We couldn't agree more!
161 karma · joined July 16, 2010
The intro says that it "...serves a dual purpose: on one hand, it provides a common mathematical framework to study the most successful neural network architectures, such as CNNs, RNNs, GNNs, and Transformers. On the other hand, it gives a constructive procedure to incorporate prior physical knowledge into neural architectures and provide principled way to build future architectures yet to be invented."
Working all the way through that, besides relearning a lot of my undergrad EE math (some time in the previous century), I learned a whole new bunch of differential geometry that will help next time I open a General Relativity book for fun.
Another developer and I were tasked with fixing it. The Customer Service manager (although one of the most conniving political-destructive assholes I have ever not-quite worked with), actually carried a crap umbrella. Instead of constantly flaming us with how many millions of dollars our outage was costing every minute, he held up that umbrella and diverted the crap. His forbearance let us focus. He discretely approached every 20 minutes, toes not quite into entering office, calmly inquiring how it was going. In just over an hour (between his visits 3 and 4), Nate and I had the diagnosis, the fix, and had rolled it out to production, to the relief of pension funds worldwide.
As much as I dislike the memory of that manager to this day, I praise his wisdom every chance I get.
But there is no absolute requirement to conform oneself to a social milieu. A social milieu changes. It can be altered. It supports a vast number of models. And milieus overlap so densely that one can just go play somewhere else.
Disclosure: I used to be a Lisp bigot, but I got better.
Nobody's going to fabricate semiconductors in their garage. But couldn't someone make a modest profit without first investing $2.0e10, like Intel? Or is it just that the profitability scale is such that if you had an extra $2.0e7 to invest, you're better off buying Intel stock?
If not all the "labor" inputs are eaten up by society-wide subsistence, some value will continue to accumulate, somewhere. To the degree that owners allow the workers to retain any of their "surplus value of labor," everybody's lot will continually improve.
Unable to discover the affiliation of its authors (not stated in the document itself), I can't tell where it did come from -- although it is hosted by several sites around the world, not just MIT. It shows internal evidence of font character code corruption, typical in the 2001 era of moving a document from one kind of system to another, or even just trying to change font-set. Note the prevalence of capital U's where an apostrophe belongs, and the clipped text in the second "competitive wheel" diagram. In fact, the diagrams show all the signs of being pasted in from an incompatible system: that wheel diagram is no longer circular, and the egregious box-and-pointer diagrams show the character misplacement typically exacerbated by PDF encoding.
None of that would have issued from Symbolics Press.
I may be a little defensive on the issue of paying attention to docs -- why else would I make a thoughtful response to a down-voted comment from someone with a history of them? At Symbolics, I was pleased that my technical writer colleagues shared the same title of MTS as us developers. I led the small team which developed Symbolics' document development system Concordia, and its document formatter -- which btw was contemporary with TeX and drew upon Knuth's published paragraph and equation layout algorithms. Also I personally inspected every pixel of every character (and all the pixels between) in every font used in Symbolics documentation. In a side-by-side comparison, Symbolics docs would look superior to something from 1986 TeX. One might see how even Prof. Knuth himself wished that Computer Modern had had the attentions of a professional font designer.
Finally, the paper itself explained that such in-house efforts were all of a piece with the rest of the company's engineering ethos.
But 50 years later, I still have those gonna-flunk dreams.
So why would there be a charge in the flappy capacitor? Well, a bias voltage is applied by this battery in the circuit. Ahem, before invoking any principles of thermodynamics, I'd like to see some detailed measurements, or even careful theory, of the current out of the battery and back into the battery, particularly w.r.t. the instantaneous voltages (P = VI), to prove that the time-average power delivered by the battery is precisely zero, or at least far lower than that putatively transferred to the load (light bulb in the animation). Otherwise it's behold, we found a high-resistance path for our battery to run a light bulb.
There is some precedent for semiconductor thermal magic in the Peltier junction. It makes one end colder and the other end hotter by applying electric watts to it, with no moving parts aside from the electrons and holes recombining, or something. But nobody sees thermodynamics being violated or extended there.
But here the magic is to take away thermal energy from one place, the flappy graphene (thereby cooling it) and moving the energy to the light bulb (thereby heating it). It seems you could then use any old heat engine to extract work by letting the heat flow from the resulting hotter place back to the colder place, getting "limitless power" for free from your perpetual motion machine. Conceivably it's a sort of heat pump that gets some multiplier above the battery power. But I think the burden of proof is on the Arkansas folks to explain how this can be. If I had more energy (no pun intended, really) right now I'd try to find the paper that the press release is based on, to see if there's a little more truth there.
Meanwhile, I doubt it.