yomritoyj

ML practice has for the moment far outstripped ML theory. But even if ML theory catches up, the answers to your question will get likely be still dependent on the nature of the process generating the data and hence they would still have to be answered empirically. I see the value of theory more in providing a general conceptual framework. Just as the asymptotic theory of algorithms today cannot tell you which algorithm to use, but gives you some broad guidance.

They are great books about some combinatorial mathematics inspired by programming problems. Not the best investment of time if you want to learn programming itself, because:

1. Most of the time you are not implementing foundational algorithms like sorting or SAT solving. You use mature implementation in libraries.

2. If you are in fact implementing foundational algorithms, then the existing volumes of Knuth cover only a very limited set of problem areas.

3. If you are implementing something in an area covered by Knuth, the books are worth looking into as a reference, but often writing performant and robust code requires considerations not in Knuth. This is because Knuth works with an idealised machine ignoring things like parallelism, memory hierarchy etc. and understandably does not get into software design issues.

If you are going to do it at this level, it already exists as an example (section 8.7) in K & R.

awk, sed etc. belong to the museum, now that we have so many tools and libraries that can handle structured data.

The whole early Unix obsession with plain text files was a step in the wrong direction. One grating holdover of that is the /proc filesystem. Instead of a typed, structured api you get the stuff as text to be parsed, file system trees and data embedded in naming conventions.

I procrastinated on my thesis. I got the usual advice: 'perfect is the enemy of the good', 'just get it written' etc. but it made no difference. With hindsight I now realize that I was working on an unfeasible project with inadequate preparation but did not want to accept that. How do other experienced people, not just your advisor, react to your project? If they are skeptical it may be a worth taking a cold hard look at the entire plan.

I think this is an increasing problem as 'liberalism' becomes the official ideology of the elite, so that everyone pays lip-service to 'non-hierarchical' values and overt displays of power are looked down on. Power struggles and self-aggrandizement then go underground and are covered in extra layers of hypocrisy and doublespeak. Those who don't catch on, lose.

For me Twitter is mainly a substitute to RSS: a central location to consume interesting content from diverse sources. In that role having an algorithmically curated as opposed to a strictly chronological feed is essential. For most people/entities I follow I'm interested in only a fraction of their tweets and I can rely on Twitter to do a good enough job of surfacing them for me. By following about a thousand accounts I can reliably hear about the latest trends in the areas that interest me by spending about half an hour each day.

On the other hand, right now I follow only a few dozen accounts on Mastodon and I'm already drowning in irrelevant posts. It can at best be a glorified group chat.

We live in extraordinary times, standing on the shoulders of the scientific revolution, with gigahertz-gigabyte machines as commonplace and hundreds of years of mathematics ready to be built upon. It is criminal not to be busy.

I agree that most of us can do at most a few hours of intellectually demanding work every day. But to win those few hours of freedom, to gather the preconditions of doing work, to maintain the social organizations necessary for collaboration, and to make the results presentable, can easily eat up a whole day year after year.

This what is so great and yet limiting about SQL. Carefully optimized implementations, but only for a fixed set of built-in functions. Are there any frameworks which allow user-defined functions to gain some of these optimization benefits without exposing the full internals of the data-store implementation to them?