tnecniv

I do love animals, but I’ve always been intimidated about the responsibility of being the person solely in charge of that animal’s life. I’ve always struggled with routines and such (I found out in adulthood I have ADHD).

I have thought about it lately, though. Maybe having that responsibility will cause other things to click into place? However, I’m worried about it not working and impacting a life beyond my own.

You are right, but the hard part for me is determining the causality here. Am I depressed because I’m burnt out, or am I feeling burnt out because I’m depressed?

As a researcher, I’ve felt largely the same way lately. It’s been hard for me to even wrap up a project I was so excited about when I started it that I missed sleep because I was that engaged. Unfortunately, I don’t have a cozy tenure position at a major research institution to ride out the burnout until I feel inspired again. I’m just a lowly postdoc.

I’ve thought about leaving the research life for a regular job, but it’s not obvious to me that would help. First, there’s not really other jobs I’d rather do. Second, the burnout has penetrated so many facets of my life (various hobbies, etc.) I’m not sure if it even is burnout or a deeper issue.

Therapy and medication has only been marginally helpful. I’m really not sure what to do at this point.

It’s probably a thread, but those of us without Twitter accounts can’t easily view threads anymore

I’d say that it requires good arm design for that to work. This might seem obvious, but I have a watch that I like as an accessory because the “arms” make cool hatch patterns, but the minute and hour hand are not distinct enough to be read at a glance. Now, I purposefully bought the watch as a fashion piece so I’m satisfied, since I always have my phone, but it turned out to be a lot less legible than I thought!

In that case, it does not materially change the content but it does change the tone to indicate you would appreciate them responding in the affirmative . Adding a “please” to a request also doesn’t make it harder to understand.

You do have a point, though. Passive voice can be a lot more wordy / harder to parse, but people often use it to be more polite sounding.

Lots of people also just like them for comfort food. They were one of my favorite snacks as a kid and I was fortunate to have access to plenty of healthy food.

To this day, if I see a new noodle flavor I feel compelled to try it. Same with sodas even though I don’t drink much soda

I have a mild enough case I didn’t get diagnosed until grad school and my long term memory is great. I’d crush history tests growing up and struggled more with math due to misreading problems and making sign errors or similar mistakes.

I did have a biology teacher that marked me down because I “didn’t look like I was paying attention” in class because I didn’t look like how most people focus on a lecture, but I retained as much info as anyone.

Eh it really depends on the context. When I got my EE degree I was told getting your PE only really mattered if you worked on the power grid or similar. It wasn’t that you were less of an engineer or an expert without it but that 1) you didn’t need the legal ability to sign design documents most of the time 2) even if you took the exam to become an FE, the odds of you working under a licensed PE to get the requisite hours was so small it wasn’t worth the effort to take the FE exam.

If the case involved a field where a PE is standard, the expert witness should 100% have that license. However that’s a small number of sub-fields in practice and doesn’t necessarily correlate with practical experience.

This is a really insightful book that I’d recommend to anyone in STEM with an academic inclination (not necessarily an academic but someone who likes reading big idea nonfiction book)

It can’t. There’s no gradient since it’s not a sufficiently nice space for them. You can use gradient free methods but I’d be shocked if there was an efficient enough way to do that

The famous mathematician Vladimir Arnold said (approximately) “the best way to learn a topic is to write a book on it.” He did that a few times in his career — most notably his excellent book on classical mechanics.

Right in the title it explains it’s a book on theory. “Prompt engineering” doesn’t really fit in any theoretical framework I’m aware of and, while I also like graphics, most theory publications are light on them. You might be looking for a different kind of book, which is fine, but I think the content matches the title.

Also, a book on theory is going to lag quite a bit in terms of topics. The general process is that people discover something new and interesting empirically and publish articles on it. Other people develop theory explaining why that things work and publish articles on it. Once the theory gets crystallized, big ideas get distilled into a book.

Not just understanding, but how to parse it. For example, I can read a theorem that introduces a bunch of variables in the first sentence that don’t get used until a few lines later and say “yeah those are probably just some constants they’ll use in an upcoming equation for an upper bound or something.” Before I was familiar with higher math, I’d say “what the hell are these where did they come from?” After reading enough books and papers, you can see a few steps ahead a lot of the time due to past experience (similar to what veteran chess players do). I can also jump to the middle of the document and see some notation that was defined earlier and guess what it is. Different authors might denote the space of continuous functions in a few different ways but they tend to be very similar for common objects.

That said, there’s a lot of poorly written theory publications out there in my opinion. A big sin to me is that a lot of them will do stuff without explaining in simple English beforehand how they’re going to do it, why they’re doing it, and why it is important. The first item you can get if you’re going through the math line by line at least, but that can be arduous and often I want to understand the big picture before I dig into the details. It doesn’t take much — just a couple of sentences before or after the result can go a long way.

Yeah I know it’s a common challenge. I think it took me a bit longer than some of my peers because I was trying to force it to be like something I knew instead of meeting it on its own terms.

When all you have is a hammer and all that

Really trial and error and grinding through proofs. Working through Linear Algebra Done Right was a big a-ha moment for me. Since I was self-studying over the summer (to remedy my poor linear algebra skills), I was very rigorous in making sure I understood every line of the proofs in the text and trying to mimic his style in the exercises.

In hindsight, I think the issue was trying to map everything to programming is a bad idea and I was doing it because programming was the best tool in my tool chest. It was a real “when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail” issue for me.

I remember cackling so loudly when I first watched that episode and he opened the door to the image of goth Freddy

Likely graduate students with a very theoretical interest. Some theoretically-oriented scientists and engineers are also basically applied mathematicians. It is presumably targeted at people that want to further develop the theoretical aspects of learning, as opposed to applied practitioners

The last part was a big hurdle for me as an early undergrad. I was a fairly strong programmer toward the end of high school, and was trying to think of math as programming. That worked for the fairly algorithmic high school stuff and I got good grades, but it made I was awful at writing proofs. I also went through a phase where I used all the logical notation and rules to manipulate it possible in order to make proofs more algorithmic to me, but that both didn’t work well for me and produced some downright unreadable results.

Mathematical notation is really a shorthand for words, like you’d read text. The equals sign is literally short for equals. The added benefit, as others have pointed out, is that a good notation can sometimes be clearer than words because it makes certain conclusions almost obvious. You’ve done the hard part in finding a notation that captures exactly the idea to be demonstrated in its encoding, and the result is a very clean manipulation of your notation.

While I tend to grade generously when instructions aren’t followed, it is a real pain. It takes a lot more time to grade an assignment when someone does not follow the requested protocol. It’s likely to me that the prof saw a mess of printed code, said “I don’t have time to untangle this and grade it properly,” and didn’t give credit. Hell, I’ve wanted to do that on many an occasion but a fault of mine is that I am not respectful of my time and will try to help the student out by finding a way to award them points even if it takes 10x longer than it should have if they followed instructions.

I can sympathize that bad assignments are tedious and you might know a better way to do them, but you can’t expect to get credit when you don’t follow the instructions.

A little bit of A and B. You can do a lot with very little math beyond linear algebra, calculus, and undergraduate probability, and that knowledge is mainly there to provide intuition and formalize the problem that you’re solving a bit. You also churn out results (including very impressive ones) without doing any math.

A result of the above is that people are empirically demonstrating new problems and solving them very quickly — much more quickly than people can come up with theoretical results explaining why they work. The theory is harder to come by for a few reasons, but many of the successful examples of deep learning don’t fit nicely into older frameworks from, e.g., statistics and optimal control, to explain them well.

So this is a book written by applied mathematicians for applied mathematics (they state in the preface it’s for scientists, but some theoretical scientists and engineers are essentially applied mathematics). As a result, both the topics and the presentation are biased towards those types of people. For example, I’ve never seen in practice worry about the existence and uniqueness conditions for their gradient-based optimization algorithm in deep learning. However, that’s the kind of result those people do care about and academic papers are written on the topic. The title does say that this is a book on the theoretical underpinnings of the subject, so I am not surprised that it is written this way. People also don’t necessarily read these books cover-to-cover, but drill into the few chapters that use techniques relevant to what they themselves are researching. There was a similarly verbose monograph I used to use in my research, but only about 20-30 pages had the meat I was interested in.

This kind of book is more verbose than my liking both in terms of rigor and content. For example, they include Gronwall’s inequality as a lemma and prove it. The version that they use is a bit more general than the one I normally see, but Gronwall’s inequality is a very standard tool in analyzing ODEs and I have rigorous control theory books that state it without proof to avoid clutter (they do provide a reference to a proof). A lot of this verbosity comes about when your standard of proof is high and the assumptions you make are small.

It depends on what you’re doing. That is accurate for, say, describing the training of a neural network, but if you want to prove something about generalization, for example (which the book at least touches on from my skimming), you’ll need other techniques as well

All very great choices! “Dog army? What do you think that means?” Is an inside joke with me and my best friend from “High Holidays”.

I also agree that the ranking is hard. A remarkable thing about the show is how it’s consistent throughout its run and doesn’t really fall off in quality despite going for over a decade.

I’m curious what your pics for best Frasier episodes are?

Two of mine are when they become illegal caviar dealers and when Niles wants to try weed. The episodes with Lilith tend to also be very good. People love the Valentine’s Day one, but I'm never a fan of that style of episode. I can appreciate the genius in it though

…is Ted Kaczynski popular among tech workers? Even the hardcore socialists I know aren’t really fans beyond acknowledging he had a good point or two.

The only reason I don’t is because, when I’m on my MacBook, I’m worried about sacrificing battery life by not using safari

Yeah a lot of these articles seem to be a lot of people who are very opinionated and don’t want to consider any other side. I guess that’s a lot of articles these days in general…and probably past days too but I wasn’t around then.

Yeah I grew up in a suburb and spent time in both suburbs and cities as an adult. I certainly prefer the big city but there are a lot of hobbies and lifestyles they do not promote. For example, any hobby that needs space (practicing an instrument without disturbing others, certain kinds of sports practice, hobbies like woodworking that require tools and a space, etc.) becomes a lot harder in a city. You either need to rent some kind of additional space to engage with that hobby, commute somewhere, or both.

I can certainly see the appeal to owning a house with a garage, basement, and yard for some people, even if I dislike the isolation of having that space more personally.

Plus, gym equipment is designed to be as ergonomic as possible (even something like a dumbbell is designed to be easy to grip and hold, contrast that with moving large, bulky equipment for a job).