Done with Deep Learning

Well, thank goodness for that. I have finally powered through the remaining 313 pages, of which 65 were the index and bibliography. That was quite a doozy. I would say that I am much more confident with the concept of deep learning now. It also seems that the ``cutting edge'' (circa 2016) was still about meshing graphical models with deep learning architectures.

I wonder how much of it is still true today, some 5 years later.

To be fair, after reading Deep Learning, I am starting to veer towards the conclusion that going down that path for so-called ``data analytics'' and/or ``artificial intelligence'' is nothing but tears.

Despite all the advancements, the fundamental limit is still that of good training data. We're not even talking about labelled data, which is the precursor to supervised learning protocols. We're just talking about good quality training data, something that only the largest of large companies can have easy access to.

Puny SMEs are never going to reach that level, especially if they are hoping that all that ``deep learning'' is going to help them. The more traditional techniques are more likely to be suitable than not, but I digress.

I'm just happy that I have finally finished reading the book. Now, I'm just going to take a small break and read a collection of Chinese poems from the Tang and Song dynasties from a small booklet entitled 《唐宋诗精选》 . Funny story, this booklet has actually been with me since 1992-08-28, as a prize for being Best in Chinese waaaaay back in Primary One.

I have never really read it, having been too frightened by all the difficult-looking Chinese characters.

I am just silently thanking whoever the teacher was who picked this book prize for me back in the day nearly three decades ago. He/she has picked well.

The book is so old that the postal code of the printing company (Seng Wah Cultural Publisher Co.) and the distributor (Seng Yew Book Store) were only four digits, and the telephone numbers were only seven digits.

I also want to point out that Seng Yew Book Store is still alive and well, and has not moved from Blk 231, Bain Street #01-15/17, Bras Basah Complex, Singapore 180231.

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In other news, I fixed a couple of oddities from my personal web site. One of the things that I fixed was the auto-generated navigation bar for my 笛子 Materials set of articles. I tested it out on my cellphone, and was horrified to find that the long text that appeared fine on the web browser of the desktop was quite hard to read/use when displayed in the mobile.

And so, I cobbled together some horrible styles to generate a small table for navigation. This allowed better text wrapping for the three navigation elements, and gave a little more control over their overall appearance in a space-limited setting.

I also adjusted the table width for the Books column of my bible study tracking page. Previously, Song of Solomon was mysteriously relegated into a multi-line presentation when the bible books filter was activated to ``poetry'' while in mobile mode.

Apart from those two fixes, I also tweaked the prettifying JavaScript to default to polling if it is not being run on my personal domain. The polling was done to take into account the case where new textual elements were being inserted into a page which had elements that needed to be prettified---the classic example is the navigation side bar of this blog. Try expanding ``2021''⟶``January'' and check out ``Career'' is a Misnomer. Without the polling, it would appear as ``Career'' is a Misnomer instead.

The prettifying script is originally executed during the onload event via injection, so any new text elements that occur after the script is done with the prettifying will not be updated.

Anyway, that's about all I have for today's entry. Till the next update, I suppose.