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What I Worked On

paulgraham.com

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Re: What I Worked On

#121

Post by whistle650 »

aborsy wrote: post #95
nmfisher wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There are a lot of things that look incredible, but don’t constitute much progress scientifically. For example, a rocket landing on moon looks incredible. But I don’t think physicists would consider moon landing notable progress. So, with data and compute you could do applications.

This feels like a very sterile view of science and it's actual history and practice. I was recently remembering how Marconi's puzzling success in sending a transatlantic wireless signal stimulated the discovery of the ionosphere.

Re: What I Worked On

#122

Post by xiaolingxiao »

sbierwagen wrote: post #115
xiaolingxiao wrote: post #83

This comment really resonated with me, I found myself in this exact situation at 25, in a "very prestigious and selective place" for AI nonetheless. It took me a couple years to realize the smart people are just playing the game, the unsuspecting losers are "playing it straight" and getting endlessly frustrated. I found my balance by, frankly, taking advantage of a system that is FUBAR. Incidentally, I also took some…

>It took me a couple years to realize the smart people are just playing the game, the unsuspecting losers are "playing it straight" and getting endlessly frustrated. This essay gets linked to a lot on here, but you might be interested in Rao's "Sociopaths/clueless/losers" taxonomy: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...

Yeah I discovered the essay around that time and found it to be true in a deeply unsettling level.

Re: What I Worked On

#123

Post by profsmallpine »

It’s interesting to me to hear about Paul’s 20s and to contrast it to my own. He seemed to have a good grasp of some internal compass - jumping from art school to Interleaf and all of the other twists and turns. I seem to get a path in my mind and then experience the need to not make any changes until that path is finished. There is a certain rigidity that I don’t allow myself to get part way through something, to then evaluate with this new knowledge, and then to iterate on the idea, even if it means a totally new direction. I hope to be more open to some twists in my 30s, staying open to the things that I feel like I need to go try.

Re: What I Worked On

#124

Post by vixen99 »

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…

If I can add to what you’ve written. ‘I have to work really really hard on it’. And that’s the point, isn’t it! 1. Sight-reading is a talent that develops, to one's own astonishment, with intense practice. It really does. The story goes that Liszt sight-read the Grieg Piano concerto but we should not forget that he worked like a dog in his earlier years and then redoubled his efforts at 17 (already with a reputation) when he heard Paganini in Paris for the first time one night after which he took his technique apart and rebuilt it with the result (another level) we know about. 2. Freeman Dyson spent his school holiday from 6am to 10pm, working through 700 problems in Piaggio’s Differential Equations. As with Liszt for music, “I was in love with mathematics and nothing else mattered”. Of course there's such a thing as outstanding talent and genius but amazing things can happen if the focus is on application rather than debating whether one is possessed of these qualities which rarely exist without the former.

Re: What I Worked On

#125

Post by zozbot234 »

nerdponx wrote: post #61
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.

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 looking at how robust SOTA results are achieved. In a way, this means that good (non-"hoax") ML is ultimately a lot more similar to traditional statistics than most practitioners are willing to acknowledge.

Re: What I Worked On

#127

Post by breck »

nostrademons wrote: post #60

This is a good essay. It's interesting to contrast it with some of the psychological/self-help literature around being your "true self", where the true self is fluid and amorphous and avoids being rigidly defined. Or with Drew Houston's commmencement address [1] - "That little voice in my head was telling me where to go, and the whole time I was telling it to shut up so I could get back to work. Sometimes that little…

The world is non linear, with discrete inflection points. Some of those points are outside of your control, but some are points where you made an important decision that correctly anticipated a non linear outcome. All positive non linear outcomes take time to compound, however, hence why you can’t connect the positive dots until enough time has passed to look back.

Re: What I Worked On

#128

Post by ngcc_hk »

zozbot234 wrote: post #27
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…

> 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, very different formats of these ideas are what took root: cloud computing and advanced type systems. The clearest example of this dynamic is probably the "Fifth Generation Computing Systems" initiative, which was described as a "hoax" for a long time but managed t…

And target to play go ... well at least that objective is done.

Re: What I Worked On

#129

Post by breck »

The bit about aliens is fascinating. If we’re living in a simulation Lisp seems like the best bet to research that thread. Like playing with chemicals or physics models were in prior eras.

Re: What I Worked On

#130

Post by desireco42 »

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 they are good kids, but they would spend all day playing Roblox and watching Youtube.

Not sure if you have some insights that can help me be better parent and support them better.

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