this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2023
297 points (97.1% liked)

Science Memes

16090 readers
2801 users here now

Welcome to c/science_memes @ Mander.xyz!

A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.



Rules

  1. Don't throw mud. Behave like an intellectual and remember the human.
  2. Keep it rooted (on topic).
  3. No spam.
  4. Infographics welcome, get schooled.

This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.



Research Committee

Other Mander Communities

Science and Research

Biology and Life Sciences

Physical Sciences

Humanities and Social Sciences

Practical and Applied Sciences

Memes

Miscellaneous

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] eestileib@sh.itjust.works 32 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (7 children)

Dude on the right is correct that perturbed gradient descent with threshold functions and backprop feedback was implemented before most of us were born.

The current boom is an embarrassingly parallel task meeting an architecture designed to run that kind of task.

[–] morrowind@lemmy.ml 11 points 2 years ago (5 children)

Random but why is "embarrassing" or similar adjectives so often used to describe a parallel program? What's embarrassing about it?

[–] Kichae@kbin.social 14 points 2 years ago (1 children)

"Embarrassingly parallelizable" is just the term for a process that can be perfectly paralleled.

[–] morrowind@lemmy.ml 6 points 2 years ago (3 children)

rather odd choice of adjective though

[–] xthexder@l.sw0.com 13 points 2 years ago

I think the usage implies it's so easy to parallelize that any competent programmer should be embarrassed if they weren't running it in parallel. Whereas many classes of problems can be extremely complex or impossible to parallelize, and running them sequentially would be perfectly acceptable.

[–] dreugeworst@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 years ago

It's commonly used in some corners of computer science

[–] eestileib@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 years ago

It's in the same spirit as the phrase "an embarrassment of riches". So a bit of an archaic usage.

load more comments (3 replies)
load more comments (4 replies)