Yesterday, HuggingFace launched their “HuggingFace course” — A self-paced introduction to their NLP library along with short explainers. My first reaction was “oh great, another tutorial in the glut of Deep Learning educational resources”, but since it was from HuggingFace, I put my opinion aside and gave it a closer look. The more I looked, […]
Lessons from Writing a Million Words
In 2020, I posed a challenge to myself. To write a million words in a year. I completed that challenge this February. Why a million? It was arbitrary, but it was a large enough number for me that even if I failed, I would’ve gotten somewhere. It was audacious, so I kept it to myself. […]
Deplatforming of Donald, Death of Parler, and the Future of Misinformation
Twitter permanently suspended @realDonaldTrump today. After years of spreading misinformation and sowing hate, the two mostly-lame-looking tweets were the straw that broke the bird’s back. Twitter makes a longer case, including a warning about potential unrest before the inauguration. Facebook took a tepid approach of banning him at least until the term is over. While […]
Flying Back from India made me Scared Sh**less of COVID
A family health emergency took me to India in the middle of the pandemic. I wasn’t prepared to see what I did both in India and back in the US. The trip crept up on me somewhat unexpectedly. After days of agonizing over “Should I travel? Should I not?”, I caved in. Googling out travel […]
Protected: Some Thoughts on Writing (noun)
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
Unstoppable AI Flywheels and the Making of the New Goliaths
TL;DR: AI creates engines for relentless optimization at all levels. Read the article to figure out how and its consequences to what you’re doing. Some time ago I wrote about how everything is a model when reviewing a paper from Kraska et al (2017) where they show how traditional CS data structures like B-Tree indexes, […]
The Twelve Truths of Machine Learning for the Real World
TLDR: Scroll and read the headings in bold Last month I gave an informal talk to an intimate gathering of friends with this title that I am putting down in words. This post is mainly for people who are using machine learning to build something as opposed to people who are working on machine learning […]
Fragility of Everything
The day before heading to Neurips, I packed my luggage as usual at the last minute before going to bed (early am flight). As I was packing, I received a call from India. It was my mom. My dad had developed “breathing issues”, which we later found out was a combination of congestive heart failure, […]
The Doers and The Clarion Callers
There is an unnecessary drama unfolding on Twitter on “the war” between connectionists and symbolists. This drama is absurd and perpetuated by people whose relevance exists only in the discussion of the “difference” and the “war.” Most of us who are too busy learning or doing, happily occupy the liminal space between symbolism and connectionism. […]
When OpenAI tried to build more than a Language Model
If you were part of the machine learning Twitter, last Thursday, it was impossible to miss OpenAI’s press release of their new GPT-2 model and all the heated Twitter conversation about that. Many people tried to summarize it in their own ways. A lot of these posts are of “He said, She said” flavor. While […]