It's true that these are very different activities, but I think most ML researchers would agree that it's actually the creation of ImageNet that sparked the deep learning revolution. CNNs were not a novel method in 2012; the novelty was having a dataset big and sophisticated enough that it was actually possible to learn a good vision model from without needing to hand-engineer all the parts. Fei-fei saw this years in advance and invested a lot of time and career capital setting up the conditions for the bitter lesson to kick in. Building the dataset was 'easy' in a technical sense, but knowing that a big dataset was what the field needed, and staking her career on it when no one else was doing or valuing this kind of work, was her unique contribution, and took quite a bit of both insight and courage.
Even if you charge $10/hr, or whatever the market rate would be for street parking spots, you still need an enforcement mechanism to prevent people overstaying.
In general, the idea of a "market rate" for any given property depends fundamentally on a system of property rights actually being enforced.
Market rate is $4.10 per hour during peak hours. But it falls off precipitously per hour and ceases to be enforced around 6pm. For overstays those little white golf cart trucks have cameras that check license plates for permits. I recently got a parking permit for $200 or so after paying like $500 in tickets for various infractions including “Parking on Grades, wheels straight”. So I very much want anyone overstaying a 2hr parking spot to get tickets and or towed to make room. And I can speak from experience having just recently being towed, that the parking downtown is ruthlessly enforced. It will cost you about $700 if you’re towed.
I've always wondered what the market rate for parking would be if you allowed for things other than parking like restaurant tables, a shed, a tiny skyscraper...
Senators, especially committee chairmen, have quite a bit of implicit leverage, beyond the direct leverage of subpoenas or directly cutting funding to an offending agency.
Any given Senator is to some extent constantly in a favor-trading game with executive branch officials. People from the President on down need congressional cooperation to get their pet provisions into bills, programs funded, nominees approved, etc. A Senator can tell a White House official "I'd love to help you with that, however I have this issue with this agency not responding to my requests". Assuming it's a reasonable thing, whoever at the agency is in charge of this then gets an irate call from their boss's boss's boss ordering them to cooperate.
Of course this mostly doesn't actually get played out, because everyone understands the dynamic that defying senatorial requests will ultimately cost the President in terms of cooperation on other issues. So the norm is mostly to comply with reasonable requests, unless you're quite sure that it's a top-level priority where the White House really wants to take a stand.
> The government doesn't have to win an antitrust trial in order to create competition. As the saying goes, "the process is the punishment."
Regardless of what you think of Google or this case specifically, this is an argument for authoritarianism: that it is legitimate for the government to "punish" any company at will, based only on them falling into political disfavor.
> ... the only punishment Google would have to bear from this trial would come after the government won its case, when the judge decided on a punishment (the term of art is "remedy") for Google.
Yes, this is called the rule of law. Punishment comes through the courts, after a guilty verdict. The government has to actually win the argument as to what remedies would be proportionate under the law. In this case the judge didn't buy it. It's fine to disagree with his reasoning (or with the law), but the fantasizing about extrajudicial punishment here is frankly un-American.
There's very little reason that Google should have been protected from the evidence of its wrongdoing being made public. That's not extrajudicial punishment, that is public record. Justice should be seen to be done as well as done.
Who can know how appropriate or not the remedy was when the evidence is hidden?
For full disclosure: I'm neither a google employee nor a US citizen.
Sure, there's a strong public interest in having proceedings on record. US civil cases are supposed to have a presumption of openness, which the judge weighs against other interests, like protecting trade secrets, confidential business information, privacy of third parties, etc.
The public record argument is fine; it's just a different argument than the extrajudicial punishment advocated by the original post.
The public interest is in judging the trial process, not in judging the defendant.
Suppose the government charges you with murder, searches your house, and finds your sex toy collection. At trial they present some elaborate thesis about how you used a sex toy to kill someone, but do not convince the jury, so you're found not guilty. The public has a legitimate interest in judging that the trial was handled with integrity and that the correct verdict was reached. They do not have a legitimate interest in judging you based on whatever private information presented at trial might in some way embarrass you (eg, photos of your sex toy collection). On balance, it could be that the public-record interest does in fact justify making public the evidence of the sex toys, but you have to justify it on those terms. The transparency is not itself intended to be punitive.
We are talking about an extremely powerful corporation in an antitrust case not a person. It does not need to be defended in this way, which is a level of protection rarely afforded to individuals.
There is a definite public interest in understanding how Google conducts itself given the reach and impact it has.
There is no way for the public to have confidence in the trial process if it is conducted in secret, and given the outcome every reason to question the process.
I'm surprised anybody objective would defend this.
>This is an argument for authoritarianism, that the government should be able to "punish" any company at will based only on them falling into political disfavor.
No its more like, the process of transparency harms the company enough that they will shift their own mentality to ensure they never have to participate in a transparent process.
If there's a general standard of transparency applied to all companies, fine. There are costs to increasing transparency, but certainly you could argue for that policy.
The argument that we should cheer on the use of government power to target a specific company, to selectively expose their dirty laundry as punishment for a crime they have not been convicted of, is what I found noxious in the original post.
The direct reference was Bill Gates being forced to testify about internet explorer. Its hard to argue with that particular case. There are very few people who argue that the results of that intervention were unwarranted.
I do find it a bit curious however, where later in the article theres a discussion about explicit collusion between corporates and the government. I vastly prefer the state and corps to be at odds with each other, than in bed with each other. Do any of the allegations towards the end register on your authoritarianismometer?
Regardless of the effects, I don't think the case against MS was brought with the intent to "punish" MS through the trial process. The government brought the case because it thought it could win, it did win, and a judicial remedy was imposed. Trials are inherently unpleasant, but a just system tries to minimize this, not exploit it.
Any unjust policy (including just dispensing with trials altogether and allowing the executive to arbitrarily break up companies) will get to the 'desirable' outcome in some cases. That doesn't make it a just policy.
The specific allegation in the post is that the Trump administration will not appeal the verdict because Sundar gave $1M to Trump's inauguration. As far as I know, the government has not yet indicated whether it will appeal, so the claim that "Trump just paid him back, 40,000 times over" is in fact not true. (whether it becomes true at some point in the future, it was a falsehood at the time the author wrote it). It's also quite plausible that a Republican administration wouldn't appeal the verdict just due to being more pro-business in general, even without explicit corruption. But it's precisely because we have such a corrupt executive that it becomes all the more important to stick up for the rule of law. The correct response to authoritarianism is not to advocate for more authoritarianism!
>Regardless of the effects, I don't think the case against MS was brought with the intent to "punish" MS through the trial process. The government brought the case because it thought it could win, it did win, and a judicial remedy was imposed. Trials are inherently unpleasant, but a just system tries to minimize this, not exploit it.
Maybe. But then why was the google case actively sheltered and hidden from the public. The optics were considered in at least one of these cases.
Scholarly consensus is that the "Gospel of Matthew" was not written by the apostle Matthew and the "Gospel of John" was not written by the apostle John:
For that assertion to hold water, "scholarly consensus" would have to define "scholarly" so narrowly as to exclude the vast majority of scholars (it seems like it should go without saying that most scholars in this area are Christian who maintain apostolic authorship).
Perhaps they are dismissing scholars who identify as Christian? That would be quite the catch-22.
To me, it is apparent that the data cannot support any clean division between two "sides", it tells a more complicated story about sometimes there was apostolic authorship, sometimes not, and sometimes we don't really know.
I would suggest that the real academic consensus is that we can confidently rule out the us-vs-them preoccupation that is common in lay discussion.
"No sides in science" is a silly idea. Of course, scholars have biases. They're human. Humans like to group up and gang up against other.
Specific to Bible Scholarship, I wager the two big sides are scholars who have faith (i.e., Nicene Creed) and scholars who have little. Bruce Metzger who had some faith, and Bart Ehrman who has none. RSV/ESV which says Jesus is the "Son of God" in Mark 1, and NRSVue which deletes "Son of God" from Mark 1.
There are plenty of YouTube videos that go into the subject thoroughly. I couldn't find the one I watched recently stating the notion that the gospels ever could have been totally anonymous is absurd. Nobody would take you seriously, reputation was everything in the ancient world. The people of the time knew exactly who wrote what, even if there weren't any direct titles on the actual manuscripts.
So then who wrote Hebrews? It wasn't Paul's writing style, and it doesn't name it's author. Matthew and Luke don't name the Q source material they have in common. Let's take gMark, someone composes it around 70AD somewhere. It gets copied and sent to other communities elsewhere. Decades later it's attributed to Mark.
Reputation has never been everything & as crazy conspiracy theories like Qanon & antivax prove, some sizable fraction of the population will find a way to believe whatever they want to.
Sure. They had crazy conspiracy theories back then too. Anyone can believe what they want. But reputation means something today just as it did back then. It's just today we outsource that function to the academic system.
Where do the attributions come from, Papias? He claimed Mark wrote down Peter's teachings in the wrong order, and that Matthew's gospel was written in Hebrew. But the Matthew we have is in Greek, copies from Mark and shares other Greek material with Luke (Q source).
They're not proposing to apply tensor decomposition to an existing collection of weights. It's an architecture in which the K, V, and Q tensors are constructed as a product of factors. The model works with the factors directly and you just need to compute their product on the forward pass (and adjoints on the backwards pass), so there's no decomposition.
You're totally right there must be supervision; it's just a matter of how the term is used.
"Supervised learning" for LLMs generally means the system sees a full response (eg from a human expert) as supervision.
Reinforcement learning is a much weaker signal: the system has the freedom to construct its own response / reasoning, and only gets feedback at the end whether it was correct. This is a much harder task, especially if you start with a weak model. RL training can potentially struggle in the dark for an exponentially long period before stumbling on any reward at all, which is why you'd often start with a supervised learning phase to at least get the model in the right neighborhood.
Backprop itself doesn't invert the computation, but it does give you the direction for an incremental move towards the inverse (a 'nudge' as the article puts it). That is, given a sufficiently nice function f and an appropriate loss ||f(x) - y*||^2, gradient descent wrt x will indeed recover the inverse x* = f^{-1}(y*) since that is what minimizes the loss. I assume this what the article is pointing at.
If you want to be picky, it's true that the direct analogue of continuous optimization would be discrete optimization (integer programming, TSP, etc) rather than decision problems like SAT. But there are straightforward reductions between the two so it's common to speak of optimization problems as being in P or NP even though that's not entirely accurate.
