flopska's comments

On: Galton Board

[flopska]

Ah, the good old BLUE (Best linear unbiased estimator). Had this in statistics and really really liked the proof.

On: How Claude Shannon Re-Invented Information (2017)

[flopska]

I recently read the Shannon biography 'A Mind at Play' [0] which I guess is the full version of the article (same authors). It does (IMHO) a very good job at explaining entropy / information.

[0] https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/A-Mind-at-Play/Jimmy-...

[goldfeld → flopska]

I enjoyed the story but found the author(s) practically peddling Shannon's importance as if any of that was needed. All in all the writing in form and substance seemed to me of low quality and in search of dramatic revision and editing. Great history job and lazy writing,

[woodandsteel → goldfeld]

>I enjoyed the story but found the author(s) practically peddling Shannon's importance as if any of that was needed.

The vast majority of the public have never heard of Shannon, or have but don't really understand how important he was, so yes, it was needed.

On: Evolutionary algorithm outperforms deep-learning machines at video games

[flopska]

There are some papers from Prof. Braun describing experiments where he uses mutations from genetic / evolutionary algorithms to find the optimal structure of a neural net.

On: From shallow to deep learning in fraud

[flopska]

They write in the text that their model featured nonlinear transformations. I think the picture shows a simplified view and as the plots don't have labels it's not clear which space is regarded.

On: Today is World Backup Day – a friendly reminder to backup and check restores

[flopska]

I'm using ZFS on my home server. The backups of my main system are created with the ubuntu desktop utility and written to the server via NFS. This means I have incremental backups and the backups themselves are protected from a hardware failure using raidz. A problem with this approach is the possibility to rm -rf /mnt/backup - that's why I only start and mount the server when I need it. It's not running 24/7.