gyom

Same here. It's a bunch of facts, some context, and more of a rant about the question than any attempt at answering the question.

You could even write an article asking why that original article was even written, and it might make for more interesting content.

You're right that this is spectacularly wrong.

I dare not even read the rest of the page just in case my brain accidentally absorbs other bad information like that paragraph about GANs.

Part of the cleverness of GANs was to have found a way to train a neural network that generates data without explicitly modeling the probability density.

In a stats textbook, when you know that your training data comes from a normal distribution, you can maximize the MLE wrt the parameters, and then use that for sampling. That's basic theory.

In practice, it was very hard to learn a good pdf for experimental data when you had a training set of images. GANs provided a way to bypass this.

Of course, people could have said "hey let's generate samples without maximizing a loglikelihood first", but they didn't know how to do it properly, how to train the network in any other way besides minimizing cross-entropy (which is equivalent to maximizing loglikelihood).

Then GANs actually provided a new loss function that could be trained. Total paradigm shift!

I also found that the best system is having the first layer of folder organization be "which period of my time is this from?".

Conceptually, it's easier to think of "music from high school" than about the specific mix of subgenres from my playlist back then. Same for documents that I saved. Those ICQ logs from high school are there. They don't belong in the same folder as the stuff I wrote yesterday, even though they could be of a similar nature.

You're setting a very high bar there, and then claiming that losing access to your gmail account isn't worse than that therefore it's not life changing.

Email ends up being the form of online identity for a lot of people, myself included, so that almost every service that I sign for has my email address as ID. If that email address isn't the ID, it's the preferred way of resetting passwords. I wouldn't be super happy about Facebook being my online ID, nor my cell phone number (see SIM swapping problems).

It's life changing in the same way that losing all your personal documents in a fire sets you up accounting nightmares. Moreover, you're making very light a situation about losing all your pictures. I'm not talking about food pictures, but there's plenty of "me" that's contained in being able to look at pictures of important events of my life (which is why I don't rely only on cloud backups for that).

I don't know what's "life changing" to you, then.

I'm sorry that that was your PhD experience. It's a pity that enthusiastic students end up there, often because they're not given the right environment to thrive (e.g. a good lab and a supervisor that cares).

There isn't much to say to respond to that, apart that it seems to me that, in a parallel universe, you might have had a more fulfilling experience, or you might have cut your losses and walked away sooner.

That's the cruel aspect of the PhD. It really seems like a lot of important things are outside of one's control, especially when it comes to important factors in mental health. Nobody's starting a PhD with the goal of sinking hours into Reddit and Buffy because they feel awful about their PhD experience.

Well, I guess he stopped doing it at some date before 2007. That's why he told an audience of 500 people about it. He sorta "cashed out" by making it a fun story about him being clever, instead of a last magic trick. He must have simply gotten tired of doing this every day and seeing all those cards in the waste basket (or burning them?).

If he had indeed tried to pull that trick in 2020, a lot of people would have remembered that he said he was setting it up.

I met James Randi around 2007 when he came to campus at UBC to give a talk. He told the following story about a magic trick that he worked on for years, which concerned guessing the timing of his death. I haven't heard him tell that story elsewhere, so now seems like a good time to share it.

He said that for a good number of years, every time before going to bed, he would write on a little card that he predicted he would die that night during his sleep. In the morning, he got up and happily threw away the little card. Every day. For many years. His concept was that, on the rare chance that this actually happened to be last day, people would think that he pulled the ultimate magic trick. People would not suspect that he wrote this on a little card every day because, well, nobody does that.

I have also had bad experiences with "Backup and Sync", which led me to abandon Google Drive right when I was seriously considering ditching Dropbox.

Given Google's reputation to ditch their own products, I guessed this was some side projects that some Googlers did, and it was never in Google's main strategy to allow people to sync their Google Drive to their local machines. Quite the opposite, actually.

My current gripe with Dropbox is that I'd like to basically be able to pay 4x the "Dropbox Plus" cost in order to get 4x the storage (without having to manage 4 separate accounts). Having 2TB isn't enough, but having "infinite" with Dropbox Business certainly is more than I want.

Comment · 7 years ago

Nobody is going for absolute certainty here. That bar is too high in any conversation.

His point was mostly that, way before you achieve the kind of AGI portrayed in fiction, you'll have semi-intelligent interdependent systems that cause a lot of trouble due (like the kind that already happens to a lesser degree). Those are the ones that we should worry about right now.

I have a friend who was participating often in psychology experiments at Stanford, and he became familiar with the whole procedure of letting the subjects believe that they were interacting with another person via a computer, when in fact they were interacting with a program (makes everything more standard and easier to analyse).

One day he participated in this "split or share" kind of experiment, and he was ruthless. Nobody's emotions would be damaged by acting nasty and never sharing with the computer program.

Turns out, it probably was actually a real person who was behind on the other side. He saw some old woman crying, coming out of some adjacent room after the experiment was over.

So, yeah, different social conventions definitely apply.

> Most people I know have moved on from using email for personal communication and only use it for business.

That experience completely differs from mine. Maybe I just prefer email to text or Facebook messages, but the same principle applies to wherever you are writing something to friend or family. Wouldn't you get the same problem, just elsewhere?

Responding to my mother's birthday wishes does seem like it's a different kind of activity than autocompleting C# code, even though both can be executed with autocomplete to get a good valid output.

The point would still stand even if Starbucks was indeed instantaneous. There's is something nice about being able to spend 2-5 minutes to prepare your own coffee. Sometimes you don't want to do it, but I think the point here is that if you have the convenient Starbucks alternative right in your face, you might "accidentally" surrender the pleasure of brewing your own coffee due to your laziness of the moment.

One of the problems with coming up with a good theory is that, at the end of day, we're building a system that's particularly suited for a certain kind of patterns. If you're building a facial-recognition convnet, there is something about the dataset of faces that is going to influence what works and what doesn't.

When you're building digital circuits, they're expected not to care about what the bits mean, which patterns are more likely. It works for all possible inputs, with equal quality.

There are things in common with how you would process faces and how you would recognize other visual objects, and that's why there are design patterns such as "convolutional layers come before fully-connected layers".

In a way, the "no free lunch" theorem says that you are always paying a price when you specialize to a certain kind of patterns. It comes at the detriment to other patterns. So, any kind of stack of theories on ML/DL is going to be incomplete unless you say something about the nature of your data/patterns.

(That doesn't mean that we can't anything useful about DL, but it just puts a certain damper on those efforts.)