thomnific

I don't know what to make of this. Honestly, where I'm from (Canada), depending on the circle, it feels like hugs are nearly a social norm, even between people who've just been acquainted.

For myself, I like MacPorts better than Homebrew because in my experience it's subject to less breakage, less flaky interaction with tools like rvm or python, and has a better project philosophy overall. And I personally like that it's not in Ruby but I understand the opposing opinion too ;)

Maybe they were a little rude, but they have a point ... you just went and infringed on the WSJ's copyright just to score internet points.

Just my own opinion, but I wish mods would delete posts that did such things.

This is silly. Blame the third-party providers on this one, for using exchange prices during a holiday when the exchanges are closed ...

Ha, that's fair, I take your point. I was being a little glib. I didn't mean to suggest conscious malice on the barber's part -- only that the barber may be incented to provide more haircuts than are strictly necessary.

Perhaps the analogy works better if the barber is a friendly, honest person, who takes professional umbrage when they see other people with longer hair :)

Perhaps labour economists, demographers, or sociologists?

I don't believe ML researchers are unqualified -- it's more of a potential incentive problem. I don't think it's unreasonable to suggest that people involved with / employed by a technology may have a tendency to exaggerate its benefits.

Ideally I'd trust the numbers here more if there was at least a cross-section of knowledgeable people being surveyed across a few different disciplines (or at least more than one).

I like this, but I feel it's a little optimistic (or pessimistic depending on your view). Isn't asking ML researchers when AI will dominate human performance a bit like asking a barber if you need a haircut?

Hahaha! Ok I can dig that, "learn the SuperHi way" is actually pretty clever. Thanks for explaining your reasoning.

Wow, that's a very cogent and intelligent response.

What does the superhi...way have to do with online learning specifically? Even if you paid a consultant to tell you otherwise, it's still not the greatest name ..

I would echo another comment here and say that it depends. However (speaking from my own perspective) depending on the discipline there's no specific need to do a PhD in order to understand and apply machine learning.

It also depends on what you mean by "advanced degree". I have an undergraduate degree in physics/math and a master's in economics/finance, and I find between those two things I've been able to follow developments in machine learning and also to apply them to my work. In fact, I used to get a bit annoyed with those who would imply that I "must" do a PhD ... I would say that's certainly true if I wanted to invent new estimators etc., but otherwise not so much. A PhD can be great for other reasons but it's not the sort of thing required for actually doing my job.

I agree with you and also with the person you replied to. But more generally -- is it fair to say that cardinality describes size as opposed to quantity? If you go with the quantity concept instead then 1-based numbering makes sense and agrees with ordinary usage.

(Disclaimer: I used to hate 1-based indexing, for reasons similar to what you are saying, but I'm brainwashed by R these days and now rather like it.)

Heh, fair enough and thank you, good to know :) Maybe in another year or two my frustration will have abated somewhat. Don't get me wrong, I think it's great that the devs recognized using /usr/local/bin was a bad decision (even if they were kind of forced to because of Apple's SIP).

However -- I just remember, when Homebrew was getting started, all the supercilious (dare I say arrogant?) advice in the docs ... oh, just install to /usr/local, "seriously", etc. (Looking for a reference in archive.org right now ...) Even their whole "Macports driving you to drink?" thing rubbed me the wrong way -- maybe I'm humour-deficient, but I think to criticize another project when your alternative isn't clearly better is just bad taste.

That being said, I am genuinely curious: is there any one awesome thing is that Homebrew does that Macports can't do? Or better, what kind of problems arise from using Macports? I recognize that packaging in Ruby is probably more convenient than in TCL, but other than that? It seems to me that Homebrew is just getting closer to what Macports did (correctly) in the first place. The only way Macports has ever inconvenienced me is requiring a fresh install from time to time when Apple updates their OS, which (for my use case) is minor.

Ugh, ugh, ugh. I just tried Homebrew for the third time the other day and it made a complete mess of my /usr/local/bin and also screwed up my install of rvm ... never again will I give it a chance. Sorry, but IMO Homebrew is crufty, opinionated software with poor separation of concerns. Macports is the (objectively?) better choice for my needs.

I still use MacPorts and I am quite happy with it -- although I've tried to switch away a couple of times, I can't bring myself to uninstall a piece of software that's worked so reliably and faithfully for me over the years.

Maybe it's just that Homebrew turned me off right away. Back in the bad old days, when the Python 2/3 split was more serious than it is now, I had a heck of a time trying to get pandas and scipy running with Homebrew. I haven't given it a try lately so perhaps things are better now.

(I am probably also the kind of person where all the hectoring the Homebrew docs would do about installing to /usr/local eventually got on my nerves ... )

That being said, I don't use MacPorts versions of things like TeX or Ruby (I prefer MacTeX and plain old rvm).