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the desire to retreat into a cave
Post created: 2021-11-17

List of things that I used to trust:

  • Chrome autoupdate -- thought it was blessed magic when I first saw it, now blocking it on the NUC as long as I can...
  • Firefox autoupdate -- used to install Firefox on everything, now Mozilla has gone from best to least-worst, and I'm casually looking for options to switch away...
  • Windows autoupdate -- I feel like windows 7 was the last trustworthy OS, ever since win 8 the marketers and PMs seem to have taken over...

And of course, the obligatory eye-roll whenever a service says it changed terms and conditions "for your privacy". Dispose of the easy bits in the title, another way in which yes minister is closer to reality...

Of the above, I find Windows the most egregious in abuse of trust because I actually paid for it. In happier days, I evangelized for browsers like I evangelized for programming languages; now no browser is trustworthy enough to actively advocate for. A rather sad state of affairs.

We had the last lecture of 888 yesterday. The course content is really beautiful and well-presented, I'm glad I took the course.

I think I would summarize my understanding of game solving as "intelligent ways of partially exploring huge game trees". There are many ways to update your beliefs on what is promising to explore (or alternatively, what you wish you explored, counterfactual regret), and CFR variants are a great starting point. Could you maybe think of it as targeted "overfitting"? I particularly liked (1) "randomness" through seeing through an abstraction and (2) the homework assignment on the cost of determinism.

I am also amused that 888 makes me want to read neurips papers and learn about convex optimization. That's more than any ML course or tutorial has ever done for me. The ending note of TMECor being convex where TME is not, is kind of a nice thing to think about -- convexity just from being able to communicate pre-game? In general, the examples in game theory from the class have been very concrete and minimal.

Beautiful field, taught by extremely good instructors. Excellent notes too! If he wrote a book, I'd buy it.

Easily one of my favorite classes at CMU. Now to grind the project.