The 7 TED Talks everyone should watch:

ugh i wanted to do a thread about the wars in Star Wars and how the two outlying wars (the clone wars in the prequels and the cold war/civil war in the sequels) are really weird but i don't feel like it any more.

my first argument is that the Clone Wars were a really complex morally gray moment in Star Wars canon in like, 5 different directions and I'd kind of like to know why Lucas did that.

especially with the direct line that's drawn in the OT with the allegory of WW2 and Vietnam with the rebels being the Vietnamese and the Empire being America. That...doesn't exist in the Clone Wars.

for starters: it's weird it's called the Clone Wars. I get why, because that's what Kenobi calls it in STAR WARS, but the clones are a small facet in the larger story of the war.

the clones basically only exist as a macguffin in AOTC that is...extremely confusing ultimately. Because if you accept that Sidious has this grand master plan to use this war to destabilize the Republic and form an Empire...it's way too complex.

Thirumalai Murugan Kovil
#Panpoli
#TamilNaduTemples 🚩

Thirumalai Murugan Temple is located in Tenkasi district of Tamil Nadu. Muruga is worshipped as Thirumalai kumarasamy. Temple is situated near Kerala border and known to be where Shri Murugan gave darshan to Rishi Agasthiar

Devi is worshipped in the temple as Thirumalai Kaali amman

Sthala Puranam says that, there was a priest named Poovanbhattar of Thirumalai Kaali amman. Murugar appeared in a dream of the bhattar and said to find a Vigraham, lying in particular place which is of Thirumalaikumaran

Bhattar conveyed the news to the Pandalam Raja and they went to find out the vigraham. Surprisingly ants showed the way to find the Vigraham. Thus Murugan vigraham was found and Prathista was done here. There is a lake with pure water on the top of the hill

which is said to be created by Agasthiyar. It is believed that kannaki of
Chilapathikaram visited here before going to Kerala. Sapthamathrukkal also worshipped Murugan here. Kanthashashti Thiruvizha is very famous here.

Om Muruga
Muruganukku Harohara
🙏🕉🙏

Important paper from Google on large batch optimization. They do impressively careful experiments measuring # iterations needed to achieve target validation error at various batch sizes. The main "surprise" is the lack of surprises. [thread]

https://t.co/7QIx5CFdfJ

The paper is a good example of lots of elements of good experimental design. They validate their metric by showing lots of variants give consistent results. They tune hyperparamters separately for each condition, check that optimum isn't at the endpoints, and measure sensitivity.

They have separate experiments where the hold fixed # iterations and # epochs, which (as they explain) measure very different things. They avoid confounds, such as batch norm's artificial dependence between batch size and regularization strength.

When the experiments are done carefully enough, the results are remarkably consistent between different datasets and architectures. Qualitatively, MNIST behaves just like ImageNet.

Importantly, they don't find any evidence for a "sharp/flat optima" effect whereby better optimization leads to worse final results. They have a good discussion of experimental artifacts/confounds in past papers where such effects were reported.

💬 I often get Q’s like these:

How did you get your first customers for WIP? How did you grow BetaList’s traffic? Etc.

Makers are looking to reverse-engineer success. I see it everywhere.

I don’t think it works that way and the answers to those questions are mostly useless. 💥

I have built dozens of different products over the last couple of years. The vast majority failed. 😭

Surely if I know the answers to these questions, but still fail over and over again, these answers aren’t that useful. 🤷‍♀️

So what’s a better question to ask? 🤔

99.9% of the questions I receive are about the products that did well. In a way that makes sense, because we quickly forget about those that didn’t succeed.

🧠 This is known as survivorship bias.

Focusing on what survived, while ignoring what made it survive in the first place.

The real question, what you really want to know, is this:

What makes @WIP, @BetaList, and to some extent @AllStartupJobs succeed where my countless other attempts failed?

What separates a failed product 👎 from a successful product 👍?

Honestly, I don’t know. I wish I did.

It’s like Steve Jobs said “I’ll know it when I see it.” 👀

Same is true when we make products. We don’t know upfront what will work. But once we see an inkling of a product that does have potential, it’s not that hard to spot.