
Torchnet – Lighting the way to deep machine learning - TY
https://code.facebook.com/posts/580706092103929
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paavokoya
Is there any universe where the future doesn't hold facebook/google/apple etc
having a monopoly on information and/or the ability to see complex future-
predicting patterns? Will this ability not lead to complete control of the
global population?

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shrugger
You misunderstand how capitalism works. If you don't want these companies to
succeed, don't give them money and don't give them data they can make money
from.

I don't use Facebook products because I don't want to give Zuckerberg my
money. I don't use Apple because I don't want to give money to a company whose
original figurehead thought that wearing Mom-jeans to press conferences was in
any way professional.

The point is that these companies, however monopolistic they might seem to you
(and me), are driving innovation several orders of magnitude faster and more
efficiently than organizations like Mozilla or GNU. A company exists to make
money. That's an ethos that I personally find more consistent and more
comfortable to think about than "we should make software that EVERYONE can
use" and it's a safer bet as well, since these companies will go out of
business if they don't make money whereas GNU/Mozilla/et al will vomit out
software that sorta works for a million years.

Also, machine learning is not about predicting the future anyways, it's almost
exactly the opposite. Understanding what people have done is much more
actionable than trying to figure out what people are GOING to do, because we
are very fickle, complex, imaginative creatures. Could you have predicted that
I'd write this comment? No. Could a program that has read every previous
comment that I've ever made predict this comment? No. Could it predict that I
might write a comment of a similar nature? Sure. If we were playing poker and
I thought that you were going to fold, that's much different from some
algorithm that was CERTAIN you were going to fold.

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autokad
does anyone have opinions on how this stacks up against h2o?

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mastazi
Based on just a brief reading of the article, I see it more like an equivalent
of Keras/Lasagne for Torch, but I might be wrong.

