The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
-
Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
-
Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
-
Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
-
Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I think instead of reading the documentation of libraries I'd try to read the main books on the theory, but only reading the first part of every chapter and very lightly skimming the rest, doing none of the exercises. Like, you understand what an integral is within like 30 minutes of having the problem stated to you, and the best ressources to be introduced to the problem are still the textbooks, they just happen to come with hundreds of pages you don't need. When I first learned ML I just spent 2 days reading Murphy's 2012 book without worrying about any of the details, I just wanted to get a small introduction to literally every method so that I could get a sort of mental picture of the entire field.
The problem with only knowing the theory so shallowly is that you're kind of brittle to modifications and expansions of the problem statement. Like, how would you solve the following problem: you have a company that has an industrial process with 10 free parameters, and they have a yield function F(x) : R^10 -> R that they want to maximize, but the exact physics if the process is unknown or very complicated. Each trial run to compute F(x) costs 1 million dollars (and of course F(x) has some unknown variance), so so far they only have around 30 data points {x_i, F(x_i)}. Your job is to advise them on how to pick the next point x_i to try in order to maximize their profits (which increase with yield, but decrease with additional suboptimal trials). And what if F(x) is nonstationary? Maybe the machines degrade over time, and the optimal parameters change...
More options
Context Copy link