Yes. Surely it's about Chapo. I'd certainly not call them as 'greedy' or 'unprincipled' as the people they criticise. However I'll not waste this opportunity to call them bland, effete and ignorant.
Late reply. It was your comment that had been downvoted into the negative when I came across it. So I was engaging in a kind of off-topic defense of your comment. ;-)
I'm absolutely convinced that the world would be a better, smarter, more civil place if Twitter simply didn't exist at all. The tragedy for me is that whoever hacked Twitter wasted the opportunity to do something that permanently maimed the platform.
Despite its ubiquity, the Linux kernel is not actually the golden standard for safety or performance. Not even for code quality. Ada remains the language of choice in areas where safety is actually crucial. Rust isn't going to take it's spot either.
I am inclined to agree. By the way: when I first read about Rust and its "safety features" that make it appealing to people, the first programming language that came to mind was Ada. I suppose it lacks the hype (and consequently a vibrant ecosystem, IMO) and people hold absurd misconceptions of the language[1]. :/ I am trying my best to dissipate those misconceptions on Hacker News; hopefully it does not count as shilling. :P
If any of you reading this comment is interested, you may want to check out my previous comments regarding Ada.[2]
By the way, just to be on topic: I found Linus' opinion on Ada vs Rust here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20838125. He said "We've had the system people who used Modula-2 or Ada, and I have to say Rust looks a lot better than either of those two disasters.". That is all though, he does not get into explaining why he believes Ada to be a disaster. Again, "I do not see any reasons given for why he considers Ada a disaster. Cannot really do much with this opinion as it is."
With Ada you can't use dynamic memory allocation and pointers safely, unless you buy into SPARK, which is heavier-weight than Rust (and also post-dates Rust).
> Standard Ada supports safe use of pointers (“access types” in Ada) via strongtype checking, but safety is guaranteed only for programs where there is no explicit deallocation of pointed-to objects
This validates "With Ada you can't use dynamic memory allocation and pointers safely, unless you buy into SPARK". (GC not relevant in this context.)
> In this work, we propose a restricted form of pointers for Ada that is safe enough to be included in the SPARK subset. As our main contribution, we show how to adapt the ideas underlying the safe pointers from permission-based languages like Rust [3] or ParaSail [13]
This validates that the pointer support in SPARK "post-dates Rust".
"heavier-weight" is arguable. I'll withdraw that assertion. SPARK is definitely less expressive than Rust though; it doesn't have lifetime variables, and it doesn't allow borrows of stack values:
> The most notable one is that SPARK does not allow general access types. The reason is that we did not want to deal with accesses to variables defined on the stack and accessibility levels.
It's worth noting that Linus Torvalds does not write life-critical software. Take his opinions with a pinch of salt. He's made some of the most incredibly valuable contributions to computing, however this does not make him an authority on all things programming. He's anything but infallible.
Simply filling the disk by any means runs the risk of your incriminating (or whatever) information being retained in a sector that got remapped out from under you that you can no longer write to.
Wiping the encryption key takes care of that problem, as well as being much faster.
Thank you, this is what I was trying to avoid doing by simply filling an SSD with random data. As you mention, I suppose FDE is better, but now you have to ask yourself whether OS level or hardware level is best. In this case if you override an encrypted partition with a fresh OS installation it wont matter as much since most of what will be left will be gibberish.
Sometimes I do just that, I'll install Linux encrypted, and then reinstall later without migrating any bytes. My main concern is work related / personal finance documents being left over on a laptop. I've tested plenty of forensic utilities on my system after erasing files.
We called them "swirlies" in middle school/high school. But I've never actually seen someone get one, and it could well be mostly apocryphal. And it wasn't something you sought out, it was like, you were getting bullied.
That's not what I got from LeCun's comment. I read it more like:
LeCun - "ML is biased when datasets are biased. It's not the responsibility of researchers to ensure that ML is used responsibly in all cases, but the responsibility of the engineers of a particular implementation who need to use the correct models for the task at hand."
> "...I don't see any ethical obligation to use "unbiased" datasets for pure research or tinkering with models..."
I don't think his comment was addressing the larger ethical discussion at all. I didn't interpret it as a discussion of ethical responsibilities, rather a strictly technical, matter-of-fact statement about the nature of ML training.
Please don't interpret my comment as an attack on yours, it was more pointing out I interpreted his statement differently.
I guess I see your view and my view as two sides of the same coin - that “research ethics” is different from “application ethics”. I inferred that view from the following exchange:
Twitter user: “ML researchers need to be more careful selecting their data so that they don't encode biases like this.”
YLC: “Not so much ML researchers but ML engineers. The consequences of bias are considerably more dire in a deployed product than in an academic paper.”
Perhaps I’m wrong. That’s the whole problem with Twitter though - you can’t convey much nuance or sophistication in 140 characters.
your summary is not making a lot of sense either to be honest. well, at least the last part...
> I'm open to being convinced if she had made any effort to show/prove that "use of biased datasets in research" is correlated with "biased outcomes in real world production deployments".
what does that mean? is there anything that would auto-magically eliminate bias if it were introduced into research?
> what does that mean? is there anything that would auto-magically eliminate bias if it were introduced into research?
Let me rephrase. Yann is basically saying "bias is the engineer's responsibility, not the researcher's". Gebru (presumably) disagrees.
Now I might agree with Gebru if:
(a) she can show empirically that "researchers releasing biased datasets/models" is correlated with "real-world deployment of said datasets/models that leads to injustice"; and
(b) she can make a convincing argument why one person (a researcher) should be responsible for the actions of another (an engineer).
But she didn't address either these points on Twitter. She actually didn't bother to address anything on Twitter. Her whole argument was "You're wrong, I'm tired of explaining, you need to listen to minorities, I'm not going to engage".
That's not reasoned discussion or debate. It's posturing and point-scoring. The Twitter format only serves to encourage this type of interaction, so Yann basically gave up on the whole platform.
okay, so... you seem to understand where the other researcher is coming from and agree with most points. i am also going to assume that you read, or perhaps know, some of the sources cited numerous times on this page.
but because she did not explicitly state those on twitter, or because of the way she brought it up, we need to invalidate her whole argument?
> but because she did not explicitly state those on twitter, or because of the way she brought it up, we need to invalidate her whole argument?
No-one said anything that could be remotely interpreted as "her whole argument is invalid".
I'm sure he'd be more than happy to discuss with Gebru where he agrees and where he differs on his Facebook page or at a conference panel. I think he explicitly said this.
He's just decided that Twitter is not the platform for that kind of reasoned debate. Gebru's attitude in this instance - providing nothing more than "I'm tired of this, you need to listen to marginalized communities" - was the straw that broke the camel's back.
Because the points of disagreement are the reason she's upset, and the reason there is an argument in the first place.
Of course she's right about all the things that everyone agrees on. Everyone in the conversation is right about most points, if you break down their stance into a list of points.
It's not that the points of disagreement invalidate the correct points, it's that having a bunch of correct points doesn't really tell you much about the thesis.
