[talk] Machine Learning

Thomas Levine _ at thomaslevine.com
Sat Aug 26 07:18:59 EDT 2017


I don't follow your use case chart; could you give an example?

It sounds, though, like you and your friends are talk past each other.
They discuss job requirements, and you discuss software design. Dijkstra
commented on this common conflict.

  Simplicity is a great virtue but it requires hard work to achieve it
  and education to appreciate it. And to make matters worse: complexity
  sells better.
  https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD08xx/EWD896.html

Ignoring the need to sell newfangled complexity, I find generic search
engines, strict text parsers, and summary statistics to be far more
practical, effective, and reliable than the overwhelming majority of
branded machine learning products. This is just like how I prefer the
reliability and ease-of-use of OpenBSD over the novelty, complexity, and
opacity of most of the other popular contemporary operating systems.



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