hnuser355

I read very little news except a print version of economist I’m subscribed to

My question is if people are so good at math why are they doing machine learning, especially in practice?

Some very good people investigating it theoretically. But the best young math professors that I’m personally friends with actually do have something of the “elitist math attitude” and will tell me things like they think the ML field belongs in the 1600s while they successfully work in their obscure area of algebra applied to mathematical physics or something

To me, a one semester course is 150 hours (10 hours classroom and homework and home study per week, 15 weeks). If you study on your own, without lectures or office hours, I imagine it should be harder.

I’m trying to read a good chunk of a math book (Analysis on Manifolds) while following a syllabus for it so that I know I’m covering roughly one semester of material in one semester of study hours. The most I can realistically devote right now is 30 minutes per day, most days per week. That means this is basically a one year project if I’m consistent enough to spend time on it everyday.

Some people seem to act like it’s extremely easy to teach yourself technical material, but I really don’t buy it unless you do one or more of 1) learn at a very shallow level 2) ignore keeping rest of your life in order and can sacrifice lots of time 3) work in a situation where you have a lot of resources and free time to do it (eg a technical lab at graduate school where reading the book is part of your actual research duties)

So I agree with you completely

Maybe it’s cynical but I feel like halfassing your work is a very good tactic in some situations. Eg your manager halfassed the project idea, he halfasses spending the time to understand what’s going on, he halfasses setting the team up correctly, etc. In that situation I’m going to halfass the project and spend the other half going out to eat with my friends at other companies, learning something new and relevant, and planning my finances so I can weather any sort of lay-off etc

Haha, I agree. I always had arguments with my dad where he’d say you have to have a passion, etc. and I’d be like “Dude, I don’t care about that extra stuff. I just want money”

Of course now I’ll play along since pretending to be passionate about office politics or JavaScript is part of making money.

I work a lot more than the minimum but the part outside my work week is all very long term fundamental stuff I hope will help my career over the decades

It’s normal because most people’s lives and normal obligations are difficult enough relative to their abilities that they have issue proactively managing these things. It’s actually a matter of life and death what you eat in many cases and should be prioritized, but this is frankly not a viewpoint that people are going to respond well to you taking in most cultural milieus

For me Facebook messenger is the only part that matters. If I don’t know you enough to speak with you on there I will never see your posts, since I very rarely go on the main site. So political opinions from my grandma don’t really enter into my usage

So I got about two paragraphs in before saying “why did this weirdo write this” and turning it off

No, there could be extra credit

All my dorms did

Perhaps it’s weird but I don’t seem to have this issue. But I generally drink 1 standard drink per day max (actually weighed out on my little scale cause I am a huge dork) and only 5x per week probably. I basically feel a bit happier and a bit lazier after drinking some alcohol. Mildly more social.

My citation count went up 3x-fold

I had a lot of anxiety about chores as a kid. As a child, I wanted to be taught very much to do them, but would get yelled at for being in the middle of things if I tried to insert myself. I guess that later my parents would randomly come up chores on the spot depending on how bad of a mood they were in and how much they wanted to annoy the children. I remember still being interested in doing chores but ended up begging my parents for the household to make some sort of chore chart or something so we could know who does what on what days instead of being randomly ordered to do huge amounts of stuff on no notice alternating with nothing. Unfortunately this was not allowed as my mother thought I would scam them by only doing the chores on the chart and not waiting on their beck and call at all times. Actually, this reminds me of a lot of ineffective managers in retrospect.

Woah I’ve never considered this idea

? I know people at most schools I pay attention to getting paid to specifically work on that. In fact this is what probably one of the most famous applied mathematicians in certain engineering crowds (Ingrid Daubechies) is working on for her big project from what i understand

Hmm, I read a book a few months ago where the author spent a lot of time discussing the intellectual background for Silicon Valley and why he thought these guys ruined journalism and probably lot of other stuff. It was called “World Without Mind” I believe.

Frankly my opinion on the majority of religious people I’ve met is that they aren’t actually religious and just want a club that encourages them to be a bit nicer, bit more prudent, and where people are a bit more friendly. Sometimes I worry that they are messing with something immensely powerful as if it’s a toy but perhaps it’s not my place to consider that

If someone is negative I usually hold them to a higher standard (and correspondingly think them dumber for fixed intelligence) in many cases. If you’re wrong but positive at least you’re helping to be in a good mood and bring up people around you. If you’re negative incorrectly you’re wrong and damaging the social mood.

Sorry it was a joke :)

We were looking for someone to do basic web dev for us, but when our leading candidate failed to even derive KKT conditions from scratch in our interview we simply had to eject him from the candidate pool

Not all parents realize this second thing unfortunately

This last part can be very true in some circumstances, unfortunately

If you care about anything that runs on a computer, linear algebra is one of the best maths.

Montaigne essays is a strong recommend from me but I only read the first book

Who could have seen that coming

This is an astounding quotation

I don’t know why everyone cares about machine learning so much. Frankly there seem to be so many prerequisites to knowing what goes on, when I imagine a software developer could just get better at java and then learn about parallel code or something to get lots of money for less effort. I’m not in software so I don’t know if any of that is actually true

most (all? Idk) corporate office workers are not in the union. People who drive around putting boxes in peoples houses and climbing poles are in the union.

My understanding is that most labs cite themselves over and over in general, but perhaps this is more advanced.

Frankly I don’t understand how people with access to the rituals, writings, scripture etc of such a complex religion end up with a worldview of “Thing I like - God. Thing I don’t like - devil”. A typical toddler or infant will probably arrive at a similar morality unaided by such powerful structures I would think.