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Not a single one of you bigbrains used the word "maxima" correctly and it's driving me crazy.


As I understand it a local maxima means you’re at a local peak but there may be higher maximums elsewhere. As I read it, transformers are a local maximum in the sense of outperforming all other ML techniques as the AI technique that gets the closest to human intelligence.

Can you help my little brain understand the problem by elaborating?

Also you may want to chill with the personal attacks.


Not a personal attack. These posters are smarter than I am, just ribbing them about misusing the terminology.

"Maxima" is plural, "maximum" is singular. So you would say "a local maximum," or "several local maxima." Not "a local maxima" or, the one that really got me, "getting trapped in local maxima's."

As for the rest of it, carry on. Good discussion.


A local maxima, that is, /usr/bin/wxmaxima...


Touché...


While "local maximas" is wrong, I think "a local maxima" is a valid way to say "a member of the set of local maxima" regardless of the number of elements in the set. It could even be a singleton.


No, a member of the set of local maxima is a a local maximum, just like a member of the set of people is a person, because it is a definite singular.

The plural is also used for indefinite number, so “the set of local maxima” remains correct even if the set has cardinality 1, but a member of the set has definite singular number irrespective of the cardinality of the set.


I've been convinced, thanks!


You can't have one maxima in the same way you can't have one pencils. That's just how English works.


You can't have one local maxima, it would be the global maxima. So by saying local maxima you're assuming the local is just a piece of a larger whole, even if that global state is otherwise undefined.


No, you can’t have one local maxima, or one global maxima, because it’s plural. You can have one local or global maximum, or two (or more) local or global maxima.


"You can't have one local pencils, it would be the global pencils"


“Maxima” sounds fancy, making it catnip for people trying to sound smart.


yeah, not a Nissan in sight


I used to use plumbum for Pythonic(ish) shell scripting. It was great for a specific use case.


Found this comment while trying to figure out if this is a joke.

What an amazing sport.


Lindy effect.


Came here to see if anyone else had a problem with that timeline.


What's so hard to believe is humans once roamed the Earth.


Huh. I wish I had encountered this way of thinking sooner.


Is this this the Mitchell translation?


This is the truth. A Fuji apple in Japan is life-changing. A Fuji apple in Minnesota is flavorless and either hard as a rock or mushy and granular. It’s all about the source.


That was not anticlimactic.


ty!


Almost nothing stated here is accurate…


It may have changed since I lived there but that was certainly true when I did. And I spent a lot of time rambling around the mountains, creeks, and NFs and NPs there and most all of it bushwhacking off trail.


Which part is inaccurate? (genuinely curious)...

I was bit by a tick in Marin a few years ago (I caught the tick as well), got very nervous about Lyme and researched it thoroughly, was much less concerned after consulting a few folks in the Bay Area. Lyme seems rare here (UCSF estimates 2-15% prevalence in ticks but its far less common than on the east coast).

https://www.cdc.gov/lyme/stats/tables.html


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