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Comment by jefft255 | Hacker News Reader

This is really good news. It was a really contentious issue in RL and robotics research to be so reliant on proprietary (and very expensive) software.

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For more context on "very expensive," a MuJoCo license was several hundreds of dollars.

For undergrad students trying to dabble in reinforcement learning, several hundreds of dollars can be quite a lot.

But they can accept that the world is not geared towards amateur dabblers, and that a few hundreds of $ for a license (a license, meaning to legalize production usage, you can always copy from somewhere to "dabble") is nothing.

The CS world has certainly been geared towards the hobbyist budget for some time now. Would be good to keep it that way, even if it meant sacrificing a supposed 1% extra accuracy in the latest "top conference" (sure if their sponsors are the companies publishing huge models it won't happen even if it should).

Well now they don't have to, because it really is nothing.

as an undergrad in the 90s I invested thousands of dollars of my own money to work on machine learning. Worth every penny, even if I had to miss out on some cool parties.

Wonderful that you had thousands of dollars as an undergrad to be able to do so.

Worked a job to pay for ram. It atypical.

Working in undergrad isn't a common thing?

Well, if you're working to pay your rent, bills, and food expenses, and you're only working part time (because you're a full time undergraduate student), you may not have a lot left over to pay for software licenses.

which is precisely the reason I went with linux: so I could maximize my hardware resources while eliminating license costs. By not buying whatever MS compiler in those days, I was able to max out my workstation with 32MB RAM.

Working in undergrad and having thousands left over after paying for food and a place to sleep certainly can't be assumed to be. That's where my pay went.

I was very fortunate to not have to pay tuition or board, but if I had to, I wouldn't have spent my money to pay for that (I would have taken out loans) and still spent my money on RAM.

I'm not even sure what virtue you're trying to signal here. Just because someone used the limited funds they had available to obtain the software and educational resources they were interested in, they've exercised some sort of inappropriate privilege?

Isn't that the whole idea behind college? Spend money to learn cool stuff?

Ok, I'll spell it out. Presenting the idea that MuJoCo having a license fee rather than being free is better, not worse, or even that the difference doesn't matter because "well, I paid for stuff" is the inappropriate part of the privilege. Given a choice between "I can learn X but I need to spend significant money on it" and "I can learn X for free", with everything else equal arguing for the former is exclusionary.

with everything else equal arguing for the former is exclusionary.

Sure. But who argued for that? They merely pointed out that they considered this particular physics engine worth spending money on. The implication was that because money is typically limited for a college student, the software must really be worthwhile. The implication was not "LOL, you must be broke and can't afford good software."

The implication j was responding to was "if you really cared, a mere few hundred dollars wouldn't matter because you'd be able to find the money." If you don't read that into the message chain, fine, but I do.

I got MuJoCo for free as an undergrad and I'm pretty sure all I needed was a .edu email address.

For reference here is the price before as seen on november 2020 (previous internet archive screenshot), https://web.archive.org/web/20201111235930/https://www.robot...

TLDR: personal non commercial 500$/year for usage on up to 3 computers personal commercial 2000$/year

the price was reasonable for a good piece of software, but for the way people want to do ML research now (launch tons of parallel jobs on lots of cloud machines) the price, and more importantly, the burden of managing licenses, was prohibitive.

There was a free license for individual users, with the non-free license applicable to those who were receiving financial support (i.e. academic / industry researchers, etc.). The individual license was very popular and heavily utilized.

+1 - plus, it's an immediate barrier for attracting new people to the field.

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