Chapter 33: A Divine Physician Indeed!

A week passed, and the start of the semester arrived quickly. Zhou Yun already had a plan regarding the air conditioning fees, though it would take some time to implement.

Graduate school starts a bit later than undergraduate programs, so by the time the new graduate students arrived on campus, the undergraduates were already visible on the athletic field undergoing military training.

One has to admit, there is a strange sense of satisfaction in watching the young men and women drenched in sweat under the scorching sun while taking a refreshing sip of milk tea.

Graduate students are exempt from military training—one of the few perks of being a grad student. Of course, for some who join their research groups early, it might actually be less grueling than military training.

However, that certainly doesn't apply to everyone. At the very least, Zhou Yun felt that his time as an early-joiner had been quite pleasant; he had already published one NeurIPS paper, was preparing another for submission to ICLR, and had managed to pick up a project along the way.

His advisor and fellow lab mates were all excellent. The computer at his workstation was top-of-the-line, so he never had to worry about resources for experiments. He even had time to exercise and pursue his own interests.

Reflecting on his life over the past few months and comparing it to his past life, he couldn't help but sigh. While his own talent had played a "tiny" role, choosing a good advisor was truly paramount.

He had no doubt that if he had ended up with some of the other advisors in the department, he might not have been able to publish even a single paper. After all, without a graphics card, no matter how much of a genius you are, you can't use a human brain as a GPU, can you?

Furthermore, some advisors loved treating first-year grad students like pack animals. Time-consuming and laborious tasks like data annotation were basically dumped on the students who joined before the semester even started—it was pure modern-day slavery, often sugar-coated with phrases like, "This is for your own good; it’s meant to build your character."

In the last couple of days, the other two first-year students had arrived. Incidentally, perhaps because he had recruited Zhou Yun, Professor Deng’s standards had been raised to an unattainable height, and he had very generously gifted his final remaining quota to another professor.

Consequently, there were only three new students in their group this year, exactly half the number of the previous year.

"Gaia! Why is it throwing an error again?!" Zhou Yun, who was sitting at his desk writing code, was startled by a sudden wail from across the lab.

He looked up to see Chang Chengxuan, one of the first-year peers.

"What's going on?" Qiu Yan, who had been napping at his desk, was jolted awake. He rubbed his sleepy eyes and looked up, dazed, with clear red marks from his desk surface still pressed into his forehead.

Chang Chengxuan looked utterly defeated, running his hands through his already messy hair. "Senior... I think I'm done for. I've been trying to configure this damn environment for two days, and it's still throwing errors."

With the two new students arriving, Professor Deng had provided each with a computer, though the specs weren't as high as Zhou Yun's, and they only had one monitor.

The first thing to do with a new computer is always setting up the environment. Those who know, know—when it goes smoothly, it's effortless, but when it doesn't, it’s a living nightmare.

Clearly, things were not going well for him.

"What's the situation? Let me take a look," Qiu Yan said, putting on his glasses and walking over to Chang Chengxuan.

"Professor Deng found an old open-source project and asked me to replicate it locally to see how it runs. I found the code on GitHub," Chang explained.

He paused and sighed. "The README is detailed enough, but I don't even know what ancient era this code is from. Most of the dependency versions are obsolete! I had no choice but to install them, but then either they conflicted or I couldn't find the specific version. I finally bit the bullet and cobbled the environment together, but the moment I ran it..."

He pointed to the latest line of red error text in the terminal: "ImportError: cannot import name 'QuantStub' from 'torch.quantization'."

"I checked the documentation, and this module was renamed after version 1.3, but the PyTorch version required by the README is 1.2!"

"1.2? That is indeed very old."

"Exactly! So I installed a version above 1.3, but then the CUDA version didn't match. I had to look up tutorials online to change the CUDA version, and now it's throwing another error." His resentment grew with every word.

Shao Shi, standing nearby, looked at him with sympathy. "That’s brutal. Good luck. My project is going pretty well; I got the environment set up yesterday."

Chang Chengxuan rolled his eyes. "That must be nice."

Qiu Yan shook his head. "Junior, it's not that I don't want to help, but if it were any other issue, fine. But you know how CUDA is—it’s a real headache. I’ve forgotten how I handled it myself back then. But there should be tutorials online; you'll definitely be able to solve it if you look."

He let out a yawn and went back to his desk to continue his nap.

"I'll send you a link. It might be helpful," Zhou Yun said with a smile.

"Really?"

He trusted whatever Zhou Yun said. Although they hadn't interacted in person for long, through several months of online group meetings, he could tell that Zhou Yun was even more capable than the second and third-year seniors. He was a gold-plated thigh to cling to!

"Sent. This is some stuff I compiled myself. I posted it on GitHub when I was bored. It has some methods for fixing CUDA issues that I've personally tested. It should be useful."

Chang Chengxuan quickly clicked the link.

The directory was very clear: how to use GitHub, how to install Anaconda, how to resolve CUDA version issues, and so on. Any problem a novice graduate student might encounter was explained there.

When he clicked into the directory for resolving CUDA issues, Chang Chengxuan was stunned.

It wasn't just text; there were images too. He scratched his head. Did Zhou Yun really have that much free time? Everyone knew that dealing with images on GitHub was a hassle, let alone the time it must have taken to write all that text.

He quickly found the problem he was currently facing and tried the solution provided.

"Holy cow! You're a miracle worker!"

The screen was finally free of errors.

"When did you write all of this? This must have taken a lot of time, right?"

"Actually, it's not too bad. I just wrote a bit here and there when I was bored waiting for experiments to run. It didn't really take much time."

"Amazing, just amazing!" At this point, only those two words could express the shock in his heart.

"Is it really that good?" Shao Shi, nearby, looked over with curiosity.

"It's incredible. It's not just about environment configuration; it also covers how to find literature and how to assess the quality of papers. It wouldn't be an exaggeration to call it a survival guide for new graduate students."

His words piqued the interest of the other seniors as well.

"Why don't you share it in the group chat?"

Chang Chengxuan looked at Zhou Yun inquiringly. "Should I send it?" After all, it wasn't his work, so he had to ask for the owner's permission.

"Go ahead. I set it to public on GitHub specifically for others to see."

Zhou Yun's original intention in writing it was to help out new students who hadn't found their footing yet. Naturally, he wouldn't hide it; the more people he could help, the happier he would be.