Chris Perry
@thechrisperry
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@GoogleColab Product lead, former data scientist, occasional writer
SF Bay Area
Joined April 2009
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Google is standardizing interview questions (finally?) so I am forced to retire my bootleg interview questions. In honor of the great service they've done over 200+ PM interviews, I'm going to do a thread that I expect no one to read but I have no other way to memorialize them.
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"Describe a product you worked on that didn't succeed as you hoped"
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This is my favorite ice breaker question - for reasons I don't understand at all, almost nobody comes prepared to talk about setbacks. I love having a moment to see how the candidate introspects and how much they learn from the past. 10/10 recommend this to a friend.
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3) the enlightened, who can talk about failures openly, lessons learned, and how they are addressing those going forward. 10/10 I love this.
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Oh, and a big thanks to everyone who has interviewed with me over the years! I always start every interview telling the candidate I want them to succeed and have the best interview they possibly can, and I mean it!
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And I'm always surprised that maybe 50% of people don't realize without prompting that Google doesn't just buy an empty 15gb hard drive every time someone signs up…
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But the real answer hinges on what the candidate wants to use the machine for? Is it for learning about the past? Time/date selector is like the worst design option. A lot of these design explorations end up looking more like a discover/explore feed.
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People mostly break three different ways - 1) the deniers, who describe a failure that's really a success in disguise, 2) the shallow, who can describe a setback but don't have good ideas what happened, and
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This one is quirky and I love it, and I bet I get some hate for this, but it's a great question because you immediately weed out surface-level thinkers: every one of them designs a delorean every time. I freaking love it. Input time/date and boom that's it, what more could it be?
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Okay I need to go back to work. I have a bunch of other less fun questions, but here I mourn the passing of my favorites. At least until I quit and do my own thing, and some future prospective employee digs this up and is super prepared for our interview ;)
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And of course I get to feel morally superior in that we built a time machine into Google Photos (albeit a sparse one!) which is a great analog if people pick up on it.
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"Build a framework for determining the estimated lifetime cost of a new Drive user"
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I've been working in data for almost 20 years and dogmatically subscribe to the following absolute laws of data:
Data insatiability: If you give anyone any data at all they will ask for more. There is no data point that is considered final and satisfactory. Never!
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How much does it cost Google to offer every new Google acct 15gb of memory? I make it clear that I don't want a real answer, I want a framework - how does the candidate break out intractably difficult analytical problems?
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This is also amazing b/c about a third of people cannot think theoretically, they MUST deliver a numeric answer, and it's always 100% nonsensical. "Well 15gb of storage costs about $10 to buy so it must cost Google $10" -> I've never quite gotten that, but it's been close.
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10 years ago today Bump was acquired by Google -- the deal closed late the night before so we all took pics of us drinking our beverage of choice.
Thanks
@dflieb
and
@jakemintz
and andybots for bringing us all together at Bump, and thanks Google for 10 years!
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@EMostaque
GPU go brrrrrrr
We prioritize interactive notebook compute for free of charge tier users; the stable diffusion webUI usage got super big; we can't support the usage growth on our team's budget.
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I recently hired a designer and we're collaborating on a UI refresh for Google Colab. As part of that I've been revisiting my design philosophy after 15 years of PM across startups + Google, from Google Photos to the Assistant to Colab. Here is my design advice to live by:
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There's all sorts of fun nuance in this question to examine, and nobody ever takes the same path, so you can explore the question from many different angles over years.
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@MetaAI
@EMostaque
I'll keep the GPUs warm for when you drop the open source version cc/
@huggingface
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We are in the process of relaxing some of the restrictions Colab has long had around webui usage. You should find Gradio & other webuis a little easier to use.
I hope to make this permanent, just depends on how well we can manage GPU usage on the free tier. Per Gemini:
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Quietly shipped -> just a redirect for now, but we'll work on migrating the service over time.
Our lawyer asked me one day why we didn't have the domain, and I didn't have a great answer so here we are.
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Heads up: Colab is updating runtime pricing soon. All GPUs are getting price cuts (will require fewer compute units). Default CPU runtimes also cheaper. Memory more expensive, so highmem CPU and TPU runtimes will increase slightly in cost.
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Will I be able to concentrate the rest of the day? No. Will there be any more scandalous information available today? Also no. Is it useful for me to scroll through all of the drama posts? Still no. And yet.
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My boss came to me a few months ago and says (roughly) "my 11 year old is learning to program and they can't use Colab, what gives?"
So, boss's 11 year old, this is for you.
🥳 We've launched support for Google children's accounts! Children under the age of 13 are now able to access Colab for learning Python programming and machine learning. 🧐
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A superpower in a bureaucracy is finding the minimal approval path. What is the precise approval mechanism (bug, process, etc.) and who is the person who owns that? Don't widen your scope of approvers - you increase the number of people who will tell you no. Minimize for speed.
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Wish I could give the full dramatic story, but after years of tenuous support, TPUs are back and better than ever in Colab. More coming.
Colab now offers TPU VM runtimes! The TPU runs locally rather than across the network. This improves reliability, debuggability, and enables support for JAX 0.4.x on TPU! Try it out by selecting the "TPU v2" accelerator or try this Gemma + TPU notebook!
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@redordead2389
gonna use that time machine to go back to 2010 when I had a blog and update it
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I am too proud of this pic not to tweet it. Happy freaking birthday America.
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How it started vs. how it's going:
✨ Today we're launching AI coding features to our Pro+ subscribers located in the United States, including natural language to code generation, code completion, and an integrated chatbot. We'd love to hear from you with positive examples of AI coding in Colab: please share! 1/
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@Craciun1904
lol I have personally only been involved in killing one product but I'll never confess
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I've officially done over 200 PM interviews at Google, and at this momentous milestone I've got some thoughts to share with any passing PMs. 1/
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Today Colab restricts non-conforming usage, mostly WebUIs like stable-diffusion-webui or RVC or a host of others. We do this b/c we reserve budget for notebook usage.
Would devs be interested if we exposed ability to host notebooks (& webUIs) & they pay for free tier usage?
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I made a big mistake years ago, screwed up a client deliverable when at a startup. I was hugely embarrassed, distraught. Called my dad, told him how terrible it was.
He, a cardiologist, replied calmly, "well son, I bury my mistakes."
Never been that distraught since.
The most important mantra for anyone working in tech:
Chill the fuck out. Get over yourself. The stakes are not high. Nobody dies. This isn’t a real crisis. It doesn’t matter
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Seeing a shift of the PM role more towards execution - more PMs writing code, more PMs shipping. Guy I work with just sent out a demo. I'm against the doomsayers on this one - I think more and more people will be using code in their core work w/ AI assist. Future is bright.
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@PurzBeats
@EMostaque
no plans to restrict paid plans from using webuis.
re: gradio, we like them a lot, will try to turn a blind eye as long as usage doesn't blow up like stable diffusion webui did
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Been testing this today and I am very excited! We pushed a bit to fix some quality bugs and it's looking great. Not too much longer to wait.
Your new coding assistant is almost here! Check out these new Colab features: natural language to code generation, code completion, and an integrated chatbot. Read all about at authored by
@thechrisperry
and
@shresbm
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When we mentioned this effort to our VP, he laughed and said we're probably the only web service to get to [n] millions of users without having a website.
I mean is a website but still.
Check out - a new site we've just released, where you can track Colab announcements and release notes, find helpful resources, and browse our collection of cool and instructive notebooks!
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Calling all CS Educators and administrative professionals - we want to hear from you about how Colab can work better in your classroom - please fill out this form to share your feedback (and tell us if you want to chat more!):
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Working in AI is just pinging "hey did you see they launched this" back and forth every day until you retire
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@somewheresy
will you submit feedback in product and reference me - I'm sure this is a false positive and we'll get you sorted
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I've wanted to do this for years - our 20% PM was like "why doesn't this exist" and prototyped it and one thing led to another...
Special thanks to the Sheets team for not blocking us when they found out we did it w/o asking.
🔥Your data just got more interactive! 🔥 With our new InteractiveSheet feature you can create and edit Google Sheets from a Colab notebook! 🤯 Perfect for analyzing or editing data in a GUI or just simply exporting outputs to Sheets. Streamline data workflows with
#GoogleSheets
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@paulg
This isn't fair to Michael - I've worked with him, and he's an earnest dude who wants to do right by users. Not the old guard at Twitter. He did the same thing when he joined Roblox--this is exactly the kind of thing he'd do regardless of Elon.
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Colab is updating its paid terms of service to prepare for generative code launches using PALM 2 as mentioned at I/O.
Paid subscribers are getting emails announcing this now. No features have launched yet, this is just a mandatory notice.
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The best way to hack a bureaucracy of kind but busy people is schedule a meeting that you promise to cancel if they do the thing you want beforehand. 10/10 they comply happily.
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Recently I complained to a lead I admire that someone was taking credit for my work.
He listened to my pettiness patiently and replied, "I consider it a success if other people take my ideas, it means I have helped the world even more."
10/10 recommend that attitude.
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I'm hiring PMs to make Gemma successful.
I'd love to work with you if you: 1) have a solid AI/ML bg, 2) love talking to users, 3) love using open models.
The future is bright.
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Respecting constraints is the most underappreciated aspect of product design. Refusing to respect constraints leads to product failures. My favorite personal example of this principle is when I helped launch Google Photos 1/
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Colab is hiring SWEs in Seattle. My DMs are open.
We’re looking for candidates that are passionate about notebooks and interested in at least one of these areas:
Full-stack development
Storage systems
Internal Google development
ML to support developers and data scientists
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@osanseviero
@julien_c
Congratulations!! As you keep growing, let us know if you've got any more requests of Colab.
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@hyperslap_
@EMostaque
no restrictions planned on pro+, burn through your credits as you desire
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@emdashkap
@Ch_JesusChrist
@washingtonpost
Loved your piece, thank you for your research and writing! We bought our first rainbow flag after Holland's musket fire speech (~40 yr member). The schism is real.
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@advadnoun
Free tier will continue to exist, we are committed to supporting folks without access to resources.
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Had too much fun with this, more on the way!
Gemini has launched! We are starting a series of notebooks demonstrating Gemini in Colab, starting with using Sheets and Colab to facilitate creation of a personalized holiday note. Once you have a Gemini API key from Google AI Studio, try it out here:
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2 things from Colab user feedback triage today:
1) I am amazed we live in a world where I can provide multilingual support via Google translate. It blows my mind every time.
2) To the dude who keeps trying to hack feedback submissions with an xss injection: nice try.
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Some Colab housekeeping - just declared bug bankruptcy for all bugs w/ no updates in the last ~3 years at
We review all new bugs, resubmit if I have done you wrong (sorry!)
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Crazy!
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@Lonewolf112062
@Neverduft
It does feel like we should have better ways of broadcasting this - we did ban web ui usage of RVC models for free tier users, under the same rationale as stable-diffusion-webui: we reserve free tier compute for notebooks, not webuis. You can pay and use all you want.
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Data questionability: Any suitably intelligent person can discount, inject doubt in, or discredit any data presented to them. There is no absolute data truth.
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Perf season at Google fast approaches, and I want to take this moment to remind you that you're probably not validating the people you work with enough. Never underestimate the power of telling someone "you're doing good work" 1/
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@BartWronsk
@EMostaque
@GoogleColab
What have we changed for the worse? I can't share numbers, but free tier subsidies per executor is pretty constant. These changes are about giving you more visibility in your compute consumption.
Also, I don't know of a paid offering *more* generous than Colab.
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Once you have a steady revenue stream, *not* shipping is super comfortable for bigtech. No bad press, no regulation, no pesky blemishes on your record. Not shipping is the safe way for bureaucrats to survive and the easiest way to identify them.
@marklucovsky
@ycombinator
The point is that builders are strictly better at that job too, b/c it’s just a means to an end for them, rather than the entire reason for existence.
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@camenduru
@Gradio
@streamlit
@GoogleColab
@Google
@SusanWojcicki
@nealmohan
1 - Gradio and Streamlit were already acquired by Hugging Face and Snowflake respectively
2 - Susan turned us down, though maybe b/c I've only met her while dressed as a cow
3 - I'm in there now - will someone let me out?? These GPUs are hot
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Bravo to all the banned Bitcoin miners in Colab writing their apologetic appeals with ChatGPT but we only accept Bard authorship here.
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@naklecha
@dflieb
@jakemintz
is still up!
it let you share your contact info & photos if you bumped phones with someone else like a fist bump. way ahead of its time, very viral and it led to Google Photos! Listen to Dave here:
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Got another expansion coming soon, stay tuned.
Also heard from a company that wanted to turn off Gemini for Workspace accounts - let me know if this is something you want. Individuals can disable, but they wanted domain-level control which we don't offer now.
We've expanded the availability of ✨GenAI✨ in Colab (in eligible countries):
- AI-enabled code completions are now available for users in our free-of-charge tier!
- Workspace accounts now have access to all GenAI features!
Enjoy Gemini in Colab! 🦾🦾🦾
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@dbonneville
@EMostaque
@GoogleColab
Blame me for the writing. Hard to launch a feature without launching the feature - this is laying the groundwork for increased transparency in your compute quota.
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Just got asked for a PRD for one of our AI coding launches so it could be reviewed by policy - it was featured at I/O, published on the keyword blog, dogfooded to thousands of Googlers and I forgot to write a PRD.
Feels like a sweet small success against the machine.
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@slashML
This was a mistake in the display price which we fixed yesterday. Nobody was charged the mistaken amount.
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"the universe does not want things to be shipped"
this is my new life logan slogan thanks dude.
Congrats to the
@OpenAI
team on o1 and o1-mini, the universe does not want things to be shipped, but you did it.
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Took the fam on an extended road trip through a few national parks and counted license plates. We're up to 47 states - just need Delaware, NH and HI, and honestly the thrill I have thinking about this makes me understand Pokemon Go a lot more.
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Data storytelling: The most underappreciated skill is the ability to tell a narrative story from data. Catch-22 here, as most data narratives are cherry picked, misleading, flawed, and shouldn't be taken at face value.
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Check out Colab in the spotlight
This weekend Google AI gave 60 Minutes an exclusive preview of their text-to-image model (Imagen) and text-to-video model (Phenaki).
Demo below. What do ya'll think?
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Today I had the shame of biking to work and upon arrival discovering I had packed my wife's pants.
@verybperry
drove in to deliver pants to save me from my misery. Thank you :)
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is it against the law for every hotel and restaurant to have a marginally decent website why in the year of our lord 2023 are they like this like I don't need to watch a video about beautiful people walking in a dark hall I want to know your menu asap please I beg of you can anyo
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Was re-planning kids future yesterday and noticed the US govt lets you give your child a million bucks for $6K.
1. Set up 529 savings acct at birth, deposit $6K into SP500.
2. Convert to Roth IRA when child has first job (requires multiple transfers over years, some nuance).
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Just do the work - I find the difference between 10x effectiveness and ineffectiveness is an ability to just dive in and start working vs. deliberating endlessly about how to approach a problem.
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Who wants NVIDIA L4s in Colab and are you okay if I replace V100s with them?
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some days I wonder if my best skill as a bigco PM is being a middle child
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Data strategy: Nobody is "data driven". Data cannot create a strategy, only inform one. "Following the data" is another way of saying "following your interpretation of a limited set of data".
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❤️ to all the now-xooglers impacted by the layoffs. I'm sorry. 🫡
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To whoever submitted this in-product feedback in Colab: "There are cuttlefish that have their own styles too." I thank you. I don't know what to do with your feedback on on pearl luster, but thank you.
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Am more nervous trying to get my wife tswift tickets on presale than I was asking her to marry me
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@CreatePerhaps
@EMostaque
@GoogleColab
No. Free tier stays. We are committed to supporting users without access to resources.
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Data trustability: You cannot trust any data you do not fully know: origin, collection, storage, transformation. There is no trust in data.
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"If you're not working on something 2-3 other teams are working on as well, you're not working on anything important." - so taught me my first eng lead at Google; wise words that I carry to this day 1/
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It's the first peer review cycle since ChatGPT and can I just say my life is so much better now.
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Data motivation: You must never pull a data point for anyone anytime without questioning the motivation. "Why?" is your first and most important question and can save you days of misery.
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Started playing with Stable Diffusion in
@GoogleColab
thanks to
@huggingface
.
It has a hard time with ducks, does better with penguins, and struggles with space. But I got this out of it so I'm happy.
"a penguin riding a saturn V rocket into space"
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But seriously watch the video.
As announced on Google's Keyword blog today, we've expanded access to AI coding features in Colab to users in the free-of-charge tier.
Watch the accompanying video to see the HousaNLP team in Nigeria talk about how Colab has helped their research!
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One thing that was hard for me to get used to at Google was the rules only apply to things that aren't important. "No meeting week" = drop all meetings that aren't important. "Hiring freeze" = only important areas get to hire.
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Find someone who loves you the way Nextdoor loves evading email unsubscribe preferences
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One of the things my late-90s upbringing in Utah did not prepare me for was the complete incompatibility of my slang with the rest of humanity
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Beauty is only skin deep and won't take you very far. Good design exists on a spectrum between utilitarian and beautiful, and while you should seek beauty, it will not save you from your sins.
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