Diffusion models from scratch, from a new theoretical perspective

They are clarifying that "a friend of mine" is not a euphemism for themselves, because it's more common to use it as a euphemism for yourself than it is to actually talk to strangers online about your friend's life, problems, opinions etc.

That's actually hard for me to answer. I'm afraid to taint it. Honestly, I'd be wary to touch it especially being advice coming from someone already well versed in the domain. It's too easy to accidentally complexify and then you end up losing your target audience. But maybe the connection to VAEs could be made clearer? Maybe a bit clearer or better introducing the topic of optimization? But again, it's a hard line to walk because you've successfully written something that is approachable to a novice. This is the same problem I suffer when trying to teach haha. But I think the fact that you're asking and looking to improve it's the biggest sign you'll continue to do well.

For later topics I think there's a lack on discussions about things like score modeling, the difficulties of understanding latent representations (so many misunderstand the curse of dimensionality), and Schrodinger Bridges. There's so much lol

The better advice I can give is to listen to anyone complaining. It's hard because you have to try to see beyond their words and find their intent (I think this also makes them more digestible and less emotionally draining/hurtful). Especially consider a novice isn't going to have to right words to correctly express their difficulties parsing and it may just come out looking like anger when it's frustration.

Just keep doing your best :)

For the conditioning and t there are different possibilities, for example the unpooled text embeddings (if the model is conditioned on text) usually go in the cross-attn while the pooled text embedding plus t is used in adaLN blocks like StyleGAN (the first one), but there are many other different strategies.

That's fine! Not everyone needs to be. I think it is just a shame we pretend. Makes research convoluted and messy. As I said the other day, we should just allow people to pursue whatever they want and lay a framework where the incentives drive the clearest explanations possible.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39665427

> How long before more legible code or code-like constructs (or markup?) start to displace arcane mathematical notation?

My best guess is never.

The problem is that math is a language itself. In fact, I'd more accurately call it a family of languages. People often confuse it for an inherent thing because most of the time we use it in applied ways for subjects like physics, and the sciences. But clearly those people have never taken abstract algebra or developed their own toy algebra (or group, ring (or rung), or field). You might say they have an _ideal_istic notion of mathematics.

That said, I am absolutely sympathetic to the complexity of mathematics and there is so much that is difficult to grasp. What's worse, is that when this abstract gobbledy goop finally clicks it's so abundantly obvious that it deceives you into thinking you've known it all along. I think this contributes to the difficulty of teaching the subject because those qualified have forgotten the struggles they themselves have had (to be fair, human psychology plays a big role here too because if we only remember the struggles we'd have difficulty finding the passion and beauty).

But I think our best hope is to find a unified mathematics. The obsession people have with things like set theory and category theory is that you can see this interconnectedness. You get this deep feeling that you're looking at the same things manifesting in different ways. Remember that a lot of mathematics is converting your system into another system (we might call this an isomorphic mapping) such that your problem is easier to solve in the other system (think about how we might want to go from Cartesian coordinates to polar, but now abstract that concept out more than your friend that took a few tabs of acid). You zoom out move around, and zoom back in, and maybe a few more times (but you have to keep track of your path).

> Squiggles and lots of Greek letters seem like an anachronism.

Do you have another suggestion? Because I don't see how code, English, or literally any other thing that can be written down is anything more meaningful than "a bunch of squiggles." There's only so many simple, and importantly, distinguishable squiggles that we can write down. Luckily we have a tool to exactly determine this ;) The shitty part of mathematics is also the best part, in that you have to embrace the abstractness of it all. But of course human brains weren't designed for this. (Yes, there are some of us trying to figure out how to get machines to think with that extreme level of abstractedness at its core. No, this is not how computers already "think.")

So yeah, I empathize with you. Quite a lot. There's so much more that I want to know about this thing too. But it is often seemingly impenetrable. All I can tell you is that it just looks that way and isn't. Everyone has the capacity but finding the right way up this mountain (that I'm nowhere near Terry, and he's nowhere near the summit) can be just as hard as the climb itself. The best way is persistence though. Just remember that you don't play video games because they are easy. Sometimes you gotta just trick yourself into pushing through. And some of the best advice I can give is revisiting old topics. So much of what you think you've known actually has a tremendous amount of depth to it. Coming back with fresh eyes and a better understanding of the larger picture can help you see all the beauty in it, even if this is sometimes fleeting.

I'm sorry to have vomited so much, but you know, Stockholm Syndrome is a bitch.

Hopefully Garrett doesn't interfere with his hard work.

Next you're gonna say that polynomial multiplication is also just convolution of the arguments.