"Brute force" would be trying random weights and keeping the best performing model. Backpropagation is compute-intensive but I wouldn't call it "brute force".
What? Either option requires sufficient data. Brute force implies iterating over all combinations until you find the best weights. Back-prop is an optimization technique.
No, a large dataset does not make something brute force. Rather than backprop, an example of brute force might be taking a single input output pair then systematically sampling the model parameter space to search for a sufficiently close match.
The sampling stage of Evolution Strategies at least bears a resemblance but even that is still a strategic gradient descent algorithm. Meanwhile backprop is about as far from brute force as you can get.
Ah yes, great book; thanks for pointing it out. Added to the list.
As for similarity, I think the sections you've highlighted are broadly similar, but I can't detect any phrase-for-phrase copy-pasting that is typical of LLM or thesaurus find-replace. I feel that the topic layout and the motivations for any tutorial or course covering the same subject matter will eventually converge to the same broad ideas.
The website's sequence of steps is also a bit different compared to your book's. And most telling, the code, diagrams, and maths in the website are all different (such assets are usually an instant giveaway of plagiarism). You've got pseudocode; the website uses the C++ standard library to a great extent.
Hi! Blog post author here. I have heard the "Computer Graphics from Scratch" book before, but I haven't read it myself, so it would be quite hard for me to plagiarize it. I guess some similarities are expected when talking about a well-established topic.
its a standard pipeline, everything from everyone will look roughly similar. your book likely looks something like previous work. i wouldnt worry about it, ps i really loved your web tutorials back in the day
I used ordered dithering in my ZX Spectrum raytracer (https://gabrielgambetta.com/zx-raytracer.html#fourth-iterati...). In this case it's applied to a color image, but since every 8x8-pixel block can only have one of two colors (one of these fun limitations of the Spectrum), it's effectively monochrome dithering.
https://gabrielgambetta.com - home of Computer Graphics from Scratch, the Client-Side Prediction & Server Reconciliation series, and some more misc things.
I switched to Gmail in 2007 or so. I used to have a gzipped mbox of my previous emails, dating back to maybe 1996 or 1997 when I got my first email account. This file was lost at some point, and I'm really sad about it. In some ways, it's like losing years and years of a journal, conversations I had with people, how I thought about the world at that age, etc. It's a huge loss to me.
About OP's tool, I also back up my Google account to an external disk periodically. Gmail is ~8 GB so it's manageable. But Google Photos is a pain. They recently removed most of the useful APIs, so AFAIK the only way to backup is via Takeout. It's terrible. Pictures in multiple albums are included as copies every time, so I had to make a script to find duplicates and replace them with symlinks. Just downloading the whole thing is a PITA (multiple 50 GB zip files). I get that Google has little incentive to make this better, in fact they might have an incentive to make it as inconvenient as possible, but I really wish they made it easier.
I'm really hoping you're wrong about the removed APIs as I recently tried doing a takeout and about 1/3rd of every album I checked was missing. Was really hoping I could find another tool to get my photos downloaded and moved out/backed up.
OP's link is a good one, but if you want a different perspective (heh), there's https://gabrielgambetta.com/computer-graphics-from-scratch/i..., also from scratch, also for free. The name clash is unfortunate, I don't really know who started using it earlier :(
My degree was 5 years back in the day. Was it worth it? Maybe, probably. But these days people seem to get a bachelor's and a master's in 5 years, and it kind of pisses me off to have that CV disadvantage when my degree could have effectively been that (the last two years were full of electives to choose a narrower specialization, and was much more research-y).
There is no way that you got that degree recent enough such that the years matter. An undergrad/master degree really only matters for the first, perhaps second job. After that, your experience and ability is what matters.
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