We often hear discipline as the key to success. However, there is a risk of taking this adage too seriously and not examining the shadow side of discipline. If any aspect of your work or life requires discipline, it's a sign of a tooling gap or an automation gap. And many of these gaps are product/startup opportunities waiting to be taken. ..Continue Reading

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, one thing was apparent — this should be how developer tools/library "documentation" should be done . Back in undergrad, when I was into systems programming, I would pour hours reading UNIX man pages, like this one: It was esoteric and required a certain trained eye to find the right man page, make sense of it, and skim over parts that didn’t matter. You typically gained that eye with at least a couple of years of doing it, and if you hung out with other systems programmers or on mailing lists, you could sense a certain masochistic pride in reading terse dry documentation. Many of them had spent a considerable part of their lives to know the ..Continue Reading

Personal post, where I share my recent writing experiment ..Continue Reading

Twitter banning @realdonaldtrump changes social media forever ..Continue Reading

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.  ..Continue Reading

AI creates engines for relentless optimization at all levels. Read the article to figure out how and its consequences to what you're doing. ..Continue Reading

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 for its own sake (god bless them). Although the latter group will do well to listen to these truths and introspect their work. ..Continue Reading

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, pulmonary edema, and some as-yet unexplained kidney issue that is keeping his blood creatine levels high. Soon after ending the call, in a daze, I threw my winter clothes for Vancouver out of my suitcase and stuffed random India appropriate clothes. Within minutes, I had my Vancouver hotel and flight canceled (thanks Ashley) and got a Bangalore flight instead.  ..Continue Reading

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."  ..Continue Reading

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 doing so is important, I will not focus on that here. Instead, I will focus on what I think were the real issues and, more importantly, where we go from here. This is a long post, but I think the length is justified as we need to step back from the rapid-fire Tweet mode and shine the light inward.  ..Continue Reading