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In Japan, houses and apartments usually have at most one transparent window. The rest are heavily frosted. It took a while to adjust to that model but once I did I wished we did this more in the US. You get more light during the day, since clear windows don’t actually let in that much light unless the sun is shining directly in, then it’s usually too much light. You have absolute privacy — you can walk around buck naked without having to draw a curtain anywhere. And, unless you happen to be in the minority and have a killer view, frosted glass makes it less distracting to be indoors. Random stuff going on outside doesn’t steal your focus at all. The fact is that for most people there really is t much to look at out their windows — a crumbling street, the neighbor’s fence, the wall of the apartment building next door, a parking lot. But of course if you do happen to have a killer view, you can always have a clear window in that direction.


Oh the view's a good point, if your window faces the back of an other apartment building and all you have is a wall of AC you're better off with frosted glass.


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!


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