@ZachMierzejewski - How's it going buddy! Good to see you on here :o)

@Pᴀᴜʟsᴛᴇʀ2 Thanks! I miss this. How are you?

@ZachMierzejewski I'm good buddy. I'm in training today, so have a much better internet connection that I'd have at work ;-)

What have you been up to? Did you finally get married?

@Pᴀᴜʟsᴛᴇʀ2 AWS training. Sounds like fun.

@Pᴀᴜʟsᴛᴇʀ2 tackling a machine learning project, or trying to.

@3Dave - Teaching a machine to learn ... great fun!

@3Dave - 25% training ... 75% hype.

@Pᴀᴜʟsᴛᴇʀ2 Yeah, pretty much. But, the results are phenomenal.

300 lines of code to write an app that recognizes hand-written digits with about 98% accuracy.

@3Dave - The results are great ... except where they're not.

@Pᴀᴜʟsᴛᴇʀ2 so it's.. learning how to learn?

@3Dave - You've got room to do 2% better ... get busy.

@motosubatsu - :o)

Ha. Depends on how bad the handwriting is.

That's where the 2% comes in.

@3Dave - Yah, at some point you have to train the human ...

@3Dave I could probably make a niche for myself as a tester of such things - I have utterly atrocious handwriting

Even then... the output is a probability that a given image is a given digit. On the really bad samples - like, an 8 where the bottom loop is nearly just a line - it'll say, like, 60% sure this is a 9, but 25% that it could be an 8.

My handwriting has always angled towards being an architect, though over the years has degraded some. I print most things in block letters. Would probably be easy for your machine to figure out what I'm writing.

To clarify: you get a list of 10 numbers that add up to 1, where each is a weight indicating the probability that the input represents is the corresponding digit.

With something like characters rather than just digits, you can improve the results via, say, spellcheck.

sounds good ... now make it faster

Ha.

:o)

It's very fast, once it's trained.

I can imagine

Training can take a little time.

@Pᴀᴜʟsᴛᴇʀ2 mine makes Doctors look legible

Does it train towards a single user, or user-irrelevant?

@motosubatsu Cool. There are public domain training data sets for things like letters, digits and cats.

@Pᴀᴜʟsᴛᴇʀ2 Depends on your training data.

@3Dave - Meow

If you use just one person's writing, you're just training it to recognize that person's writing.

The more unique data you have, the better the model will perform.

yup

@3Dave - Spellcheck would probably help tremendously.

ML is a great tool, but it's just another tool.

A tool making a tool ... ;-)

The people that are beating their drums in fear of general AI don't really understand the technology. It's not that much different than some circuit design techniques we've been using in EE for decades.

I bet it's more exciting than other things you could be doing, like twiddling your thumbs.

Yep.

@3Dave - Actually, it's quite exciting from this side of the screen, just hearing you talk about it. I don't know if I'm overly excited about the machine learning part of it (for the reason you've mentioned), however, I am uber excited when I learn the bits and pieces of how it's programed. I'm no programming expert, so again, living vicariously and learning as I go!

Play with TensorFlow. It has a python interface, and does most of the hard work for you. Lots of tutorials, etc. available.

If I have "time", lol

I'm ensuring I'm spending as much of my spare time as needed to ensure my Master's program is taken care of before I start doing other things ...

@3Dave - I'll take a deeper look though ... seems interesting :o)

@3Dave ... looking through the TensorFlow page, I realize I'm well over my head, lol. I'd need to actually apply it and see how it works in function, then maybe I can start to understand how it's actually doing what it's doing (reading through the code, not in general).

I'm not fluent enough in Python to understand it totally.

you know how there's a bit of a sub-genre in TV shows about someone who fakes being an expert in something and then we follow their amusing hijinx and how they always seem to win in the end?

well if anyone was wondering why that hasn't been done for developers it's because when people fake knowing how to code it's NOT FUNNY

the rest of us develop stress hernias from trying to make sense of their sh#t

:(

sorry guys

needed to get that out

@motosubatsu - You'd be happy to know, I've never portrayed myself as a developer ... I know just about enough to be dangerous! I mean, if it was my full time job, I could learn how to do it ... BUT, not something I'm willing to do at this point. It is very interesting to me, though :o)

oh don't worry that wasn't aimed at anyone here

that's aimed at my predecessor at this client

@motosubatsu - Oh, that story sounds interesting!

@motosubatsu I’ve always been pretty honest about not knowing what I’m doing.

lol

@Pᴀᴜʟsᴛᴇʀ2 kinda hard to explain to someone not in the trade as it were.. but essentially this guy clearly knew bits and pieces about how to code.. and he could make it do stuff (and it actually largely works) but you can tell that he just didn't understand many of the concepts he tried to implement - so it's like the code equivalent of reading a book where the end is at the start, the beginning is in the middle then you have the end and then you go back to the beginning again

all the bits are there.. but it doesn't make any sense and is generally a really, really bad way to do things

he'd clearly heard of inheritance for example

but either didn't understand it or didn't bother to actually read further to understand how it worked

@motosubatsu - That would be me ... I have knowledge, but not a lot of formal training.

@Pᴀᴜʟsᴛᴇʀ2 ah but you don't go round passing yourself off as an experienced contractor dev charging poor innocent customers decidedly non-trivial amounts for it

The difference would probably be I have a fairly logical brain, so intuitively I can make things happen correctly.

@motosubatsu - exactly

;-)

@Pᴀᴜʟsᴛᴇʀ2 then you definitely aren't this guy... logic doesn't appear to have been his strong suit

"I'll put this code.. here" "why?" "It's a Tuesday"

@motosubatsu - It's the fifth Saturday in June February?

@motosubatsu - It sounds as though you have a slight amount of animosity towards your predecessor.

@Pᴀᴜʟsᴛᴇʀ2 possibly.. I'm not normally a particularly hateful person.. and I'm sure if I didn't have to deal with his code I'd probably quite like the guy

lol

@motosubatsu Cleaning up crap code is never fun. Start with a little refactoring, and it's like pulling a loose thread on a sweater. The whole thing can just fall apart.

tensorflow.org/tutorials/keras/basic_regression

@3Dave - ^^ up my alley, lol

@Pᴀᴜʟsᴛᴇʀ2 Cool