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cfcf14

489 karma · joined May 4, 2018

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cfcf14··on The void in Calgary: How office towers emptied in a once bustling downtown
I lived and worked in Edmonton and Calgary for about 8 years before moving to London (UK) and I can confidently say that I have no intention of ever going back.

To me, those two cities are exemplars for the concept of 'soul-less glass and steel altars to capitalism'. They're now even more desolate as millennials such as myself left for better opportunities. I also agree with other commenters that the politics there are toxic, and very much stuck in the past. I wish the best for everybody remaining there, hopefully they can transition to a more sustainable economic model and excise the regressive, entitled political culture that's sprung forth from decades of unbridled decadence.

cfcf14··on Turing Oversold?
Wonderful explanation, thank you.
cfcf14··on The Ethnocentric Origins of the Learning Style Idea
I'd really like to read the whole text, are there any non-paywalled versions available. The topic seems intriguing.
cfcf14··on AI has the worst superpower medical racism
This is bewildering and concerning. I absolutely applaud the authors for releasing their code and asking the public to have a look, as well as raising the alarm. Given the degree of due diligence they've performed, it seems too much to hope that there's just some really nightmarish data leakage occurring; but even if that were the case, the difficulty of identifying its origin or even determining the true characteristics of what the models are doing is extremely problematic regardless of whether this particular instance of bias can be explained.
cfcf14··on Encoding Time Series as Images (2020)
This is a relatively common trick in ML - mapping temporal data to image form so one can use the relatively efficient convolutional operations on it. An example would be mapping audio data via a short-time fast fourier transform (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short-time_Fourier_transform) and using 2d convolutions on that for processing.

Architectural improvements in 1D convolutions (atrous convolutions) have possibly surpassed these techniques in some areas though, I'm not sure.

cfcf14··on Israel data reportedly shows efficacy drop of Pfizer-BioNTech for delta variant
I'm so exhausted and demoralised by this endless cascade of things-getting-worse. It's taking a really big toll on my mental health and there's no resources available in my country to offer support (and there's nothing to be done except try to learn to live with it, anyways). The future looks bleak.
cfcf14··on Linux Rust Support
This is a very strong condemnation of their efforts, and I'm skeptical that you're making this claim in good faith.
cfcf14··on GitHub Copilot
From Clippy to this technology, in just under 25 years! Very impressive. I wonder how much impact this tool might have as a teaching aid, as well?
cfcf14··on Bumble closes to give 'burnt-out' staff a week's break
Thanks for sharing this lovely anecdote, and for the positive sentiment. Unfortunately I do agree with the person you're replying to - these days, it is vanishingly unlikely to find a partner past your early 30s.

Only a tiny proportion of the adult population in most western countries is single, and asymmetries in the dating pool induced by modern modes of meeting people (ie: apps) have radically upended traditional ideals about coupling and compatibility. Respectfully, if you met your partner 16 years ago (congrats by the way!), that might as well be a completely different world than the one we live in now. I sympathise with the GP's expression of urgency.

cfcf14··on AirPods Max and AirPods Pro Don't Support Apple Music Lossless, Apple Confirms
This is a really baffling decision from Apple - normally they're very good about having tightly integrated ecosystems where everything just 'works' with everything else. That's kinda the entire value proposition in my eyes.
cfcf14··on Test for lists in Cython
Have you been successful in implementing non-trivial computational code in numba/numpy? I've always found it starts to really break for anything which isn't really trivial, and the errors are mostly non-prescriptive and highly verbose.
cfcf14··on A Semitechnical Introductory Dialogue on Solomonoff Induction
I found the literary style of this article to be really aggravating and distracting. The content is interesting, but the author is showing off their prose more than actually communicating anything.
cfcf14··on Double bongcloud: why grandmasters are playing the worst move in chess
As silly as this is from a chess point of view, I really genuinely enjoyed watching Hikaru Nakamura's face as he sees the opening. Needed a good laugh!
cfcf14··on Google advised mental health care when workers complained about racism, sexism
Preface: I think this is probably giving the colleague too much credit, but with that thought in mind...

I learned the hard way once that even a (seemingly) innocent comment about a friend's tan could be perceived very adversely, due to the fact that their culture had "being tanned" == "being dark(er)" connotations which were quite negative. It's a particular point of view, not one globally shared, that being tanned (or general malleability of skin tone) is a discussion point/something of casual interest.

These day I find it's best to simply mind my own business about others' appearances unless they're very close friends or family.

cfcf14··on The Hijacking of Perl.com
Aside from the primary content regarding the hijacking the registrar, I really enjoyed reading about the methodological approach they adopted for tracking information and contacts during the crisis.

But to the primary content - I've been surprised at just how ad-hoc much of the internet backbone infrastructure is as I've learned more about it. The same could be said about the payments processing industry! Beneath all the complexity and sleekness underlying the tools we use every day seems to eventually lie a system of IOUs, with an honor-based resolution mechanism between sufficiently trustworthy entities.

cfcf14··on Differences between the word2vec paper and its implementation
The research published in this case (the original word2vec paper) is quite literally not what it claims to be. It is factually incorrect. Is that really the responsibility of the individual attempting to reproduce the work to identify and correct?

How wrong should the original work be before it ceases to be a case of 'clean your own pipettes'?

cfcf14··on Go is Google's language, not ours
Mostly machine learning for distributed sensor networks (ie: smart meters). Deal with lots of time-series data, state space modelling, some recurrent neural nets (etc). Our shop has a 'golang only' thing going, which means that I end up having to reimplement algorithms in go sometimes from scratch.
cfcf14··on Go is Google's language, not ours
I completely agree. When I first started writing Go (coming from Python/C#) I complained an awful lot about what felt like pointless hamstringing of functionality. Go is a simple language, and you don't get many toys. It also feels very verbose at times, and forces you to think a lot about doing things which seem automatic in other languages.

However, as time went on, I noticed a few trends. Firstly, forcing me to think more revealed that what I had thought was automatic was more automagic - Go forces you to take responsibility for what your code does to a far greater extent than other more convenient languages, albeit not to the extent that C/Rust does. Secondly, I noticed that code written in Go tends to do what I expect it to pretty much all the time (with the occasional except of async stuff). Sitting down and writing a program in Go often results in something that actually works the first time it runs, and has far fewer runtime surprises.

As painful as it is to do numerical computation in Go sometimes, I have a very high level of confidence that I can look at a program, deduce with some accuracy its runtime memory usage & footprint, multithread it easily, and reason (successfully) about possible runtime failure modes and behaviour. This is something I find difficult if not borderline impossible to do in Python, especially utilising the standard '10 layers deep' stack of numerical computing libraries.

cfcf14··on The new features of Fortran 2018 [pdf]
I've been really interested in learning Fortran for a while- I work doing a lot of computational stats/ML and typically my tools are python, R, or Golang. Is there any use-case for Fortran in production settings or should I just accept it would be purely a personal satisfaction project?
cfcf14··on Learning Math for Machine Learning
:) Personally I've never used any serious complex analysis in my job (I'm very grateful too, because I always struggled a bit with it). The closest thing I've seen, which I did run into recently, is the use of complex numbers to compute very accurate finite differences. It's one of those delightful tricks that is both elegant and useful: https://blogs.mathworks.com/cleve/2013/10/14/complex-step-di...

I've been working in golang, which fortunately has built-in complex128 types, so it's proved very helpful in a project!

cfcf14··on Learning Math for Machine Learning
Hamiltonian mechanics, along with many other seemingly out of place 'advanced' maths, show up in modern Bayesian statistics pretty frequently. Hamiltonian Monte Carlo/Riemannian Manifold Monte Carlo are pretty cutting edge (although are implemented in popular libraries like MC-Stan and Pymc3) and both require fairly advanced physics to really understand.

Additionally, we're seeing the introduction of even more sophisticated stochastic samplers (stochastic gradient hamiltonian monte-carlo, etc) that require even more esoteric branches of math and physics to really grok. I have a strong math background but frequently find myself struggling with a lack of knowledge in statistical mechanics when trying to read papers in these areas.

So yeah - there's plenty of bullshit and exaggeration. But there's also some wicked cool stuff happening which requires very sophisticated (and specialized) knowledge to understand.

cfcf14··on Gaussian Processes for Machine Learning (2010)
I've used Gaussian Processes to great effect in the field of energy regression/forecasting for commercial buildings, and have found them to be generally superior to other approaches due to the richness of prior information you can encode into the GP kernel. I'll be attending http://gpss.cc/ this year as well, so you could consider me something of an evangelist!

For example, you might approach a regression problem with the information that you expect the outcome to vary very smoothly w.r.t covariate 1, periodically (cyclically) over a long timespan w.r.t covariate 2, and periodically and non-smoothly (but with a known period) w.r.t covariate 3 and 4.

You don't know the exact form of these relationships (ie: what kind of periodicity exactly, or the nature of the 'smooth' relationship), but you're pretty sure they are related in that way.

GP regression allows you to draw from a posterior distribution over a function space of functions with those properties, conditioned on the observed data. The resulting credible intervals (HPD) are directly interpretable and meaningful without hand-wringing. And in a much more practical sense, the results you get tend to be extremely good compared to other techniques (trees, neural nets, GAM's, etc).

Other very useful applications of GP's include hyperparameter optimization, classificaton, and GP-latent variable models (GPLVMs) for dimensionality reduction and manifold embeddings. The only downside, which other users have mentioned, is the time-space complexity of inverting the covariance matrix, making the computation O(n^3). Various approaches to making GP fitting more performant, including sparse GP models with inducing points, variational approximations to the posterior, help a bit.

My personal feeling is that these models fall squarely into the category of 'clearly the best option if it weren't for the computational complexity'. If that bridge is crossed, we're going to see their popularity grow dramatically.

cfcf14··on Canada facing ‘brain drain’ as tech talent leaves for Silicon Valley
It goes without saying that SV pays dramatically more than London, and certainly more than mainland EU (Paris, Frankfurt, etc).

My point is more that as a Canadian you can go pretty much anywhere else and be better paid (even if only a little bit relative to cost of living), and sometimes there are substantial other advantages too, such as proximity to desirable locations, cultural stuff, and so on.

cfcf14··on Canada facing ‘brain drain’ as tech talent leaves for Silicon Valley
Canadian living in London for about 4 years now - of course people are leaving. The pay is incredibly low in major Canadian cities like Vancouver & Toronto; I was looking at 50-60k/yr there, ~150k in the US, or about 60-70k GPB in London.

Now, London isn't exactly cheap, and my overall buying power here is probably only mildly superior to what it would be in Canada, but I get to live in a great city with all the amenities of a major European hub.

Canada is great and I love many things about it, and I do consider it my proper home, but there's not much to attract me back at this point in my life & career. It's just truly a bad place to be if you're in tech.

I've been encouraging my friends back home to go explore other options like the US or Europe, and so far 3 more people I know have left - and it doesn't take much convincing once they see what's abroad.

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