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Comment by ablekh | Hacker News Reader

Kudos to the author on producing an excellent, comprehensive yet readable, post (based on my initial very brief review)! Much appreciated. One thing that jumped at me, though, is the recommendation for the "I want to try deep learning, but I am not serious about it" scenario. Advising to use a physical GPU (unless it's already a part of the system at hand), especially RTX 2060 Super, IMO does not make any sense in this case. Using cheap cloud GPU instances is the optimal way to try deep learning.

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Thank you! You have a good point. I think I would agree with you if somebody already has cloud computing skills, then the cloud is much more powerful to learn deep learning than your own GPU.

I figured that most people that start with deep learning might also lack cloud computing skills. Learning one thing at a time is easier and as such, just sticking a GPU into your desktop and focus on deep learning software / programing might yield a better experience.

I might update my blog post in the future with this detail.

You're welcome! While I understand your rationale now, I'm afraid I still disagree with it. :-) Simply because I find it very unlikely that people interested in and having enough skills to embark on any reasonable deep learning journey (even if just to try) would lack enough cloud computing skills to use cloud GPU instances. After all, using GPUs in the cloud is not much different from (and, thus, not more complex than) using physical GPUs in your local machine.

Fun fact: I've saved your post as PDF for offline reading and it clocked at 649(!) pages at the time of saving (32 pages for the post per se and the rest for the blog post comments). Combining that with feedback here at HN, it is clear that there is quite a lot of interest in the topic ...

Haha, 649 pages! Thanks for the discussion. I can understand your perspective. Maybe it would be best to add something to the blog post that discusses it from both perspectives and readers can then choose which perspective suits them better.

I should also a bit more in general about cloud computing, it seems some people agree that the post ran a bit short on that. At some point I just wanted to be done with it though — editing 10k word blog posts is not so much fun anymore!

It's my pleasure. I agree - it's a good idea to present both perspectives and allow readers to decide what works best for them.

I can certainly understand you being hesitant to add more content to an already sizeable post. Perhaps, several small paragraphs on important relevant aspects might still be worth considering (take it with a grain of salt, since I haven't actually read your post in detail, including cloud-related parts). Anyway, thank you very much, again, for your time and effort. Keep it up!

Thank you so much!

You're very welcome! BTW, do you have any interest in and time for potential consulting or advisory for a frontier/deep tech startup (ambitious goals, challenging tasks, great impact)? Not an immediate need, but, hopefully, it will be a more real opportunity in not so distant future.

The card could also be used for gaming.

Fair enough. However, this use case is far beyond the subject and scope of the post at hand. :-)

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