4 ms·

Okay, based on the introduction of the linked paper, this is brilliant. I have seen few if any texts like this one, which treat a fun + interesting + simple ide

by bckr 6y ago

Okay, based on the introduction of the linked paper, this is brilliant. I have seen few if any texts like this one, which treat a fun + interesting + simple idea with fun language while also presenting it in the form of a research article. Do give this a chance EDIT: I forgot what day it is. I really like the idea though and I think with a little more work it could really deliver

jawns 6y ago
It reminds me a little bit of "Gödel, Escher, Bach" in terms of its playfulness.
ronsor 6y ago
Tom does this sort of stuff regardless of whether it's 4/1 or not.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
dhosek 6y ago
There's The Journal of Irreproducible Results. Not sure if it's still in publication though. Their website appears to be down/broken.
- alisonkisk 6y ago
  Thats one side of the schism with the more popular Annals of Improbable Research. https://www.improbable.com/ https://www.improbable.com/
  - dhosek 6y ago
    Ah, that's the one that I really wanted. Thanks.
bbischof 6y ago
My favorite line in this wonderful paper is: The database is just filled with garbage that is unusable for this project: Fonts that are completely illegible, fonts that are missing most of their characters, fonts with millions of control points, Comic Sans MS, fonts where every glyph is a drawing of a train, fonts where everything is fine except that just the lowercase r has a width of MAX INT, and so on.
- kebman 6y ago
  07:48 “Comic Sands; so called because the letters look like little droppings of sand, or something. And they are kind of aesthetic. We could consider this an improvement.”
isoprophlex 6y ago
The linked paper is a wonderful read indeed! This guy is the Terry Pratchett of home-grown deep learning libraries... So I did that and let it run for a month. Actually I had to start over several times with different parameters and initialization weights because it would get stuck (Figure 11) right away or as soon as I looked away from the computer. I prayed to the dark wizard of hyperparameter tuning until he smiled upon my initial conditions, knowing that some- where he was adding another tick-mark next to my name in a tidy but ultimately terrifying Moleskine notebook that he bought on a whim in the Norman Y. Mineta San Jose International Airport on a business trip, and still feels was overpriced for what it is.
matsemann 6y ago
The conference "FUN with algorithms" consists mostly if these kind of things. CS done on toy problems or other things making the papers a bit out of the ordinary (but still real science). Not presented in quite the same quirky way, though. https://drops.dagstuhl.de/portals/lipics/index.php?semnr=16069 https://drops.dagstuhl.de/portals/lipics/index.php?semnr=160...

by bckr 6y ago

jawns 6y ago

It reminds me a little bit of "Gödel, Escher, Bach" in terms of its playfulness.

ronsor 6y ago

Tom does this sort of stuff regardless of whether it's 4/1 or not.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

dhosek 6y ago

There's The Journal of Irreproducible Results. Not sure if it's still in publication though. Their website appears to be down/broken.

alisonkisk 6y ago
Thats one side of the schism with the more popular Annals of Improbable Research. https://www.improbable.com/ https://www.improbable.com/
- dhosek 6y ago
  Ah, that's the one that I really wanted. Thanks.

bbischof 6y ago

My favorite line in this wonderful paper is: The database is just filled with garbage that is unusable for this project: Fonts that are completely illegible, fonts that are missing most of their characters, fonts with millions of control points, Comic Sans MS, fonts where every glyph is a drawing of a train, fonts where everything is fine except that just the lowercase r has a width of MAX INT, and so on.

kebman 6y ago
07:48 “Comic Sands; so called because the letters look like little droppings of sand, or something. And they are kind of aesthetic. We could consider this an improvement.”

isoprophlex 6y ago

The linked paper is a wonderful read indeed! This guy is the Terry Pratchett of home-grown deep learning libraries... So I did that and let it run for a month. Actually I had to start over several times with different parameters and initialization weights because it would get stuck (Figure 11) right away or as soon as I looked away from the computer. I prayed to the dark wizard of hyperparameter tuning until he smiled upon my initial conditions, knowing that some- where he was adding another tick-mark next to my name in a tidy but ultimately terrifying Moleskine notebook that he bought on a whim in the Norman Y. Mineta San Jose International Airport on a business trip, and still feels was overpriced for what it is.

matsemann 6y ago

The conference "FUN with algorithms" consists mostly if these kind of things. CS done on toy problems or other things making the papers a bit out of the ordinary (but still real science). Not presented in quite the same quirky way, though. https://drops.dagstuhl.de/portals/lipics/index.php?semnr=16069 https://drops.dagstuhl.de/portals/lipics/index.php?semnr=160...