Really interesting, I like the kind of “stream of consciousness” approach to the content, it’s refreshing. What’s also interesting is the fact that the author felt the need to apologize and preface it with some forced deference due to some kind of internet bashing he certainly received. I hope this doesn’t discourage him to keep publishing his notes (although I think it will). Why are we getting so human-phobic?
I would be a little surprised if he gets discouraged and I would also really hope he doesn't. The author is a statistics professor at CMU, and everything of his that I've read, including his textbooks, are awesome and written with similar clarity to his blog post.
Yes this is a great discovery. It refreshing to see someone else with the same intuition but can put it into words. I especially like the isEven thought experiment. That is a big fundamental limitation.
It is nice and it's interesting how if you go read stuff like Einstein's general relativity paper you (or at least I did) find that it's actually quite similar and not so dense.
Dense papers are a way to hide the ugliness of the ideas presented. Beautiful ideas always have an intuitive and clear explanation. The burden is on the author(s) to explain the idea in a reader-friendly way. If they don't, it's either due to the journal/literature pressure, or because the author(s) stole the idea from someone else without fully understanding it.
It's an understanderable deference when stumbling through a huge new field and its freshly minted jargon when tidying up and tying the new jargon to long standing terms in older fields.
"As near as I can tell when the new guard says X they're pretty much talking about what we called Y"
Does 'attention' in the AI bleeding edge really correspond to kernal smoothing | mapping attenuation | damping ?
This is (one of) the elephants in a darkened room that Cosma is groping around and showing his thoughts as he goes.
> I hope this doesn’t discourage him to keep publishing his notes
Doubtful, aside from the inevitable attenuation with age, he's been airing his thoughts for at least two decades, eg: his wonderful little:
A Rare Blend of Monster Raving Egomania and Utter Batshit Insanity (2002)
