After returning from vacation I went in to approve the blog comments that were sitting in the possibly-spam folder. This gave me the chance to skim through a couple hundred comments, and there were some gems! We often have great comments but I just read them as they come in, one at a time. Seeing a week of comments all at once made me appreciate what we’ve got here. So, thanks everyone for contributing to our discussions!

Here are a few fun comments from last week:

From Anoneuoid:

A friend and I were talking the other day about all the people who seem to be on the phone (via headset) all day at work. This is particularly common for jobs like cab/uber driver, convenience store clerk, and mail/package delivery.

Who exactly is available to talk all day with them? Then we realized who must be on the other end of the conversation: other people with similar jobs.

That lead to the next idea, what if for every “crazy” person who hears voices and talks to themself there is another “crazy” person on the other end?

Now yes, this theory requires assuming some form of natural long distance communication is possible. And also must be highly compressed/encrypted to escape detection for so long. But all of that sounds like what you would expect evolutionarily anyway.

I love how that comment starts with an amusing observation and then goes off the deep end. It’s kind of like science standup.

And this from Jd:

Random forest, neural nets, bagging, and boosting sounds so cool. You know, if your sponsors are staring across the horizon of big data and you offer something like random forest, they may just say, “yes…yes…that’s the thing.” Mr P is sorta cool, but it sounds kinda like a hip hop artist. But if you say, well we ran this Bayesian linear regression with a couple of variables, how are you gonna compete against the feedforward artificial neural network multilayer perceptron model?? It’s like boring old stats vs the Transformers.

Finally, a serious one from Anonymous, relating to the controversial unreproducible paper from Google on chip design:

This repository has been up for over a year, right? Have things changed since this statement from Andrew Kahng? https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vkPRgJEiLIyT22AkQNAxO8JtIKiL95diVdJ_O4AFtJ8/edit

Relevant quote:

“Further, I believe it is well-understood that the reported methods are not fully implementable based on what is provided in the Nature paper and the Circuit Training repository. While the RL method is open-source, key preprocessing steps and interfaces are not yet available. I have been informed that the Google team is actively working to address this. Remedying this gap is necessary to achieve scientific clarity and a foundation upon which the field can move forward.”

I wonder what ended up happening with that. My guess is that everyone moved forward and nobody cares about that particular method anymore, but I have no idea.