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Comment by malnourish | Hacker News Reader

I read through this entire article. There was some value in it, but I found it to be very "draw the rest of the owl". It read like introductions to conceptual elements or even proper segues had been edited out. That said, I appreciated the interactive components.

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It started off nicely but before long you get

"The MLP (multilayer perceptron) is a two-layer feed-forward network: project up to 64 dimensions, apply ReLU (zero out negatives), project back to 16"

Which starts to feel pretty owly indeed.

I think the whole thing could be expanded to cover some more of it in greater depth.

I think the big frustration I've had in learning modern ML is that the entire owl is just so complicated. A poor explainer reads like "black box is black boxing the other black box", completely undecipherable. A mediocre-to-above-average explanation will be like "(loosely introduced concept) is (doing something that sounds meaningful) to black box", which is a little better. However, when explanations start getting more accurate, you run into the sheer volume of concepts/data transforms taking place in a transformer, and there's too much information to be useful as a pedagogical device.

I tried to include tooltips in some places that go into more depth, but I understand there's a jump. I'm not sure what will be the best way to go about it tbh

I liked the tooltips. You should define each term the first time it shows up (MLP for example).

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