I'm sorry that you're not mathematically literate but that is no reason to cast aspersions on expositors that have
1) zero obligation to cater to your needs
2) receive zero compensation for producing such expository pieces (since they don't count towards publication records)
>the generally accepted genre?
Indeed "gentle introduction" does not mean spoon food, it means exposition that includes niceties like motivation, examples, and diagrams. It is gentle relative to a research monograph (at which I'm sure your indignation would be astronomical).
Here's my recommendation to you on how to learn mathematics if you're serious about it but don't have the patience to struggle through "gentle introductions" like absolutely every single other practicing mathematician did: head down to your local university math department and ask about grad students willing to tutor. The going rate is ~$100/hr for the kind of spoon feeding you seem to be looking for. Quite steep I know but it's highly skilled labor after all (I'm sure you make about that as a software dev for whom this is above their skillset). But you'll be interested to that it's an inversely sliding scale for just how much spoon feeding is necessary (I personally go as low as $25 for very highly motivated students).
As you know, you can't attack other users like this on HN, regardless of how knowledgeable you are or feel you are. Therefore I've banned this account. If you don't want to keep getting banned on HN, please follow the site guidelines.
Your shop, your rules, obviously. I think that's a shame fwiw and write now against any bans based on a cursory read of their last 3 months of comments or so. As I also did against the disappearing of the comment itself.
You may know better for many reasons. I note our concerns and goals are not necessarily aligned. YMMV.
When someone has a long history of abusing HN, the standards are different. Normally I'd just post a warning in cases like this. Actually, even if this were the first time this particular account had posted abusively, I'd have used a warning rather than a ban. But there are enough abusive comments in this account's history also, and this comment was a particularly clear case of reverting to a long-established pattern.
i'm gonna get downvoted for elitism but it's very clearly "aspirational upvotes" from people that don't actually know any ML and won't ever end up learning any. to wit: no one that actually studies seriously spends this much time wringing their hands over which reference to use.
you don't keep cycling through references that seem better because that's a sure way to never make any progress - you pick a reference and grind through it. maybe with occasional double checking against some other reference sure but you never end up ditching the first one because the cost of changing notations/formalisms/etc is very very high and not worth paying almost ever (since intrinsically they're all talking about the same thing anyway). this is the reason that profs today still teach from the books they learned from 30 years ago.
you don't need vivado to modify the hdl, you need vivado (or some other proprietary xilinx toolchain) to produce the bitstream which actually deploys to the fpga.
That's a level of nitpicking that I didn't bother with.
Of course the Verilog or VHDL is just plaintext, which you can modify anywhere, but to actually do anything with it you need to compile it into a bitstream.
It does make me wonder if someone could set up a CI server to get around proprietary compilers like Vivado. Point the community resource at your source and get back a binary! Obviously you'd need to strip the license ID...
i read polya's book as an undergrad to my detriment. 10 years later and having "solved" several problems, i can authoritatively say that it is not how difficult problems are solved. the real "how to solve it" for problems that aren't exercises is closer to what feynman said in one of his books: a good physicist [or mathematician] has 5-10 problems on their mind at all times and when they learn of a new technique they apply it to their problem. such learning happens by reading monographs, papers, and going to conferences. that is to say that math (or theoretical physics) is socially produced/developed.
No, because the answer is actually "no". Half of the article is dedicated to zero-interest loans which are no different than using a credit card and paying the balance each month.
arnold's proof is the most intuitive and what made it click after years of being responsible for understanding it (several years of algebra at the undergrad and grad level):
there is some slight difference but i don't remember what it is. i wrote a blog post about abel-ruffini based on those two videos and i remember there being some things that were clearer in one rather than the other (but i don't remember which!)
lol people don't understand that science at gerard 't hooft's level is just as petty and vulgar as your local bar.
what i mean is very accomplished scientists brag and sneer and bluster all the time - they feel entitled to and we worship and empower them to. examples abound; read any of feynman's books; landau had a scale by which he measured other scientists; von neumann would chew people out who couldn't keep up with him; the cat fight right now around Mochizuki's proof; etc etc etc. if you've never been around these people you think they're saints when in fact they're almost universally assholes.
it's not unlike ultra-wealthy people competing with each other for the greatest monument to their wealth...
i'm sure someone will respond to me to say something like they need to be this way to accomplish (just like with the slavish worship of the ultra wealthy) what they've accomplished and to this i always present to them john bardeen, who won two nobels and still managed to be a good neighbor.
> you think they're saints when in fact they're almost universally assholes
This does not match my experience, and outside the classroom I have been in 1:1 or 2:1 situations with several Nobel prize winners. I'm commenting on individual demeanor, not whatever happens when departmental politics plays out.
As you describe Bardeen, I would take that to be the norm.
Edit: That much said, the topic article rubs me the wrong way. As someone above says, the tone is harsh.
> von neumann would chew people out who couldn't keep up with him
Imagine what that experience was like from his perspective, constantly explaining simple things to people too lazy to put in the work necessary to have a proper discussion about whatever before ultimately wasting his time. Over and over and over again. That gets old quickly no matter what level you're operating on.
Lol this is exactly what I preemptively alluded to - how we (as a culture) enable this kind of behavior. It becomes even worse when you realize that at least the ultra wealthy pay people for the right to abuse them and von Neumann et al are abusing, frequently, poorly paid junior scientists.
>That gets old quickly no matter what level you're operating on.
If you can't handle being around people that are differently abled from you then the answer is not to take your frustrations out on them. The answer is to stop being around people. No community/culture/society owes anyone, not even people at this level, some kind of pampered sphere of existence that revolves around them.
> If you can't handle being around people that are differently abled from you then the answer is not to take your frustrations out on them.
Of course. But von Neumann was just as human as the people who struggled to keep up with him, he just had different weaknesses. Having low emotional intelligence is every bit as deserving of understanding as having low general intelligence.
> The answer is to stop being around people. No community/culture/society owes anyone, not even people at this level, some kind of pampered sphere of existence that revolves around them.
You sure about that? Society has MASSIVELY benefited from von Neumann's work. If the cost of that was a few people's hurt feelings at his inability to interact with them a way that doesn't hurt their feelings it was a small price to pay.
>You sure about that? Society has MASSIVELY benefited from von Neumann's work. If the cost of that was a few people's hurt feelings at his inability to interact with them a way that doesn't hurt their feelings it was a small price to pay.
The flawed premise implicit in this is that he (or even someone else) wouldn't have produced all the same things while being cordial. More importantly the even greater flaw is the assumption that he wouldn't have produced even more if he'd been easier to work with
You could speculate to that effect, just as easily and correctly as you could speculate that he would have been even more productive still had he surrounded himself with people he didn't consider mentally slow.
Wait what? What did I say that lead you to that conclusion?
I'm sure there were people in his time who would rightly consider him to be slower than they were (and equally sure that he wouldn't be acknowledging that if confronted about it).
My point is more that he had his own flaws, just like the people he had trouble getting along with. Being around slow people _is_ often frustrating, especially if you're more concerned with working than teaching. Was he an ass? Absolutely. But we should we try to understand_why_ he was, rather than just talk about how he should have been kicked out of society. Especially in von Neumann's case, where his net utility to society was insanely high (compare to, say, Mochizuki).
Without reading the paper, I think you have it a little backwards - the IR doesn't itself allow for more general functions. More general functions are possible (in theory) because the frontend (this Triton language) is decoupled from the backend (CUDA) through the IR as an interface. In this way the Triton IR is no less domain specific than XLA (because both are IRs that represent sequences of operators that run on GPU (or TPU or whatever). I guess in theory Triton could be eschewing all of eg cuDNN but most likely it's not as NVIDIA's closed source kernels perform best on their closed source hardware.
Edit: should've read the post before commenting. Looks like they are in fact using LLVM's PTX backend (ie generating cuda kernels from scratch). Kudos to them
I'm sorry that you're not mathematically literate but that is no reason to cast aspersions on expositors that have
1) zero obligation to cater to your needs
2) receive zero compensation for producing such expository pieces (since they don't count towards publication records)
>the generally accepted genre?
Indeed "gentle introduction" does not mean spoon food, it means exposition that includes niceties like motivation, examples, and diagrams. It is gentle relative to a research monograph (at which I'm sure your indignation would be astronomical).
Here's my recommendation to you on how to learn mathematics if you're serious about it but don't have the patience to struggle through "gentle introductions" like absolutely every single other practicing mathematician did: head down to your local university math department and ask about grad students willing to tutor. The going rate is ~$100/hr for the kind of spoon feeding you seem to be looking for. Quite steep I know but it's highly skilled labor after all (I'm sure you make about that as a software dev for whom this is above their skillset). But you'll be interested to that it's an inversely sliding scale for just how much spoon feeding is necessary (I personally go as low as $25 for very highly motivated students).