1/ City Council members spent Monday questioning @ChiPubSchools’ re-opening plan. Let’s get into it (and other public meetings #CHIdocumenters are covering this week)! 🧵

Some people really benefit from hearing advice that everyone knows, for the same reason we keep schools open despite every subject in them having been taught before.

In that spirit, here's some quick Things Many People Find Too Obvious To Have Told You Already.

Your idea is not valuable, at all. All value is in the execution. You think you are an exception; you are not. You should not insist on an NDA to talk about it; nobody serious will engage in contract review over an idea, and this will mark you as clueless.

Technologists tend to severely underestimate the difficulty and expense of creating software, especially at companies which do not have fully staffed industry leading engineering teams ("because software is so easy there, amirite guys?")

Charge more. Charge more still. Go on.

The press is a lossy and biased compression of events in the actual world, and is singularly consumed with its own rituals, status games, and incentives. The news necessarily fails to capture almost everything which happened yesterday. What it says is important usually isn't.

Companies find it incredibly hard to reliably staff positions with hard-working generalists who operate autonomously and have high risk tolerances. This is not the modal employee, including at places which are justifiably proud of the skill/diligence/etc of their employees.

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.

1. There are more people added on the list of arrests and executions of famous people but no further intel is available at this time.

ARRESTS and EXECUTIONS OF FAMOUS PEOPLE 2020 UPDATED
Explanation of the latest military tribunal arrests and executions of famous people in 2020.

2. The tribunals are arresting these people in plain clothes. We saw the Obama’s arrest, although we didn’t know it was an arrest at the time. The arrest was done nonchalantly so as to not get noticed by the public.
All arrests of these famous people were done this way.

3. If the person is convicted of child sex trafficking, crimes against humanity or treason, they will be executed.
If the person arrested has evidence on someone else to help their prosecution, or is willing to help Trump, & they want to cooperate, they may be allowed to do so.

4. A sentence of execution down to life in prison may be accepted if their evidence is worth anything.
When a plea deal is done, the defendant must present evidence they have to make their sentence lighter. This information is given to the prosecution, defense, and to the judge.

5. If evidence is accepted, they are presented the plea deal. They will have to make a guilty plea to the crime with a video confession & written statement. That is how all plea deals work.

All famous people arrested were either treasonous or involved in satanic worship rituals.