Colin Zhou

SWE @ / CS @UofIllinois / love stocks, speedcubing, piano, coding! 🇺🇸🇺🇸

[John Ternus @johnternus]

The way Steve taught us to care about every detail, every experience, every person, still guides our work today. Forever grateful.

[Colin Zhou @ColinZhouUSA]

@joannejang "you are absolutely right!"

[Colin Zhou @ColinZhouUSA]

@shiyi_peng @ycombinator i've been building a very helpful hermes stock research bot! Nice to meet you!

[Colin Zhou @ColinZhouUSA]

As someone who grew up with a scarcity mindset, I had second thoughts of spending 4.5k on a DGX Spark.

The past few days have reminded me to not be hesitant about a good purchase if it's worth it.

Good luck to y'all out there.

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

We'll be spending a lot more time trying to understand the outputs of language models. A few thoughts, tips & tricks:

Writing. Something I've had success with: Ask your LLM to explain something in ASD-STE100, it's a controlled language specification originally developed for aerospace maintenance documentation. LLMs well-versed in this language and it comes with heavy constraints on clean writing style that I often find a lot more readable. Sometimes I've tried to soften it a bit e.g. ask for "80% of the way to ASD-STE100" because the spec is quite stringent. But even better:

Diagrams / images. Instead of writing, ask your LLM to create a diagram. These can be a lot easier to process, parse, and understand. But even better:

Web pages. Ask for output "in HTML" to get a beautiful, interactive webpage. LLMs are getting really good at frontend and can create beautiful experiences, animations, etc. But even better:

Explainer videos. The output format I am most bullish on is fully custom / bespoke explainer videos generated on any arbitrary topic. Experiment with things like "Create a 3b1b style video explainer on X. Use my ElevenLabs API key for audio narration". (you'd need an API key for the latter or you can ask your LLM to find you decent free alternatives that use your local compute). This is actually starting to work!

In summary:
- As LLMs get better, they will do more and more of the legwork autonomously, and a lot more of our work will rise up the abstractions into oversight and understanding.
- Luckily, LLMs can help here too because as intelligence and code are increasingly abundant, you can ask for large, custom, discardable software artifacts (e.g. web apps, video explainers) that would have never made sense to create before. Push the boundaries here and you'll be surprised.

[Colin Zhou @ColinZhouUSA]

people who make the weights slam on top of each other while using the gym machines are so annoying

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

May Starship have the Mandate of Heaven

[Colin Zhou @ColinZhouUSA]

who decided to make the ask youtube button so big & so close to the X icon in the search bar??

[Jonathan Ho (CSN3RD) @JonathanHoHAX]

25 👑

[Colin Zhou @ColinZhouUSA]

@floguo @newsystems_ aura

[Colin Zhou @ColinZhouUSA]

@lucyjcai add "ex-yc" onto your linkedin

[Colin Zhou @ColinZhouUSA]

@floguo @valiocon did you win?

[RGV Aerial Photography @RGVaerialphotos]

Captured this drone footage yesterday. Alot of activity at the newly acquired 444 acres SpaceX site along Hwy 4 near Starbase.

[Colin Zhou @ColinZhouUSA]

@jeffseibert why is this so relatable

[Colin Zhou @ColinZhouUSA]

@klyap_ amazing progress!

[Colin Zhou @ColinZhouUSA]

@floguo how to solve global warming: change from fahrenheit to celsius

[Colin Zhou @ColinZhouUSA]

https://t.co/TxYcJMQzDy

[Colin Zhou @ColinZhouUSA]

@floguo @tryramp congrats, flora!

[Colin Zhou @ColinZhouUSA]

I wasn't old enough to remember 9/11 so in theory, all of these images and videos are relics of the past without any emotion. It was well into my teenage years that I did research on my own and discovered what happened and how traumatic it was for the land I grew up in.

But thank you to everyone for their determination in preserving the memories of so many who lost their lives on this tragic day. I am grateful for being educated on this subject.

Thank you to all the firefighters who selflessly rushed into danger knowing they possibly were dead men walking through every tick of the clock.

Even though the old America changed forever that day, it doesn't take away from the pain of people who lost their loved ones. Please direct all of your attention to them on this somber anniversary.

From a post 9/11 baby, salute NYC and God Bless America 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸
#911Remembrance #September11

[John Ternus @johnternus]

iPhone Duo
iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max
Apple Watch Series 12 and Apple Watch Ultra 4
AirPods 5

… and Joz