[quadcore]

convolutional network to pilot a simulated car on the GPU

Seems silly enough to get you somewhere cool. Though the best pass is recommendation. Impress your colleagues so bad, they will recommend you somewhere one day.

than for impactful work at my actual job

Oh you have to fight hard to get one of those. You cant just do what you're told. Ive got a cool story to tell from my time at amazon but I fought heroically to get it (I was younger though).

I guess hiring is just incredibly noisy

Careful what you believe because your belief becomes your reality.

If you want to be great, you cant just act and think like anybody else. Work on yourself and be great. Get the mindset first.

"life has strange ways"

[WinLychee]

This is honestly kind of motivational, thank you. Currently building a GPU rig to get back into deep learning, I want to hack on the open-source end of AI efforts, and we'll see what comes of it.