[HN Gopher] GradIEEEnt half decent
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       GradIEEEnt half decent
        
       Author : notmysql_
       Score  : 245 points
       Date   : 2023-05-01 23:42 UTC (23 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (tom7.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (tom7.org)
        
       | dirtyid wrote:
       | two tom7 videos in as many months, what a treat.
        
       | ironbound wrote:
       | Best start to a video this year, really wish more people would
       | use a hook to get people engaged in learning.
        
       | sva_ wrote:
       | > I think this is a fractal in the sense that it is chaotic, has
       | a color gradient, and could be on the cover of an electronic
       | music album
       | 
       | I didn't know of this criterion
        
         | pjc50 wrote:
         | It's on my album "Hausdorff-Besicovitch Criterion"
        
       | eur0pa wrote:
       | Two videos so far this year and we're still in May. What a bliss.
        
         | sethaurus wrote:
         | Tom7 our beloved. How might we make this creator publish more
         | videos? Money? Is it money? Can we give him money somehow?
        
           | UncleMeat wrote:
           | Tom has a pretty good day job, so I suspect that money isn't
           | the thing.
           | 
           | The sigbovik conference seems to be the motivating goal
           | behind these videos. I think the key thing would be to make
           | sure that sigbovik continues and that people are excited
           | about the papers.
        
           | shadowgovt wrote:
           | Unfortunately, Tom's a lot more creativity and concept-driven
           | than money driven. So the best strategy is probably to spend
           | the money on some kind of near-C sublight vehicle and take a
           | one-hour jaunt in it, then return to Earth in a year and see
           | what's tickled Tom's fancy since you last saw him.
           | 
           | this solution may have side-effects that are left as an
           | exercise for the Rocketeer.
        
       | tysam_and wrote:
       | I believe that this floating point imprecision was something that
       | David Page used (I think it may have been accidental as he was
       | originally doing something else with it?) to achieve a world
       | record training speed on CIFAR10 by summing a bunch of loss
       | values together instead of taking the average. The sum
       | effectively reduced the precision of the loss value and seemed to
       | have a regularizing impact on network training as best as I
       | personally understand. :) <3
        
       | chrisldgk wrote:
       | Always delighted to see tom7 content. Dude just thinks out of the
       | box like no one else.
        
         | newswasboring wrote:
         | It has been a long standing dream to make videos like this. I
         | have no idea where to start though. I think everyone has these
         | out of the box ideas, but we (or at least I) disregard them as
         | "who will be interested in this".
        
           | airstrike wrote:
           | In addition to picking a subject that interests people, it
           | helps to be good at storytelling. Fortunately, that skill can
           | also be learned
        
         | physicles wrote:
         | His videos also cover a super wide range of content areas. Just
         | this latest one has a refresher on neural nets, ieee floating
         | point (and explained the accuracy tradeoffs more clearly than
         | I've ever seen), fractals, chess engines, and more.
        
           | newswasboring wrote:
           | Not just that, he is also very good at making videos. His
           | story lines are good and everything flows like a deep river.
           | It's mesmerizing to look at.
        
             | airstrike wrote:
             | and he's also great at naming things, at least based on
             | this one submission
        
           | fugalfervor wrote:
           | And running the length of every street in Pittsburgh, of all
           | things
        
           | x86x87 wrote:
           | Not only that but they are highly entertaining.
           | 
           | This one is probably my all time favorite:
           | https://youtu.be/LA_DrBwkiJA
        
         | waynecochran wrote:
         | Dude is way out of the box. Using IEEE floating point rounding
         | error as his neural network transfer / activation function --
         | never thought to go there.
        
       | unlikelymordant wrote:
       | Reminds of some earlier openai work
       | https://openai.com/research/nonlinear-computation-in-deep-li...
       | 
       | "Neural networks consist of stacks of a linear layer followed by
       | a nonlinearity like tanh or rectified linear unit. Without the
       | nonlinearity, consecutive linear layers would be in theory
       | mathematically equivalent to a single linear layer. So it's a
       | surprise that floating point arithmetic is nonlinear enough to
       | yield trainable deep networks."
        
         | [deleted]
        
       | alexb_ wrote:
       | This is one of the few tom7 videos that I see and am utterly
       | confused by in every way. It feels like he's speaking a different
       | language than I am.
        
         | shadowgovt wrote:
         | I lucked out a bit in having only recently learned about the
         | need for a nonlinear transfer function (although it was taught
         | to me as a "That's just how we do it," not with the associated
         | underlying explanation that you can't represent all functions
         | with only linear functions).
        
       | VikingCoder wrote:
       | Tom7 is kind of like the electronic version of the Primitive
       | Technology Youtuber.
       | 
       | It's fascinating watching someone using some of the worst tools
       | ever to make something in about the most labor-intensive way
       | imaginable - and it's just beautiful. It's practically
       | meditative.
        
         | hoosieree wrote:
         | I know what you mean by Primitive Technology Youtuber, but I
         | would encourage you to not dismiss the underlying concepts out
         | of hand. Building a chair from green wood with hand tools may
         | not work for Ikea, but it is much more energy-efficient than
         | power tools [1].
         | 
         | There's also something incredibly empowering about working with
         | tools you understand, both in software and woodworking.
         | 
         | [1]:
         | https://www.mortiseandtenonmag.com/blogs/blog/podcast-12-the...
        
           | VikingCoder wrote:
           | Oh absolutely. I'm going to confess that I read this book,
           | "Replay" by Ken Grimwood, which is roughly about a guy who
           | keeps having a heart attack on the same day, and wakes up in
           | his younger body, with all of his memories. Again and again
           | and again. Kind of like Groundhog Day, but for an entire
           | adult life. I kind of became obsessed for a while with the
           | idea that I would like to live my life over again. It was a
           | really unhealthy obsession. It took a while for me to live in
           | the moment, try to not hold on to my regrets, etc.
           | 
           | Back to the topic... I kind of watch things like Primitive
           | Technology out of a hope/fear that I'll either get thrown
           | back in time to when these skills were relevant, or that I'll
           | live in a post-apocalyptic world where they're relevant
           | again. (Which was probably inspired by reading Stephen King's
           | "The Stand," and worrying about how my life would be if there
           | was no electricity.)
           | 
           | But yeah, I love watching people show their enthusiasm... I
           | love watching people demonstrate mastery over tools I don't
           | know how to use... I love watching someone build something...
           | Tom7 and Primitive Technology check all those boxes. Adam
           | Savage's Tested often does, too.
        
           | wyager wrote:
           | > but it is much more energy-efficient than power tools
           | 
           | Only if you forget to amortize the cost of supporting a human
           | life for the extra marginal hours it takes
        
             | yetanotherloser wrote:
             | sure, let's all maximise the time we have available to
             | spend on a couch consuming mindless tv.
             | 
             | The "but it takes tiiiiime" argument against making your
             | own things (and achieving a kind of satisfaction, control
             | and learning that's hard to beat) is simply dreadful.
        
               | VikingCoder wrote:
               | It's nice to have the luxury of spare time. Many people
               | don't. Or they have to budget it extremely tightly.
        
               | wyager wrote:
               | Don't project your use of spare time on everyone else.
               | Some of us use spare time towards productive ends. I
               | would personally prefer not to spend all my time living
               | like a subsistence farmer from 1200 years ago.
        
               | kelnos wrote:
               | Who are you to decide what people do and don't want to do
               | with their spare time? Some people don't achieve any
               | satisfaction from making their own things; they just see
               | it as a chore. Your disappointment in that is just your
               | subjective opinion, not any reflection of objective
               | truth.
               | 
               | You also seem to think that there's nothing "productive"
               | anyone could do with the time they save from not having
               | to make their own things, which seems obviously false.
        
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       (page generated 2023-05-02 23:03 UTC)