| About me | http://www.vlakshman.com/ |
Two truths and a lie:
The movie song was filmed in Ukraine. The blue building in the background is the Kyiv presidential palace.
The song is about an excellent fish sandwich: Nah, tuna, tuna, tuna, tuna, too ...
At the Oscars, none of the dancers were Indian. One of the leads is Lebanese-Canadian.
I'm discovering the calm reflectiveness of Chinese poetry thanks to the translation by Arthur Waley.
Here's a poem by a bureaucrat posted to a distant outpost of empire:
Happy #BlackHistoryMonth !
You know the drill by now. I don't like talking about Black history. Americans know Black history. I want to talk about white American history. In other words, racism, and the erasure of both positive achievements of, and injustices suffered by, non-white people. That's what people don't know.
Try this: Ask your white US friends what the statue of liberty celebrates.
Now ask your Black friends. Or French folk of any color.
1/N
Fun fact - #layoffs are a social contagion amongst businesses, and do little (to nothing) to actually help companies recover during economic downturns.
Don’t take my word for it - this comes from years of study and scholarly research:
https://news.stanford.edu/2022/12/05/explains-recent-tech-layoffs-worried/
As layoffs in the tech sector mount, Stanford Graduate School of Business Professor Jeffrey Pfeffer is worried. Research – by him, and others – has shown that the stress layoffs create takes a devastating toll on behavioral and physical health and increases mortality and morbidity substantially. Layoffs literally kill people, he said.
Just a reminder for folks out there that you can do meaningful, impactful, and (yes) well-paid work in ML without needing a PhD, let alone the doorstop CVs full of top-tier conference papers that ML grads from the prestigious programs all seem to have these days.
Domain expertise, knowing the non-ML state of the art, knowing what problems to solve, and knowing what counts as a good-enough solution are all *much* more valuable than ICML publications. Don't let people tell you otherwise.
@dahukanna @futurebird I have a chemistry degree, and basically every year, they’d do an intro lecture saying that same thing:
Chem 101: “here’s how stuff basically works”
Organic chemistry: “yeah, everything we said about bonds and atoms was a lie. “
Quantum chemistry: “hah! You believed that crap? None of that stuff even exists! At best it’s a probability distribution.”
It was harrowing, but also freeing and a lot of fun.
I wish programming was taught the same way.
mekka okereke 
Keith Hoodlet 
Rich Harang
Luke Kanies