Identity Field
The Identity Field has to be the most obvious pattern. As Martin Fowler says, it is "mind numbingly simple."
Making things better.
The Identity Field has to be the most obvious pattern. As Martin Fowler says, it is "mind numbingly simple."
Posted by Matt McKnight at 11:44 AM View Comments
This fascinating article attempting to explain machine learning for statisticians is very interesting. I don't know if I even properly understand it, and the tone is a bit negative. Here's the simplest way I can think of it.
If I have:
(b1 * x1) + (b2 * x2) + (b3 + x3) + a = y
the statistician is trying to minimize error in the b values and the machine learning person is trying to minimize error in the y value?
Posted by Matt McKnight at 10:35 PM View Comments
Thinking about whether there is a way to beat Twitter with open standards. The day Twitter shut off RSS (so that people couldn't build apps that avoided their ads) we lost a huge function of it as a part of an aggregation system. However, tools like NewsBlur show it can still be scraped.
Spotify is trying to create a walled garden around podcasts. Again, shutting off the aggregation function.
Google Reader was very popular. With some additional tools to create self-hosted content, likes, and some additional discovery tools, it could have been a distributed twitter.
We may be able to do this.
Posted by Matt McKnight at 11:41 AM View Comments
I have another post sitting in the dock, but I can't really release it because I need to think about it a bit more. I've been trying to lower the bar yet again so that I can produce some shorter things, but I still don't want to put out things that are wrong!
Fred Wilson at AVC https://avc.com/2020/07/short-and-sweet/ has posted about how he has been getting shorter with his blog.
If shorter is good enough for Fred, it's good enough for me.
Short content seems like Twitter. I just am not finding Twitter rewarding lately. It seems like the Cultural Revolution on there, just people spitting at each other. Not pleasant in any way. I was trying to keep a list of just silly funny stuff in my approach to using lists as the way to consume Twitter, and only following people I know personally and am thus less likely to be sickened by. I just can't stick to it properly and keep following people.
Anyway, things are so ugly on Twitter I don't even feel like linking up these posts there.
Posted by Matt McKnight at 3:01 PM View Comments
I was watching the fascinating Lex Fridman discussion with David Patterson and found it very stimulating. It really made me think about the nature of computer science as a whole in a way that I haven't for a while. David Patterson is just so clear when he speaks about things that it makes you consider the basic nature of the endeavor. It reminded me of so many things I used to think about more frequently.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=naed4C4hfAg
Some random notes or ideas that occured or recurred to me. Not necessarily in the discussion, but where my mind went...
Posted by Matt McKnight at 10:51 PM View Comments
Most of the JavaScript frameworks seem to be transitory technologies. They exist to fulfill some perceived gap in the web browsers' capabilities. Once those gaps.are filled, their reason for existing fades.
Probably the two strongest pieces are Web assembly and Web components. We also have webgl. It seems hard to imagine that a virtual DOM and another event model on top of the event model that already exists, are the right way to deal with these technologies.
The only question is how long it takes.
Posted by Matt McKnight at 1:01 AM View Comments
I am not opposed to Design. I do think there are a lot of advantages to text as opposed to image heavy design, but I see both sides of both sides. There was a trend for a couple of years to have website home pages be huge, highly detailed, saturated images, or even video. The idea there seemed to be create this feeling of lushness or richness. This has obvious costs- bandwidth, latency, etc., but there is also something decadent about it. We have all of this bandwidth, let's use it. A picture is worth a thousand words. However, these are fleeting feelings that leave me empty. I need the words to create a rational idea out of the picture.
I need the command line.
I love the episode of the Netflix series on design "Abstact" that featured Paula Scher. https://www.netflix.com/watch/80093802?trackId=14277283 There is a lot you can do with typography. I do see evidence that people are coming back to text favored design. https://cheapskatesguide.org/articles/beauty-of-text.html.
I am sick of fighting over which icon to use on a toolbar when a word would do-- although this does bring another battle. Which word? Which language? We live in a world where we fight over words. Do symbols let us agree to disagree? Do they let us put our own interpretations into those symbols, while disagreeing under the surface about what they mean?
I kinda want to switch from using blogger to get more fonts.
Posted by Matt McKnight at 5:42 PM View Comments
Programming is about making things. Purity is about adhering strictly to a set of rules. It seems that one should favor the programming over the purity. Abstractions should be minimal.
Think about this thing from John Cook on "Pretending OOP Never Happened".
That has been my experience. I hardly ever write classes anymore; I write functions. But I don’t write functions quite the way I did before I spent years writing classes.Cook then quotes James Hague's "Follow-up to "Functional Programming Doesn't Work":
And while I don’t often write classes, I do often use classes that come from libraries. Sometimes these objects seem like they’d be better off as bare functions, but I imagine the same libraries would be harder to use if no functions were wrapped in objects.
100% pure functional programing doesn’t work. Even 98% pure functional programming doesn’t work. But if the slider between functional purity and 1980s BASIC-style imperative messiness is kicked down a few notches — say to 85% — then it really does work. You get all the advantages of functional programming, but without the extreme mental effort and unmaintainability that increases as you get closer and closer to perfectly pure.Getting to the point of it, the pure functional people are the most annoying people in the world. The world has state. You need state.
Posted by Matt McKnight at 11:54 AM View Comments
I am not sure if people who haven't been doing machine learning can appreciate how weird GPT-3 is or what "few-shot learner" means.
In normal NLP machine learning, you might start with a pre-trained language model that encodes the relationships between words of a language. You then build a training set of data, probably 1000s of items where you have labels applied to text, correct translations, answers to questions, and things like that. You then train the model to minimize error on that training set. Then, with the trained model, you send it new samples of text and it spits out a label, translation, or answer as appropriate.
With GPT-3, a much bigger language model, trained to just predict the next word, you don't have to do any of that. You construct the whole task in the last bit, where you would normally be sending a trained model new samples of text. The trick is, you send in a description of the task in with the text. So you could send in:
translate from English to French: hat => chapeau, cat => chat, hello =>and it would send back "bonjour".
Posted by Matt McKnight at 12:24 PM View Comments
Labels: gpt-3, machine learning, nlp
Posted by Matt McKnight at 1:17 PM View Comments