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It looks promising! Minor point, a requirements.txt file or something would be convenient to get started quickly.
We didn't expect the draft to get this much attention, frankly!
It's a neat idea to write the entire book as notebooks - so you can have run-able code right in line. Definitely excited to check this out; thanks Jeremy and Sylvain!
It always amazes me how bad some technical people is at basic promotion: What is Fastai? Why do I need it? Something as basic as an elevator speech that introduces your product in your github page and book intro can mean 10x or 100x more sales. If you force people into having to search it for you, you have already lost most of them. For this author it is as you already know everything about Fastai, but if you did, yo…
By contrast, Jeremy and team have proven that "build it and they will come" is not dead. They built high quality courses and quickly became authoritative with no marketing and with full transparency and openness in everything they do.
This book draft looks great. Everyone else is talking about "democratising AI" - this is actually doing it.
It's a neat idea to write the entire book as notebooks - so you can have run-able code right in line. Definitely excited to check this out; thanks Jeremy and Sylvain!
These sorts of books have existed since the dawn of notebooks. While I think them useful for demonstrations, I don’t think there is much pedantic value (beyond a more static medium) in all honesty. Well-worked examples a student can consult while attempting to solve problems on their own is still of paramount importance.
It always amazes me how bad some technical people is at basic promotion: What is Fastai? Why do I need it? Something as basic as an elevator speech that introduces your product in your github page and book intro can mean 10x or 100x more sales. If you force people into having to search it for you, you have already lost most of them. For this author it is as you already know everything about Fastai, but if you did, yo…
It's sad to see this perspective. With the AI hype, there are so many people spending all their time and money on marketing AI materials while their actual product is all smoke and mirrors. By contrast, Jeremy and team have proven that "build it and they will come" is not dead. They built high quality courses and quickly became authoritative with no marketing and with full transparency and openness in everything they…
They don't have access to compute power (GPUs) or bandwidth to download datasets hundreds of gigabytes of data, which they'll find right there, so this should help them since they don't need to have powerful machines or worry about experiment tracking.
We also have a Publish option to make an application from a notebook in one click behind the scenes with training parameters in a form generated automatically, so they can write scripts and instrument model training.
The fast.ai course will also help current or future members, and other students. It's important for us to make it even easier for people to enter the field.
> There are also "agglutinative languages", like Polish, which can add many morphemes together to create very long "words" which include a lot of separate pieces of information. [1] Polish does not work this way. Source: I am Polish. Perhaps jph00 meant Turkish. Issue filed. [1] https://github.com/fastai/fastbook/blob/master/10_nlp.ipynb
Doesn't German work this way?
Wow, Orielly lawyers are determined to screw this up. The thing is GPL v3 licensed which means I can’t copy any of the book code in my closed-source product or competitions or even MIT licensed code. The readme says I cannot make copies of this material but it’s ok to fork. Huh?
No, the readme says you can make copies for personal use. If you want to use code in the book under a non GPL license, then you could just buy the book when it comes out. That doesn't seem like an unreasonable burden. PS: none of this is anything to do with O'Reilly or their lawyers.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are downvoted by fanboys but you are exactly right. I am surrounded by researchers working in DL and I have say at least 40% of them have never heard of FastAI or Jeremy Howard. However folks who are active on Twitter, listening to popular podcasts, popular media, HN etc would be very familiar with name Jeremy Howard and what FastAI is and need no introduction. In research world, an astonishing number of good res…
Fast.ai really democratizes the bleeding edge research for the masses, though, that’s why it’s popular among outcasts and outsiders. In general, I would be more wary of people working within closed environments and organizations than people making all they do public and open to review.
It's a neat idea to write the entire book as notebooks - so you can have run-able code right in line. Definitely excited to check this out; thanks Jeremy and Sylvain!