I'M TAKING A BREAK... (Channel Update July 2020)

yes you're at that right I am going on a break don't worry though there will still be videos just not as many I've decided to basically reduce the upload frequency a little bit mostly because I am going on a break but also because I kind of want to have time to do other things but we'll get to that later so

how's our little channel doing we've just passed 1 million views 1 million times someone thought well that's kind of worth watching and only about 900,000 times where they were severely disappointed after clicking on the video I think that's the thing that's a net gain honestly the channel just surpassed 30 thousand subscribers so technically in log space were already halfway to a hundred thousand matter of time and I think I've said this in the last update but this is just absolutely overwhelming how many people are interested in machine learning research and topics related to it so that's pretty cool and encouraging thank you everyone who has already subscribed and especially the people that leave comments the people that share the videos this means a lot and I think it's awesome and it's quite motivating to continue doing this honestly I'm having lots of fun along

with that I've gained almost 5,000 Twitter followers I think more than 5,000 Twitter followers which is strange because Twitter is weird but you know so that's pretty cool I guess I wonder if all of those are subscribed to the channel in any case I just want to highlight again that the community around machine learning research is in the absolute largest part a very positive community you people are absolutely great the comment sections are just so much better than anything else on the entire internet including paper reviews at major conferences really this is a half joke that the comments section is better than the reviews on papers but it is actually very often true people are discussing ideas in the comments that are valuable and creative and asking interesting questions and helping each other out and that also counts for our discord server so if you're not on our discord server we do have one and there is a channel for beginners question there's a channel for discussing the videos that are on the YouTube channel and people are generally very helpful there it's a vibrant community and I can only recommend that if you are looking to contribute to the community and be part of it it's a great place that being said I'm also on a number of other platforms such as LinkedIn I finally made a LinkedIn account I was always kind of skeptic I don't know how LinkedIn works like what is the difference between follow and connect and then people like write little messages while connecting and it says like I'd love to connect but then you accept them and then that message pops up and then it's saying I loved I'd love to connect but you've already connected at that point I this is we like how does LinkedIn works tell me what is it for like I get it it's like professional social networking but ah it seems weird to me okay but there is an entire community there and I do post my videos there I'm not like super active on LinkedIn I have to say that I'm also on shoot mines parlor so the reason why I'm mentioning these things is that with recent developments especially around this young looking video there were some developments that potentially threaten the existence of this channel and I don't want to make it a single point of failure so I would appreciate it if you follow me on at least one other thing point of contact so that in the case that something might happen which is unlikely but you know can I still have a way of distributing this content all the links are in the video description I'd love to

see you there wherever so with respect to the young situation he has left Twitter now de facto and people wanted me to kind of make a follow-up video asked me about it but I feel you know I have I have nothing more substantial to say and just to make a video for video sake it's not really a thing I want to go into general it's kind of sad but these kind of news and drama videos they do get a lot of attention not like outrages but they do get I want to keep this channel mostly about the machine learning research and I only want to make videos when I really do have some information to add you know Young Lacan is an adult and he's able to make his decisions of whether he wants to leave Twitter or not it's probably for the better for his mental health so with respect to the drama videos I always kind of say that I'll pull you in with the drama and then before you know it I educate you ha checkmate so that's how this works and how we ultimately end up with many more machine learners then originally wanted to be we gotcha so in

other news flatland round one of flatland has officially started and I've previously made a video about flatland it is a new rips challenge it is a challenge where we have to route trains around a 2d map and I wanted to make this kind of a community project where we do research together hopefully do something with machine learning with reinforcement learning to tackle this problem and to crush the challenge and this is looking extremely good so on our discord server there is a core group of people that is really engaged and this is one of the reasons why I kind of want to reduce my upload frequency because I want to have time to participate more in these community efforts I really want to have time to do more myself in the flatland research group that we have we do open research anyone is welcome you're still very welcome join our discord server and join us and contribute to the code there is a core group right now that is really pushing forward so just to highlight a few of them there is no édouard direct Dola frostbite China CEO trademarked AI Adrian and I'm Peter and I forgot nuber pwnage am so sorry noob apology you're beautiful these people are helping each other reach more and better performance profiling code implementing parts from other papers and it's just great to see that people can collaborate on this even though it's technically a competition but you know I guess we're competing against nature for anyone I haven't mentioned here I'm very sorry and any list of names is always prone to leave people out I do not want to diminish your impact so right now this D queuing algorithm is able to reach about a 95% success rate with three to five agents on the maps of three to five trains but round one has just started and we see that some of these environments have many more agents in them so there's still a lot of work to do so we need you to come and contribute and join the fun it is fun and as I said I will be working on this myself or as well because it's fun so again big shout out to anyone on this court that has contributed in any way this is just awesome we've just had a recently our first grassland Town Hall with entirely community generated content so these people came together and basically joined in making one PowerPoint presentation and then presented to each other their knowledge of the environment and amazingly we also had the flatland organizers come in and tell us their perspective about the challenge the environment and what's challenging and what's changed and so on this was just unprecedented for me the amount of contributions there the first town hall is available if you join this court it's linked there it's recorded you can still see it and as I said there's still plenty of time to join the competition together with us

okay next thing you've probably seen the spine net video and the thumbnail there was excessively beautiful so the story behind it is on the discord server I've asked people to help me with this some nail which was originally rather boring and I just kind of wanted to know which subtitle I should put there and then one of the discord members Lucas Ferrara just gone ahead and drawn up this very beautiful image of a spine net robot that has the spine net as a spine and this is this kind of stuff is just awesome so again big shout out to Lucas Ferrara and the absolutely amazing thumbnail that this has generated and also the contributions to anyone that comes on the discord server and into the beginners question channel ask some question and usually get some form of help now that being said please do don't just come and we'll solve your problem like try to search for a solution before going into that group of very well-meaning people because you know if too many people just expect them to solve their problems it won't be as

well-meaning anymore in the future okay so how does this channel go forward I want to make the content a bit more diverse and kind of branch out and as I already said the upload frequency will be sort of lower after my break or also during my break but I have some ideas of how to generate kind of more interesting content or different content so here are my ideas and this is a list and please tell me what you think of it and you can do this at this video any point you can give feedback about what kind of videos you like what kind of style anything really I'm happy to listen to people and incorporate all the feedback that I can so I want to do some more channel updates maybe more frequently maybe once every two three weeks just to let you know what's going on kind of what's going on with the channel community this should be fun so another idea I had is to look at kind of historical papers and I think I got the idea from a comment in my comment section so shout out to whoever lifted me to that it's a great idea to basically go back to historical papers and just kind of see what people back then knew and didn't know and predicted and were right about and especially I wonder what kind of choices did they make that survived until this day kind of arbitrary choices that someone made in some paper that just stuck around it's interesting to see and there will be a series of kind of classical papers that I will extend from time to time and I hope you enjoy that I also want to do more a bit of live coding videos lots of people have requested that I'm not the best coder in the world but I have done my fair share of machine learning research hands on I have lots of more stupid ideas that might or might not work out and I'm very happy to implement them live then next thing I want to branch out in topics maybe more exotic things causality is a big thing quantum machine learning what not more practical applications robotics control also fairness a lot of people especially after the young lock on video asked me to look more into the fairness literature I am naturally very interested in that and approach it from kind of a technical but also a societal standpoint throughout all of that I would like to include the community more so you I don't really know how to do that properly yet so here's the first thing that I'm going to include you if you have a good idea of how to do more community inclusion in the channels content please tell me because I think the community has lots of stuff to give and it would be a shame if it were only me always doing all the things where other people would be much better at it okay the last question on this is a question that I get very often and

that is how do I select papers and there seems to be of a misconception in this so let me tell you I select papers by what interests me and that alone if I make a video about a paper it means that I found it interesting enough to read it and make a video about it now this can be accelerated by sending me appropriate amounts of protein and carbohydrates but generally me making a video is not an endorsement of a paper it doesn't mean that this paper is the most important paper or influential it doesn't mean anything beyond I find it interesting if I ever get sponsor deals I'll let you know that a video is sponsored and that's that I will not change how I select papers I will not go by some kind of impact I would like to branch out my content I see the danger and only kind of covering what the big companies do but honestly they do a lot of interesting stuff stuff and I'm constantly looking at research that's kind of outside the box whatever is interesting you know that's what it's gonna be I will not start going by some impact factor and I will not start politicizing my paper review selection any time soon you know I've already had multiple people high profile people come to me and say well with your platform couldn't you once a week take a paper where the first author is an underrepresented minority and review that and you know I appreciate the sentiment behind it and I see where it comes from but if you consider the practical implications of something like this like I I'd have to you know go through papers Google the first author kind of try to find a talk or a picture of them and an estimate whether the melanin content in their skin is high enough for this to qualify now and something like this and just the thought of this how someone could do something like this and know start to vomit is just beyond me I don't know what to say other than that so let me say this if you're thinking leads you to a place where it's necessary to treat people differently based on the color of their skin you're wrong like that's my opinion but you're wrong the answer to bias cannot consist of more bias that's that I do not care how the person that wrote a paper looks like if your papers on this channel it means your work was interesting to me and I hope that can be my contribution to making the community more fair and just okay last thing lots

of people have asked me if I had a patreon or something like this and I've sort of resisted that kind of stuff until now mainly because I knew that the day would come when I reduce my upload frequency and I didn't want to kind of trick people into thinking that I was going to continue this forever again financial support is not my main goal here and it is completely absolutely and utterly voluntary and so I just want to have that out there so I have made a patreon page I do have some reservation with respect to patreon because of free speech issues and so on so I've also made a SUBSCRIBE start page both are equal both have equal tiers all the tiers are equal there is no option we're just we're you could just put an amount which I would like so I just tried to make a bunch of tiers all of them are equal so I have to ask myself what do I give as a benefit because I don't want someone to have to pay for like extra content because the entire goal of this channel is to educate people including people that don't have money to go to good universities that might live in other parts of the world where education is not as available where resources are not as available to give extra content to people that pay seems to be so I thought okay what I could give to the well that do support me on these pages is you will get a PDF of my scribbled OneNote document of the papers that our review I mean it's not very helpful because I mostly scribble and it's going to be like subdividing the pages weirdly maybe it has more of a symbolic value and if you're really into that in you know at least there's something I've also made a bunch of crypto wallets so if you'd rather want to use that to support me you are welcome to do so all the links are in the description of the video again financial support very very optional and very voluntary though of course I do thank anyone that does I am also going to experiment with ads on the videos and as creators we have kind of different options of which ads are displayed and how often and so on I found mid video ads annoying I find nonce capable ads annoying and so on I'm really counting on you here to give me feedback after various videos of how much the ads and all you which ones annoy you which ones don't I'm really counting on you okay last thing I am planning on a line of merch mainly because I think it's funny but I don't know if that's gonna work out but you know maybe if you have fun t-shirt ideas or so just let me know alright that was the update as I

said I probably won't be reading comments too much but I will catch up after the break and I hope you continue enjoying this channel even with kind of the lower upload frequency and the new types of content that come in if you do have suggestions for new exotic content that have a Glee has to do with machine learning or not let me know what you think of anything I said and I wish you an awesome summer and I hope to see you here anytime ciao