241–250 of 421 posts
What struck me most about this essay is the privilege required to make it all possible. From educational institution to educational institution changing focus and whimsically studying other fields without much care for how to make a living or how it all would be paid for. Perhaps just omitted from the story because it wasn't relevant or doesn't need explaining. Kids these days sure don't have it so lucky, and if they…
So a weird thing is happening today. When I was a kid, like Paul, I had to beg my parents to get me a computer ie. spend money on it. Once I got it, I couldn't stop using it and hacking and figuring things out. Kids these days... :) have everything, I made sure my kids have all good equipment, they have good instruction but they are kind of not interested it all. If they do something, this is more to please me, as th…
Another commenter already identified the meat of the problem; you were restricted access to computers, whereas your children are not. Here is an article about that exact conundrum, on the concept of "antagonistic learning": https://medium.com/@ThingMaker/educ-103-antagonistic-learnin... If you DM me, I will be happy to send you a list of similar essays that explore the concept of learning and teaching and why it's do…
Exactly when I was thinking about that.
> When I came back to visit for a project later on, someone told me about a new thing called HTML, which was, as he described it, a derivative of SGML. Markup language enthusiasts were an occupational hazard at Interleaf and I ignored him, but this HTML thing later became a big part of my life. This is hilarious writing!
I did my time with that, and happy to leave it behind.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 m…
> Lack of good quality data (and qualified people to analyze it) is a bigger problem than lack of advanced models and computing power.' There's plenty of data and compute power, but what's often lacking in the ML field is precisely models that reflect reasonable priors for one's given use case. Good feature engineering (often relying on domain experts) is similarly underrated. You see this again and again when lookin…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, and I tell you very few if any. If you don’t believe an anonymous person here, see what prominent physicists say clearly on this topic, e.g., Steven Weinberg. This is not to dismiss experimental research which is quite important, but to distinguish (experimental or theoretical) science from product development.
Why don't we see what he says? In https://www.thespacereview.com/article/1037/1 you'll find that he is very critical of manned spaceflight in general, but about Apollo he says, "No, at the time of Apollo, the astronauts did do some useful things. They brought back Lunar samples. They placed a laser reflector on the Moon that has been used ever since to monitor the motion of the Moon with incredible accuracy." Earlier…
He mentions one area, but then says, “but actually that could have been done much cheaper using unmanned robots”
I agree costs are issue here; money that could have been better spent.
So a weird thing is happening today. When I was a kid, like Paul, I had to beg my parents to get me a computer ie. spend money on it. Once I got it, I couldn't stop using it and hacking and figuring things out. Kids these days... :) have everything, I made sure my kids have all good equipment, they have good instruction but they are kind of not interested it all. If they do something, this is more to please me, as th…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Another commenter already identified the meat of the problem; you were restricted access to computers, whereas your children are not. Here is an article about that exact conundrum, on the concept of "antagonistic learning": https://medium.com/@ThingMaker/educ-103-antagonistic-learnin... If you DM me, I will be happy to send you a list of similar essays that explore the concept of learning and teaching and why it's do…
Btw, HN doesn't have DMs and your email address isn't public. (It's on my list to make that explicit on the profile page.) So if you want to be contactable, you need to say how in your About field.
So a weird thing is happening today. When I was a kid, like Paul, I had to beg my parents to get me a computer ie. spend money on it. Once I got it, I couldn't stop using it and hacking and figuring things out. Kids these days... :) have everything, I made sure my kids have all good equipment, they have good instruction but they are kind of not interested it all. If they do something, this is more to please me, as th…
I'm not a parent so I can't give concrete advise, just sharing my thoughts.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is absolutely correct, but is sadly the case in a lot of fields. It doesn't mean that the practical results we see (AlphaFold, Imagenet Performance, NLP performance, Robotic control with RL) isn't amazing progress. Luckily due to so many people using ML these days, what's useful vs. fluff gets sorted out over time.
Is AlphaFold a practical result? Winning a competition isn't the same as production use. It would be interesting to read about how it's being used. This is a good list of promising work, but showing practicality would need more explanation.