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Jacob Buckman
Personal blog · jacobbuckman.comaiprogramming
Jacob Buckman's personal blog at jacobbuckman.com covers ai and programming. Since 2018, 17 different Hacker News readers have linked it 19 times, most often “Tensorflow: The Confusing Parts”. The last post was in 2023, but the archive is still widely read.
I occasionally have thoughts on various topics. You can read those thoughts here or on Substack. Delegating To Computers 17 September 2023 Where Bayes Falls Short 30 May 2023 I'm Not Worried About An AI Apocalypse 22 May 2023 We Aren't Close To Creating A Rapidly Self-Improving AI 26 April...
Most-linked posts?
- Tensorflow: The Confusing Parts5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2018-06-26
- A Sober Look at Bayesian Neural Networks3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2020-01-18
- Please commit more blatant academic fraud3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2021-05-30
- Bad ML Abstractions I (Generative vs. Discriminative Models)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-04-19
What Hacker News says?
Best part of the article is the footnote, where the author characterizes his own papers: > This paper is bullshit, this paper (a NeurIPS oral) is bullshit, this paper is complete bullshit, this paper is mostly good science but also has a sprinkling of bullshit. Apologies to my co-authors. https://jacobbuckman.com/2021-05-29-please-commit-more-blata...
Comment linking /2021-05-29-please-commit-more-blatant-academic-fraud/
on “Please commit more blatant academic fraud”Submitted Please commit more blatant academic fraud as a story · 536 points
HN discussionI fully agree with you. While I can't speak for Keras, after reading [1] it seems Tensorflow would very much benefit from strong types. You'd easily be able to catch most of the errors presented in the article with higher-kinded and linear types, and maybe you don't even need that much power. [1]: https://jacobbuckman.com/post/tensorflow-the-confusing-parts...
Comment linking /post/tensorflow-the-confusing-parts-1/
on “Keras vs PyTorch”Submitted Please Commit More Blatant Academic Fraud (2021) as a story · 153 points
HN discussionhttps://jacobbuckman.com/2020-01-17-a-sober-look-at-bayesian... "But in practice, BNNs do generalize to test points, and do seem to output reasonable uncertainty estimates. (Although it’s worth noting that simpler approaches, like ensembles, consistently outperform BNNs.)"
Comment linking /2020-01-17-a-sober-look-at-bayesian-neural-networks/
on “Launch HN: Humanloop (YC S20) – A platform to annotate, train and deploy NLP”Submitted A Sober Look at Bayesian Neural Networks as a story · 113 points
HN discussion> if you're saying i'm a racist I wasn't, sorry if that's what you interpreted. > The status quo however should be changed by people,not people with machines I'm not sure I understand what this means. People/companies own machines (and ML models) and use them. So shouldn't we make sure that the machines' decisions align with what people/companies _want_ them to do? (i.e. that the people's ethics align with the ML mo…
Comment linking /2021-02-15-fair-ml-tools-require-problematic-ml-models/
on “Is Google’s AI research about to implode?”Submitted Tensorflow: The Confusing Parts as a story · 5 points
HN discussion> That's a sloppy statement. You haven't defined what standard. Actually, I think I established a basis of discussion then later illustrated this basis with the way HN has grown and tends to enforce its standard. > A "rhetor" is a teacher of rhetoric. This is not the correct word in this case. A rhetor is a person practicing rhetoric, or a person delivering persuasive or effective communication. Teachers are indeed…
Comment linking /2020-01-17-a-sober-look-at-bayesian-neural-networks/
on “A Sober Look at Bayesian Neural Networks”Submitted Tensorflow: The Confusing Parts as a story · 4 points
HN discussionThis is also a huge problem in offline Rl (learning a policy using only a dataset). If done naively, the learned policy will keep accumulating errors due to enter areas that are not well covered. So the trick is to avoid these areas. In offline rl they do this by measuring epistemic uncertainty and using this as a regularization term in the loss function such that the model learns to avoid these areas. This a good b…
Comment linking /2020-11-30-conceptual-fundamentals-of-offline-rl/
on “Imitation Learning (2023)”Submitted An Actually-Good Argument Against Naive AI Scaling as a story · 3 points
HN discussion> my claim was that we need some mechanism to decide who gets a position and who doesn't I don't disagree. My claim is that the current mechanisms are nearly indistinguishable from noise but we pretend that they are very strong. I have also made the claim that Goodhart's Law is at play and made claims for the mechanisms and evidence of this. I'm not saying "trust me bro," I'm saying "here's my claim, here's the mech…
Comment linking /2021-05-29-please-commit-more-blatant-academic-fraud/
on “Argonne National Lab is attempting to replicate LK-99”Submitted Automation via Reinforcement Learning as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Bad ML Abstractions I (Generative vs. Discriminative Models) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Tensorflow: The Confusing Parts as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Recursively Self-Improving AI Is Already Here as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Bad ML Abstractions (Generative vs. Discriminative Models) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Tensorflow: The Confusing Parts (1) – Buckman's Homepage as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
