argumate:

nostalgebraist:

nostalgebraist:

Reading up on the Perceptrons controversy.  It seems just totally petty and anti-intellectual – one group of researchers think another group’s approach is unpromising and getting too much hype and funding, so they write a book actively trying to “take down” that approach, even though all they really have are proofs of well-known limitations the other group is already moving beyond

– and they spin it in the community so that it does get seen as a definitive takedown, which was the point of writing the book, to take them down

There is a lot of this kind of think in academia, I think, and it isn’t unrelated to the production of knowledge, but it’s related only in a weird indirect way

Oh and then later everything surrounding the word “backpropagation” – now the neural net people want to say that in practice gradient descent works fine despite the lack of theoretical guarantees, but instead of just saying that, they give gradient descent a fancy new name, so it looks superficially as if they have defeated the other guys with a new specific innovation

science! inevitable progress in hindsight, but complete lunacy at any given time.

The second part of this old post is embarrassing because no, backprop is not just another name for doing gradient descent, it’s a fast algorithm for gradient descent, smh @ old me

(via argumate)

nostalgebraist:

Chapter 6 of Almost Nowhere is up here.

Figure I’d left you guys hanging long enough.

Morning reblog

Chapter 6 of Almost Nowhere is up here.

Figure I’d left you guys hanging long enough.

sadoeconomist:

taahko:

“jedi dont have sex” is a lie the entire order has told to yoda for 900 years bc they don’t want him to feel bad that hes not getting any

Century 1: ‘That padawan Yoda is a huge whiny incel and won’t shut up about it’

Century 2: ‘Yoda’s still going on about that? Tell him that Jedi don’t have sex lmao’

Century 3: ‘Yoda’s still going around telling people Jedi don’t have sex, no one has been able to convince him that it was just a joke, oh well what can you do’

Century 4: ‘Why is Yoda saying Jedi don’t have sex? I can’t find anything about that in any of the texts’

Century 5: ‘When Master Yoda says Jedi don’t have sex he must mean it’s a mystery meant to be contemplated, like the sound of one hand clapping’

Century 6: ‘The old saying that Jedi don’t have sex that Master Yoda taught us is just metaphorical, don’t take it too literally’

Century 7: ‘The rule about Jedi not having sex is ancient but it’s never really been enforced, only the most pious Jedi like Master Yoda follow it’

Century 8: ‘Jedi don’t have sex, that’s always been the rule, that’s what Master Yoda said and he’s been around forever’

Century 9: ‘Jedi not only don’t have sex but they must have no emotional attachments at all, Master Yoda has taught many generations of Jedi this central principle of the Jedi Order’

Of course, nobody ever really taught Yoda what sex even was, he asked another Jedi once what sex was and they said it was like when people sing a beautiful song of love to each other

So once, after an epic lightsaber duel when he had a Sith Lord cornered and disarmed and at his mercy, he said ‘Let you go, I will, but first! Tell me the sex song, must you!’ And the Sith Lord had no idea what he was talking about, and then Yoda lost his patience and screamed ‘Sing! SING YOU WILL OR DIE YOU WILL! Know the song I must! SO SEX I CAN HAVE! Nine hundred years old will I reach! Just once, the rules I can be allowed to break! HAVE SEX, BEFORE I DIE, MASTER YODA WILL!’

And so with Yoda’s lightsaber to his throat the Sith Lord, trying to save his life, sang the first thing he could think of: ‘rockin’…rockin’ and rollin’…down to the beach, I’m strollin’…’

(via sadoeconomist)

raginrayguns:

while I dont believe in satan, I do believe in omnipresent intelligent nonhumans working hard to get me to give into self-destructive vices (corporations). I complained to S that I had to keep deleting tinder and okcupid because it was hard to control how much time I spend on them. I said I’d start using dating apps again when someone makes one that isn’t calculated to be as addictive as possible. She laughed and said nobody wants to make an app like that.

Taibbi: Horse sperm, yeah, exactly.

Gillespie: That’s pretty much in the past for Matt Taibbi, you think?

Taibbi: Absolutely. I am 47 years old. I have three kids.

Gillespie: And horse semen is very difficult to get, even in New York.

Taibbi: Even in New York.

I was just re-reading the extant parts of Almost Nowhere tonight, and thinking excitedly (as one does) about how people were going to react to the next few chapters, and then realizing that I’ve always had it in the back of my mind as a project I would get back to any day now – tomorrow! next week! soon! – and yet it’s been nearly a year since it was updated, and I’m going to have less time than ever to work on it for the foreseeable future, and those “next few chapters” will never arrive at this rate

Of course, free time has never been the limiting factor – I had plenty of other things to I was supposed to be doing, back when I wrote the stuff I did finish – and if I really want to keep going, which I do, it’s always possible if I just make it happen

I have various hypotheses about why I can’t just write the way I used to, but none of them are nearly as plausible as the one that says “once you say ‘I can’t just write the way I used to,’ it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy”