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Nikhil Thorat
@nsthorat
Co-created Know Your Data and TensorFlow.js. Google Brain // PAIR // Responsible AI // Human Centered Technology. Building the Sound Museum.
Cambridge, MAknowyourdata.withgoogle.comJoined January 2013
1,332 Following
7,394 Followers

Nikhil Thorat’s Tweets

Nikhil Thorat
@nsthorat
10 years at Google this week.. how time flies. There’s a lot of impressive stuff about this company but the top notch people are what consistently stand out to me. Thank you to everyone who made me who I am over the years!
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Nikhil Thorat
@nsthorat
Once you realize that the essence of good software is well defined API boundaries you start to realize that’s also the essence of all good human relationships too.
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Nikhil Thorat
@nsthorat
Regardless of your opinion of value / efficacy / issues, this has been a WILD week for machine learning. From audio synthesis in your DAW (mawf, RAVE) to PaLM to robotic control with natural language. There are still major walls but the process is still exciting!
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Nikhil Thorat
@nsthorat
A reminder that we build huge models and then distill / shrink them later, but scaling first seems to be a requirement for this process that seems to work well (simpler to see what’s possible). See inception => mobilenet, encoder decoder translation networks, facemesh, Bert, etc
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Nikhil Thorat
@nsthorat
I’m much more interested in the human side of software engineering than the technical. This is an art: constructive criticism, team building, how to choose the right people to work with, how to stay happy long term. All “unsolved” problems, in some sense.
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Nikhil Thorat
@nsthorat
It’s important to always ask why you’re following industry norms — they’re meant to be guidelines, not dogma. My philosophy is do whatever makes sense for your project — be pragmatic. You can break any rule if it makes sense for your project.
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Thierry de Pauw
@tdpauw
I’m going to say this one more time … You cannot have Continuous Integration with feature branches. You can have automated builds. Which is a good thing. But not CI! Alright? You might have CI with short-lived branches of a couple of hours.
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Nikhil Thorat
@nsthorat
"[T]he Office will not register works produced by a machine or mere mechanical process that operates randomly or automatically without any creative input or intervention from a human author." Machine creates z-vector, human adds 1e-10. Is this okay?
ipkitten.blogspot.com
US Copyright Office refuses to register AI-generated work, finding that "human authorship is a...
Can a work entirely created by a machine be protected by copyright? On Valentine’s Day, the US Copyright Office (Review Board) answered thi...
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Nikhil Thorat
@nsthorat
Politics is about people, people make software for other people.
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DHH
@dhh
"It's a real shame that this is the world we find ourselves in now. One so sharply divided by politics and ideology that we can't even share the love of Ruby on Rails together at a conference without a need to settle scores." world.hey.com/dhh/no-railsco
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Nikhil Thorat
@nsthorat
Pocket cameras & internet seem like the most important technical inventions of the last few decades. The war in Iraq is probably the last war that didn’t have this type of worldwide visibility.
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Nikhil Thorat
@nsthorat
I have a really hard time understanding how sanctions are going to protect a modern city where families are hiding in the subway and now instructed to make guerrilla molotov cocktails, one we vowed security assurances in 1994. This is all we can come up with?
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Nikhil Thorat
@nsthorat
Work on the “dumb” problems. Things that make people go “well that’s obvious isn’t it?” but hasn’t been done properly. Usually those things are timeless :)
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Nikhil Thorat
@nsthorat
Design docs are best written retroactively. Until a working prototype is built a design doc has little value since it’s a conversation about hypotheticals.
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Nikhil Thorat
@nsthorat
All computers, big or small, have a memory leak somewhere. That’s why turning it off and on again will always be a solution :)
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Nikhil Thorat
@nsthorat
The best career advice I can give is to be meticulous about the people you work with. They are much more important than the project you’re working on.
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