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A grad student told me a joke that captured the impossibility of developing an intuition for machine learning's highly dimensional spaces, attributed to one of the field's most senior figures, Geoffrey Hinton: "How do you deal with a fourteen-dimensional space? To deal with a fourteen-dimensional s…

The instructor asks us to look for patterns in the space, and the students find one: the movies seem to have separated by genre. Romances are on one side, while action movies are on the other. A student asks how the algorithm knew about genre, when the input only contained rating data. "It seems li…

[...] he has just finished an internship at a large software company known for such techniques, and he is convinced that feature learning is the future. He derisively calls feature representations like MFCCs "handcrafted," suggesting that they are archaic and ready to be replaced.

Today [...] bandwidth constraints are largely considered a thing of the past, and recommender systems are no longer commonly framed as techniques for optimizing the bandwidth of a computer network. When people suggest that recommender systems are necessary to manage an overwhelming amount of inform…

preferential technics blends the technical exigencies of circulation