u/empirical-sadboy

Just (re-)watching 'San Francisco Streets' from 2 years ago, and at about 11-11:30, there is a shot which I'm 99% sure is Vancouver British Columbia, not San Francisco. But nothing about the context of the video would suggest that the footage was not San Francisco itself.

Wondering if anyone else has noticed anything like this.

Now I'm watching the video on Baltimore and questioning whether all the b-roll I'm seeing is actually from there, but I'm not familiar with the East Coast.

I want to do proper controlled experiments and use econometric methods with observational data to answer causal research questions.

Is this common anywhere in Quant UXR outside of big tech?

Is there another role better-suited to this goal?

For those with the experience working on "traditional" digital products and LLM-based chatbot tools, how has working on the latter been distinct?

Do you hit different roadblocks and use different methods?

Is the way you measure success different?

Does your data/engineering team do fine-tuning of local models or do you use APIs with minimal customization outside of prompt engineering?

Do you have any input over how the AI model is trained or evaluated prior to user interactions?

I've seen several large financial organizations (e.g., fidelity, vanguard) hiring "Behavioral Scientists" and I'm wondering how this is distinct from Quant UX.

Does anyone have a good sense of the distinction?

I am thinking specifically of business roles, and not the occasional "behavioral scientist" roles you will see for things like counseling or working with youth.

Hey ya'll,

I'm an ex-cognitive scientist turned NLP Data Scientist by day, and science fiction author by night.

I want to bring fictional characters in my prose to life with Local LLMs, and I'm looking for the best resources out there for doing this kind of work (datasets, models, libraries, common patterns, etc.). Could you help me out?

For context, I recently got a 64GB Mac Mini for this and other Local LLM side-projects, and my work pays for about $750 USD of LLM API tokens for personal use per year I could use to create my own training data. I work with BERT & GPT-style models at work, and I've done some Local LLM work on my MacBook with >8B models (mostly just basic vector-database-based RAG for question-answering and summarization over PDFs). I also have detailed character notes for persona prompting as well as world-building notes for RAG-based pipelines.

I would like to go beyond persona prompting and RAG, though. I've been reading mechanistic interpretability / steering research for the last few months, and am very interested in using these methods to more precisely control character behavior and personality. So anything in this space specifically would be very appreciated.

Cheers!

TL;DR - Looking for for resources on using LLMs in fiction, specifically using LLMs as fictional characters/NPCs. Particularly interested in applying mechanistic interpretability / steering methods on top of persona prompting and RAG.

I've vibe coded an app over several months very carefully, paying lots of attention to security and adherence to industry best practices and norms. But I'm not a dev, I'm a vibe coder.

I need a real dev/engineer to evaluate, and make the necessary changes. Maybe they tell me it's a pile of crap, too, and needs to be built ground up by them or another dev.

Is there a company that offers this specifically? I know I can hire anyone on contract, but I'm wondering if there are any companies specializing in this kind of arrangement.

I don't need a full time employee or a rebuild (yet). I just need someone to review, find core issues, and write me a quote for fixing them.