woopwoop

15 ms·

31.
by woopwoop 1y ago
Clickbait titles are something of a tradition in this field by now. Some important paper titles include "One weird trick for parallelizing convolutional neural networks", "Attention is all you need", and "A picture
32.
by woopwoop 1y ago
Totally unrelated, but this reminds me of my favorite title of a math article: "How often should you beat your kids?" (it's about a certain simple combinatorial game) https://people.mpim-bonn.mpg.de/zagier&#x2
33.
by woopwoop 1y ago
My grandfather was a (non-professional) left wing agitator who was brought in front of HUAC when he joined the NIH, and also won the Lasker-Debakey award for his contributions to the development of combination chemotherapy.
34.
by woopwoop 2y ago
> They want me to do their work for them. During the Covid lockdown, faculty bent over backwards in every way we knew how to accommodate students during an unprecedented (in our lifetimes) health crisis. Now students expect that as a mat
35.
by woopwoop 2y ago
Agree, but I would point out that the errors that I make are selected on the fact that I don't notice I'm making them, which tips the scale toward LLM errors being not as bad.
36.
by woopwoop 2y ago
Those are not necessary to reproduce benign overfitting
37.
by woopwoop 2y ago
A decade ago the paper "Understanding deep learning requires rethinking generalization" [0] was published. The submission is a response to that paper and subsequent literature. Deep neural nets are notable for their strong general
38.
by woopwoop 2y ago
Yeah, it's straightforward to reproduce the results of the paper whose conclusion they criticize, "Understanding deep learning requires rethinking generalization", without any (explicit) regularization or anything else that c
39.
by woopwoop 2y ago
Here is data from the IMF, for example, showing US and EU area GDP as a percentage of global output over time, gradually declining since 1980. The decline from 1960 to 1980 in the US was even more dramatic: in 1960 the United States GDP was
40.
by woopwoop 2y ago
They aren't proofs, they're just numbers. All the questions have numerical answers. That's how they're evaluated.
41.
by woopwoop 2y ago
If he had written "Twitter is important because a critical mass of important people use it to communicate directly with the general public" I would not have called the essay dumb. What he actually wrote is that Twitter was a new m
42.
by woopwoop 2y ago
I don't fault op for posting it. I agree that it's an interesting historical artifact, but intrinsically the essay is dumb.
43.
by woopwoop 2y ago
I hate to be blandly negative, but this deserves (deserved?) it. This is dumb. Message boards had this property, as did blogs. There is nothing meaningful in this short essay. Edit: if you think message boards and blogs were too specific, h
44.
by woopwoop 2y ago
I agree that openai is somewhat sketchy about this, but they're sketchy about everything. In the past though they have admitted up front to data contamination (e.g. the original gpt-4 press release did not use big-bench as a benchmark
45.
by woopwoop 2y ago
I don't understand what their definition of a band limited function on a manifold is supposed to be.
46.
by woopwoop 2y ago
That's funny, because to me these headlines about how deep learning is over-hyped and hitting the wall remind me of headlines from ten years ago about how... deep learning is over-hyped and hitting the wall.
47.
by woopwoop 2y ago
I am a pure mathematician by training. I _hate_ machine learning. The entire field seems to me like a bunch of unprincipled recipes and random empirics. The fact that it works is infuriating, and genuinely seems like a tragedy to me. The bi
48.
by woopwoop 2y ago
My argument is not that slippery problems are unimportant or extraneous, it's that this paper does not convincingly demonstrate that these models are actually especially bad at this kind of reasoning.
49.
by woopwoop 2y ago
Real discourse is also full of typos which accidentally invert the meaning of things, asking the wrong question for deep reasons, asking the wrong question for shallow reasons, and all of the other things that justify subtracting the below
50.
by woopwoop 2y ago
This paper, among other things, shows that LLMs have dramatically worse performance on basic algebra questions when you add in irrelevant information. The examples are things like "John picked 43 kiwis on Monday, 24 kiwis on Tuesday. O
51.
by woopwoop 2y ago
I'm curious about what happens with the no-op dataset if you include in the prompt that the questions may contain irrelevant information.
52.
by woopwoop 2y ago
I've lived in cities with decent homeless populations (Austin, New York) for almost my entire life. I read about this phenomenon of homeless people defecating on the streets all the time. I've literally never seen this in real lif
53.
by woopwoop 2y ago
My PhD thesis was about the extension of smooth functions. In the 1960s, ideas in this area were studied under the umbrella of ideals of smooth functions, and had applications to catastrophe theory. So I spent some time reading about this t
54.
by woopwoop 2y ago
When I took Dan Freed's algebraic topology course, one time he asked us if two spaces were the same. Then he looked at us for a moment and said that actually that was a "Bill Clinton question: the answer depends on what the meanin
55.
by woopwoop 2y ago
My point is not merely that there exist socially competent people who advance science at the highest level, but that I reject the claim that this is an anti-correlation. I do not think that scientific genius and social grace are anti-correl
56.
by woopwoop 2y ago
It says there is a "strong anti-correlation" between being a weird nerd and being pleasant to be around socially. This may be true, but it is not my experience that there is a strong anti-correlation between being an exceptional m
57.
by woopwoop 2y ago
I've met a handful of people who have won at least one of the top prizes in mathematics, i.e. a Fields medal, Abel prize, or Wolf Prize. I would describe none of them as "weird nerds", and I don't think any of them are a
58.
by woopwoop 2y ago
I guess it's all in the way you look at things. I would say that the addition formulae for sine and cosine are more weird and technical than the Banach fixed point theorem, which I would say is much more fundamental.
59.
by woopwoop 3y ago
I think mathematics is in a good place with regards to tolerance of self-promotion. I do not think that we should put up with excessive hype in the name of "humanizing" papers. I do think that a lot of mathematicians do not provid
60.
by woopwoop 3y ago
This is not the greatest essay in the world. No, This is just a tribute.

More ›