractions, so itâs worked well for him
D23 uses room desk daily. She and her roommate created a full coffee bar set up on her desk and use roommateâs desk top as the landing station for keys, mail, etc.
Neither wanted their room to become a study space - they both use the libraries and study rooms around campus to do their homework and projects. I like knowing they are both getting out and being social in study groups. It can be easy to become dorm room bound.
Thatâs funny, how different their perspectives are on that. My son would walk around in a T-shirt and shorts year-round if he could so Bama weather suits him. He said he even liked the regular 90-plus temperatures in late-August/early-September after we first dropped him off. Now itâs just downright pleasant there every day while we now have six inches of snow. Iâm driving down to pick him up for Christmas break and weâre hoping to get a round of golf in together before we head home.
This. My son hates cold weather. Refused to take his heavy jacket. Compromise is that he will take it after Christmas. Meanwhile, 23F this morning in Raleigh.
True story: When I was an undergrad at the University of Maryland College Park I was a student worker in the graduate schoolâs office for two years. The other student who worked there my second year in the job was a sophomore (who grew up in Maryland) who had done her freshman year at Clemson, then transferred up to Maryland. She hated cold weather, and said that when sheâd gotten promotional mailings from colleges, she struck them off her list if any of their pictures showed any snow.
She transferred back to Clemson after her year at Maryland.
My son is at Purdue and doesnât study in his room either. He hasnât bonded with his roommates eitherâŠthey donât NOT get along, but rather, just donât mesh and apparently one is always in the room, always gaming. So my kid spends little time in his room, which heâs ok with. But he has taken on a mission to check out every building on campus and rank how good they are to study in (he figures this will take several years to accomplish). Heâs got a spreadsheet going to track his scores! So far, the roof garden in the civil engineer building has been the best!
The Boy turns 19 tomorrow - first time weâll not be there
We bought him a bike and are sending a charcuterie platter â all picked up and facilitated by the ever-more-awesome girlfriend.
Hi to you all awesome parents! You all have been very helpful with my queries related to my kid and even my questions about writing a novel.
Now that I have found writing so joyful and have done publishing my first book of trilogy and second one is ready to be published in Jan 2024.
I got bitten by wanting to learn Artificial Intelligence bug!
I want to ask your help to do so. The good thing is though I am in medical field I have several family members who are in computer field. Software development. So I took their advice and enrolled in classes in Udemy and watched for YouTube videos. I have loved everything so far.
My goal is to get comfortable in AI to be able to solve real world problems in medical field where I have 22 yrs of experience.
I also asked Chat gpt which actually gave me wonderful suggestions and also wished me good luckđ€Ł
Now letâs see what you my fellow parents and human beings suggest?
âAbstractâWe introduce the Granite series of decoder-only foun- dation models for generative artificial intelligence (AI) tasks that are ready for enterprise use. We report on the architecture, capabilities, underlying data and data governance, training al- gorithms, compute infrastructure, energy and carbon footprint, testing and evaluation, socio-technical harms and mitigations, and usage policies.
Index Termsâfoundation model, large language model, gener- ative AI, data governance, contrastive fine-tuning, energy con- sumption, evaluation, socio-technical harms, usage governance, transparent documentation
I. INTRODUCTION
IN this technical report, we present the Granite series of decoder-only foundation models for generative artificial intelligence (AI) tasks. The first in this series, granite.13b, is an English-only large language model (LLM). Using self- supervised learning, this base model has been trained on an IBM-curated pre-training dataset described in Section II. IBM relies on its internal end-to-end data and AI model lifecycle governance process and capabilities to develop enterprise- grade foundation models and is making similar capabilities available to customers of its watsonx platform.
The first versions (v1) of granite.13b models leveraged a base model trained on 1 trillion tokens. The second version of the granite.13b models leverages an updated base model trained on 2.5T trillion tokens. In both versions, the base model is the jumping-off point for two variants: granite.13b.instruct and granite.13b.chat. Granite.13b.instruct has undergone su- pervised fine-tuning to enable better instruction following [1] so that the model can be used to complete enterprise tasks via prompt engineering. Granite.13b.chat benefits from novel alignment methods to further improve the modelâs quality of generation, mitigate certain notions of harms, and encourage its outputs to follow certain social norms and have some notion of helpfulness [2]â[4]. We emphasize that these notions are not universal and discuss this point to a greater extent in Section VI on socio-technical harms and risks.â
Be wary of ChatGPT. It spits back authentic and authoritative-sounding paragraphs, but much of it can be total bs. Itâs only as good as the information itâs scraping, and we all know how reliable the internet is these days, right?
I just received an application from someone who wants to work for me. The cover letter was complete BS with phrases pulled from my companyâs website, the job listing, etc. Not sure if it was ChatGPT, but it looked like it.
