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phowon

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My roommate has a cat who mostly hangs out in the living room. I never had pets growing up, so I never interact with it. Every so often, when I'm walking past it to get around the apartment, it swipes at/scratches me, even drawing blood at times.

Did I also have it coming?

As someone who aggressively uses conda, I do think one of its downsides is how heavy it is. I agree that it's a good one-stop-shop if you want to get an environment up and running with no issues. But if you're not doing any scientific computing for a given project, it might help to use something more lightweight.

I've definitely noticed a much stronger emphasis on wowing visual effects in today's RPG's and a much weaker focus on the story and plot lines as was the case in past games.

This basically started in the PS3 era, where it appeared that the casual consumer's bar of visual graphics were raised high enough that pushed up development costs, to the point where developer couldn't cheaply churn out interesting, experimental titles.

Many people will cite the SNES and PS1 era as the golden age of JRPGs, but I think the PS2 era is under-appreciated. The SNES/PS1 era had a lot of classics, but the PS2 era was absolutely flooded with great, 8/10 JRPGs across all manner of series, benefiting from the gameplay/UI/UX refinements learned from the SNES/PS1 era and the improved hardware capabilities of the PS2. You had participation across all manner of series: from your popular Final Fantasies and Dragon Quests, to Tales, Persona, Star Ocean, Suikoden, Wild Arms, Breath of Fire, Arc the Lad and so on. You had a whole generation of new entrants like Radiata Stories, Shadow Hearts, Atelier, Dark Cloud, Rogue Galaxy, Xenosaga, .Hack, and many others. Not all of these were amazing, but most of these were at least very good, and in particular they were diverse while also being streamlined as some of the visual/gameplay "language" JRPGs become more firmly established. To me, this was the last great age of JRPGs.

As an example, there are many people who like grinding in JRPGs and some even consider it as a defining element of JRPGs (in that a JRPG is not real JRPG if it doesn't have grinding)

I am one such person who is happy to argue for the fact that ability to grind is one of the (maybe two?) defining traits of a JRPG. The option to meaningfully strengthen your player avatar that is not tied to story/game progression is the heart of JRPGs.

Putting aside the whole Schmidhuber debate - where are people getting this idea that causal convolutions are anywhere near the prominence of RNNS/LSTMs?

As far as I'm aware, causal convolutions were used in WaveNet (and subsequent models) and a small number of NLP applications. Meanwhile, LSTM-based models are used in just about every NLP paper, and at least a baseline in the newer ones more dominated by Transformers.

What is it generally used for though? To me, a "k.v" store sounds like a very generic but nice thing to have, but I still don't have a good sense of what it is and what people think of it.

The one place I've run into it is in web development where it's used for caching? In some tutorials I've read.

Put another way, even if you take the strict definition of a rational (optimal) agent, in probably any non-trivial or non-contrived corner case, for any arbitrary set of actions, there exists some utility function and information constraint that can justify that set of arbitrary functions.

Have a set of "irrational actions"? Add in information and computational constraints and the necessity for heuristics, the exact right kind of risk-aversion / novelty-seeking behavior, (or play with the second or higher derivatives of your utility function), add in social dynamics like signaling, repeated games (or incorporate mental burdens that negate the impact of repeated games) etc. There exists some formalized universe where your agent is indeed rational.

I am aware of the origin of the word. I am distinguishing between the generic notion of a meme (which as you pointed out simply means "transmittable idea", which is an incredibly general concept) and the specific notion of an Internet Meme (and, as in OP, 'meme culture', which surely refers to Internet meme culture, and not the culture of transmittable ideas in general).

The later misuse of the word meme to refer only to image macros is also a separate shift.

For example, in jointly learning to align and translate, the attention is certainly not invariant to number of context vectors. You train the attention to take in a fixed number of context vectors and produce a distribution over the fixed number of context vectors

That's not true.

You compute an attention weight across however many context steps you have by computing an interaction between some current decoder hidden state and every encoder hidden state, and normalizing over all of them via a softmax. There is no constraint whatsoever on a fixed context length or a fixed number of context vectors. See section 3.1 in the paper.

I will be happy to discuss and clarify over email.

I'm not sure if you're understanding me correctly.

Attention is generally length invariant. You take some transformation on the hidden representations (/+ inputs) at that each time step, and then you normalize over all the transformed values to get weights that sum to one. No part of this is constrained by length.

For CNNs, any network that has pooling has the potential to be length/dimension invariant. Whether it actually is is a combination of the architectural design and an implementation detail (e.g. some implementations when trying to pool will specifically define a pooling operation over, say, a 9x9 window. You could define the same pooling operation over a variable-dimension window).

The length/dimension invariance aren't a special or novel property. In the case of attention it's built in. In the case of CNNs, the convolutions are not length invariant, but depending on the architecture, the pooling operations are (or can be modified to be).

And convolution-based models still find use in all sorts of cool applications in language, such as: https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.04833

With regards to adversarial discussions, it's one thing to argue about whether method A or method B gives better results in a largely empirical and experimental field. But giving a very misleading characterization of a model is actively detrimental especially when it would give casual readers the impression that the Transformer is a "convolution-based" model, which no one in the field would do.

Like I said - pooling.

You can take the mean over 3 elements or 10 elements just the same. Pooling is lossy, but it seems that if you have the right architecture the model can still learn what it needs to.

It's worth noting that the attention mechanism (at least in RNNs) has always been invariant to inputs lengths. It's a weighted sum with weights computed per element, so there's no length constraint at all.