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What I Worked On

paulgraham.com

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Re: What I Worked On

#61

Post by nerdponx »

sdevonoes wrote: post #32
chrisaycock wrote: post #9

> during the first year of grad school I realized that AI, as practiced at the time, was a hoax. I had a similar realization during grad school about a lot of the popular topics at the time (early 2000s). I even used to call them "the hoaxes of computer science". Things like grid computing or formal methods of software engineering had a lot of resources behind them, but nobody was able to use the results. Instead, ve…

Funny because I do have the same feeling these days: that ML is a hoax. Even funnier: I do have a master's degree in ML.

You can't have a master's in ML and seriously argue this.

It doesn't even make sense, it's like saying marijuana is a hoax because my uncle smokes pot and still got cancer.

Here are some alternative statements that make more sense (and contain more truth):

* There is a lot of snake oil and outright fraud being sold to unwitting managers.

* There is a lot of empty hype being fed to general public through the pop sci media and mainstream news.

* Deep learning specifically has not borne fruit in all (edit: or even most) problem domains.

* Lack of good quality data (and qualified people to analyze it) is a bigger problem than lack of advanced models and computing power.

Re: What I Worked On

#62

Post by earthscienceman »

dekhn wrote: post #41
chrisaycock wrote: post #9

> during the first year of grad school I realized that AI, as practiced at the time, was a hoax. I had a similar realization during grad school about a lot of the popular topics at the time (early 2000s). I even used to call them "the hoaxes of computer science". Things like grid computing or formal methods of software engineering had a lot of resources behind them, but nobody was able to use the results. Instead, ve…

I don't agree about grid computing. Many scientists got work done with it on aggregations of clusters. LIGO used pyGlobus to transfer large amounts of scientific data.

Absolutely. Things that were commercial failures were often huge successes in the scientific community. If you don't see why something is popular it's probably not because it's useless, it's probably because you aren't the intended user. Which is fine but a very different conclusion.

Re: What I Worked On

#63

Post by kenjackson »

ISL wrote: post #29
DC1350 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know he does now but I’m talking about the earlier sections of the essay. He mentions taking time off from art school to work because he needed more money. What’s interesting to me is how he just decided to go to art school, study philosophy, or work on projects that had nothing to do with his career when he wasn’t already financially secure. The common narrative around really successful people is that they work re…

One can certainly suggest survivorship bias in this sort of situation. Another commonality I've found with very-successful people: they work really hard, but they might not be aware that they're working much harder than others. Two anecdotes: 1) A pianist in my high school was Eastman or Julliard-bound. One day, I watched her sight-read a new piece. It was beautiful. As someone who struggled mightily sight-reading si…

And some successful people pride themselves on how hard they work. There's a story that Jay Williams tells about Kobe Bryant. Jay is playing Kobe the next day and they both happen to end up in the same gym the day before. When Jay gets to the gym Kobe is already there working out. Jay works hard and sees Kobe is still there. Jay eventually wraps it up, while he sees Kobe still working out that evening.

The next day Kobe has a great game, and after the game Jay asks Kobe something like, "Do you work out that long all the time?" (can't remember the exact question) -- to which Kobe says, "I just wanted to let you know that no matter how hard you work, I'll always outwork you".

For a lot of successful people their joy is their work and they take pride in being great, but still working harder than everyone else.

Re: What I Worked On

#64

Post by earthscienceman »

alberth wrote: post #38

How does PG recall so much about college. I was a computer science major as well. I made good grades. I went to university similar to PGs. I’m younger than PG and it wouldn’t surprise me if I’ve forgotten that I even took a particular class, let alone recall the professor and certainly don’t recall the small details described by PG. Just curious if I’m the only person who can’t recall as vividly courses as PG can.

Sounds like you need to start writing/journalling/blogging. It's amazing how it shapes your brain's ability to remember events.

Re: What I Worked On

#65

Post by zozbot234 »

ve55 wrote: post #57
sdevonoes wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny because I do have the same feeling these days: that ML is a hoax. Even funnier: I do have a master's degree in ML.

Something can be both legitimately revolutionary/interesting, but also significantly over-hyped and misrepresented, often with strong for-profit incentives. Some recent good examples of this include progress in cryptocurrencies, decentralization, and ML/AI.

Sure, but many people disagree that ML itself is revolutionary. The basics of it were known (referred to, quite appropriately, as 'data mining') as early as the 1990s and perhaps earlier. We've added a smattering of new techniques since then, and compute power has been expanded via GPGPU, but there was no "revolutionary" shift in the field. Even multi-layer ("deep") neural networks are very old tech.

Re: What I Worked On

#66

Post by taxcoder »

myWindoonn wrote: post #28
sillysaurusx wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eyeroll. Try a more substantive comment and we’ll talk. Clojure in particular has nothing like what bel has. No program does. I don’t claim it’s novel, I claim it’s a simple solution to a hard problem. Possibly the simplest.

You first. Bel claims to do what Kernel does (metacircularity with everything first-class) but isn't open-source, doesn't have a solid whitepaper detailing its theory and practice, and is clearly just a rich dude spending his unlimited time on fun things.

Unlimited time? Do tell! How do I unlock this super power? Even when I have taken several months off there was always more to learn than time allowed. One's time does not scale at the same rate as his money.

Re: What I Worked On

#67

Post by pyb »

judofyr wrote: post #4

> Working on Bel was hard but satisfying. I worked on it so intensively that at any given time I had a decent chunk of the code in my head and could write more there. I'll have to say reading this makes me feel a bit sad for pg. It seems that he worked on Bel extensively for four years, and the end result was something which appeared on the front page of Hacker News for one day and then disappeared. I haven't seen it…

As a Lisper, I had not been able to understand what Bel was when it was released, and still do not understand it after reading the shorter explanation in this post.

Does anyone else feel the same ? Perhaps this project just needs to be "sold" a bit better.

Re: What I Worked On

#68

Post by tqi »

DC1350 wrote: post #14

This was a good read. I wish I could understand the mindset of people who can live spontaneously like this. I always plan so far in the future because I feel like it’s way too easy to ruin my life financially. Is this a generational thing? A class difference?

I think class does have a lot to do with it. It's not (just) the obvious reasons, like having access resources to start new ventures or having a backstop in case things don't pan out. For some there is a feeling of responsibility for your family, from the very beginning, that informs every choice you make.

If it were just me, I know I can live cheaply and get by if I have to, and therefore could afford to take on high risk/high upside ventures. However the reality is, in the back of my mind, I'm thinking about whether I can support my parents as they age. Whether I can pay for an occasional vacation for them, or maybe a nicer house. These are things they would NEVER ask for, and I know they can live just as cheaply as me (if not more so). But I can't help feeling like I owe it anyway. And so I take high paying, low variance jobs.

Re: What I Worked On

#69

Post by samcgraw »

> I wrote what beginning writers were supposed to write then, and probably still are: short stories.

This is a bit tangential, but if anyone is finding themselves in a similar spot and looking to sharpen their short story writing, I built a site called Storylocks [1] - it's a collaborative fiction app for aspiring authors to write serialized fiction just for fun.

[1]https://storylocks.com

Re: What I Worked On

#70

Post by nmfisher »

sdevonoes wrote: post #32
chrisaycock wrote: post #9

> during the first year of grad school I realized that AI, as practiced at the time, was a hoax. I had a similar realization during grad school about a lot of the popular topics at the time (early 2000s). I even used to call them "the hoaxes of computer science". Things like grid computing or formal methods of software engineering had a lot of resources behind them, but nobody was able to use the results. Instead, ve…

Funny because I do have the same feeling these days: that ML is a hoax. Even funnier: I do have a master's degree in ML.

Have you used speech recognition (or speech synthesis) lately? It's incredible, leaps and bounds ahead of where it was a decade ago.

Not everything in ML is as rosy as the papers make it out to be, but to call it a "hoax" is going way too far.

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