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Comment by bzhang255

3 years ago

Sure - but I think that's the least important part of my comment. The preview is basically just an intro to Scheme. I would rather be able to see how well the book covers interesting ideas about deep learning. While the jury is still out, my personal skepticism is that this is a really beautiful passion project that looks great on bookshelves, but that any serious learner would be better served dedicating their time to working through the existing, more traditional, and very high-quality resources available online.

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zelphirkalt  3 years ago

This is what the book has to say (part of a foreword by Peter Norvig):

> Maybe, maybe not. But even if you use a machine learning toolkit like TensorFlow or PyTorch, what you will take away from this book is an appreciation for how the fundamentals work.

  • rg111  3 years ago

    I think all serious researchers have implemented core Deep Learning algorithms from scratch. I know I have.

    There are two books that do exactly this:

    1. Deep Learning from Scratch

    2. Data Science from Scratch

    In these books, you implement each part of the ML/DL pipeline, from scratch, in Python.

    There is also a GitHub project call Minitorch that teaches you the inner workings of a framework like PyTorch.

    And then there are several other good resources for exactly this.

    What he claims to have as a content is neithet new nor unique.

    • albertzeyer  3 years ago

      What does "from scratch" really mean? You don't reimplement Python itself, or invent a new GPU hardware, a new CUDA including compiler, etc. You don't reimplement the OS. Where do you draw the line?

      Do you reimplement matmul or other basics?

      Do you reimplement auto-diff?

      Maybe PyTorch or TensorFlow using auto-diff is a good "from scratch" basepoint, without using predefined optimizers, or modules/layers, or anything. Just using the low-level math functions, and then auto-diff.

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fumeux_fume  3 years ago

More than happy to leave the traditional, high quality resources available online to the serious learners