Blog


  • The hardware lottery

    Sara Hooker

    The performance of an algorithm is fundamentally intertwined with the hardware and software it runs on.

  • The bitter lesson

    Richard Sutton

    We have to learn the bitter lesson that building in how we think we think does not work in the long run.

  • Discussion of Software 2.0

    Andrej Karpathy & Dogan Ulus

    So we need to design neural networks to work with other solutions, not to eradicate.

  • Excerpts from François Chollet's 2017 essays on deep learning's limitations and its program-like, modular future.

  • Why MIT stopped teaching SICP

    Yarden Katz & Ron Garret

    The "analysis-by-synthesis" view of SICP became irrelevant. Nowadays, we do programming by poking.

  • When people feared computers

    Adrienne LaFrance

    Don't forget that you're in charge, not the computer.

  • A brief history of statistical learning

    Gareth James et al.

    Though the term statistical learning is fairly new, many of the concepts that underlie the field were developed long ago.

  • Advice to a young mathematician

    Michael Atiyah et al.

    You may learn from others but interpret what you learn in your own way.

  • Architecture astronauts

    Joel Spolsky

    When you go too far up, abstraction-wise, you run out of oxygen.

  • What a scientific theory is

    Stephen Hawking

    Any physical theory is always provisional, in the sense that it is only a hypothesis: you can never prove it.

  • You and your research

    Richard Hamming

    Why do so few scientists make significant contributions and so many are forgotten in the long run?

  • Consequently "known" refers to values that are both available and considered worthwhile to include in model specifications.

  • The threats to computing science

    Edsger W. Dijkstra

    The question of whether Machines Can Think, a question of which we now know that it is about as relevant as the question of whether Submarines Can Swim.

  • Aspects of scientific method

    George Box

    Since all models are wrong the scientist cannot obtain a "correct" one by excessive elaboration.

  • The function of the machine

    George Orwell

    The machine would even encroach upon the activities we now class as 'art'; it is doing so already, via the camera and the radio.

  • A cloud shedding a shower of words

    Lev Vygotsky

    What is contained simultaneously in thought unfolds sequentially in speech.

  • Not a vox populi, but a vox expertorum

    Francis Galton & F. H. Perry-Coste

    I heartily wish that the case were otherwise.

  • The machine of speculative knowledge

    Jonathan Swift

    The most ignorant person, at a reasonable charge, and with a little bodily labour, might write books in philosophy, poetry, politics, laws, mathematics, and theology, without the least assistance from genius or study.