I needed some whole black-mustard seeds that our coop doesn’t have and went to an Indian grocery. This is why I love this city. Of course they had two shelves of every kind of mustard seed imaginable, but then this – I’m still in shock – all of this is just peppercorns….
Every packet is a different kind!
Today was cold, gray and very windy, but I got to hear the ocean and walk down a tiny trail and so it was pretty significant.
The latest three points on that graph, interestingly show reinforcement learning related projects, applied to games by Deepmind and OpenAI. Particularly AlphaGo Zero and slightly more general AlphaZero take ridiculous amount of compute, but are not applicable in the real world applications because much of that compute is needed to simulate and generate the data these data hungry models need. OK, so we can now train AlexNet in minutes rather than days, but can we train a 1000x bigger AlexNet in days and get qualitatively better results? Apparently not…
“This gradual shift from rich, big corporations to government sponsored institutes suggests to me that the interest in this kind of research within these corporations (I think of Google and Facebook) is actually slowly winding down.”
Saw friends today who said they also can no longer afford to live here, not even in places like Beacon, so moving further away, like Northwest Connecticut away. Looking at places that have barns in their backyards.
Both are accomplished and talented architects.
One got a job locally, the other will commute from the last Metro North stop 3 times a week.
“We belong to the future. We must put ourselves into it, each one at his situation. We must not plant ourselves against the new and attempt to retain a beautiful world, one that must perish. Nor must we try to build, with creative fantasy, a new one that claims to be immune to the ravages of becoming. We have to formulate the recent. But that we can only do if we say yes to it; yet with incompatible heart we have to retain our awareness of all that is destructive and inhuman in it. Our time is given to us as a soil on which we stand, as a task that we have to master.”
“If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.”
– Lewis Carroll
Sort of the point of that Frost’s Road Not Taken poem.
Also, I miss Mediterranean.
I love that there is fog now, and that I can hear the foghorns somewhere impossibly far away in the sea that may or may not exist in that milky nothingness outside the windows, and that the usual expressway noise can do nothing about it.
Particularly Anna Sorokina and Artur Samarin stories – both fascinating!
I actually kind of sympathize with them both – the system is no longer set up for equality of opportunity, and they managed to circumvent it – in some ways their only fault is not being born lucky.
Jill Stein though – I was actually one of her marks who gave her recount money in 2016. Never giving anything to the Green Party ever again – for me, they will forever be associated with cheats and hacks, with cynicism not quite the same level as Republicans but getting there.
tinfoilparachute 