Source?

Just break the law lol. The law is made up horseshit 😆

Thank you for this. I couldn’t find this for some reason.

Unironically I would be literally thrilled to contribute to this brain drain. I’d drop everything and get on a plane right this very second for a chance to do a PhD in literally any other country.

If anyone is looking to fill a electrical engineering PhD position literally anywhere but America then I’m ya boy.

But are we though? Because based on my research, it’s a lot harder to get into the EU than it used to be like 10 years ago. It’s not as if anti-immigration sentiment isn’t picking up there either.

I don’t really know why anybody would want to come here anymore for university

I mean if my advisor can secure the funding, the two reasons I plan on doing my PhD in America are (1) I like my advisor and (2) I went to school here and I don’t like my chances of being accepted somewhere else. Like I would rather do a PhD in literally any other country.

Me not doing the midterm exam due on Sunday 😭

please be sarcastic I beg you

Generally speaking I keep everything personal to myself unless it’s to my advantage because I live in America, and America destroys anything/anyone inconvenient for business, so I’m not going to give assholes the ammunition to shoot me with. So no I really don’t share my neurodivergence with people, at least not IRL.

If AI spits out stuff it’s been trained on

For Stable Diffusion, it really doesn’t just spit out what it’s trained on. Very loosely, it starts with white noise, then adds noise and denoises the result based on your prompt, and it keeps doing this until it converges to a representation of your prompt.

IMO your premise is closer to true in practice, but still not strictly true, about large language models.

Honestly…I don’t.

Like I love my parents but we’re not really into any of the same stuff. (Well technically all of us went to engineering school, but they’re not really interested in engineering/math/physics for its own sake like I am.)

But also that’s fine with me because I know they’re there for me.

For similar reasons, I’m not very close to any of my family members, even the ones I like… which is fine. We don’t need to be close to love/support/trust each other.

So I think that if you really share zero interests with your son, it’s fine if you acknowledge his interests and remind him that you’ll be there for him and that you love him.

All of them.

USA sux

“Gradient descent” ≈ on a “hilly” (mathematical) surface, try to find the lowest point by finding the lowest point near an initial guess. “Gradient” is basically the steepness, or rate that the thing you’re trying to optimize changes as you move through “space”. The gradient tells you mathematically which direction you need to go to reach the bottom. “Descent” means “try to find the minimum”.

I’m glossing over a lot of details, particularly what a “surface” actually means in the high dimensional spaces that AI uses, but a lot of problems in mathematical optimization are solved like this. And one of the steps in training an AI agent is to do an optimization, which often does use a gradient descent algorithm. That being said, not every process that uses gradient descent is necessarily AI or even machine learning. I’m actually taking a course this semester where a bunch of my professor’s research is in optimization algorithms that don’t use a gradient descent!

They created a good product so people used it and there were no alternatives when it got shit.

They created an inherently centralizing implementation of a video sharing platform. Even if it was done with good intentions (which it wasn’t, it was some capitalist’s hustle, and its social importance is a side effect), we should basically always condemn centralizing implementations of a given technology because they reinforce existing power structures regardless of the intentions of their creators.

It’s their fault because they’re a corporation that does what corporations do. Even when corporations try to do right by the world (which is an extremely generous appraisal of YouTube’s existence), they still manage to create centralizing technologies that ultimately serve to reinforce their existing power, because that’s all they can do. Otherwise, they would have set themselves up as a non-profit or some other type of organization. I refuse to accept the notion of a good corporation.

There’s no lock in. They don’t force you off the platform if you post elsewhere (like twitch did).

That’s a good point, but while there isn’t a de jure lock-in for creators, there is a de facto lock-in that prevents them from migrating elsewhere. Namely, that YouTube is a centralized, proprietary service, which can’t be accessed from other services.

Also: model trains. I was into model trains for a few years, but I realized that I didn’t really have the life experience to make a fulfilling model trainset. Like I did the thing, I made a (really childish) layout with some crappy blocks and streets, and I got the trains to move and stuff, but it didn’t…say much? It was “I’m a child and I like trains”, which is great! Probably wouldn’t have become interested in trains at all otherwise!

But I want more…I always want more. I need to go more hardcore into the few things I can actually tolerate doing…

And as a child, I saw some really cool trainsets built by adults that told stories, made me laugh, made my parents laugh, made me feel awe at the storytelling and creativity of the craft. Even my cousin, who built a trainset in his basement in his early twenties, had a much more inspired trainset than mine (when I was much younger, like 10 or 12). His trainset was cool. He studied how trains worked, how to make a realistic line with realistic scenery and infrastructure. His trainset reflected who he was, and ultimately forecasted what he became. He literally works for a rail company now designing the train tracks.

So I’m kinda “saving” that hobby for when I’m in my 60’s after I integrate enough life experience (and hopefully some capital) to build a trainset that really reflects the person I ultimately became.

My trainset is gonna have a sick, functioning roller coaster, some overly complicated automated control circuits, some heavy metal references, some intentionally goofy shit, serious shit, an anarcho-communist bent, a layout that at least is informed by modern infrastructure design, etc., because that’s at least partially the person I will have become.

Roller coasters. I’m too heavy to go on them, too poor to afford to ride them, too busy to simulate them.

Literally every corporation does or attempts to do the same thing.

Exactly. Every single corporation is evil and should be dismantled 🔥🔥🔥. This is just one of a thousand reasons to do so.

“Absolute evil” is a bit of a stretch, but it’s YouTube/Google’s fault (by closing off and centralizing their video platform) that it is impossible to go elsewhere for videos.

With just the information provided, not weird at all. Good luck with your program 🙂.