I'm of two minds here. The pro is that the "you could have invented this" walkthrough from first principles is more engaging than "and then so and so introduced this term in 1972 and the definition is such and such". This style is a reaction to that boring and dry teaching style and tries to push towards what eg Feynman pointed at in the Brazil critique.
The con is that you don't get to understand and see any of the history of the ideas or even the ballpark when it was discovered, you attribute it to the blog mentally and you don't know what is how new or old and can't reference it properly when talking to others.
Your theory is that anybody who writes anything is obligated to make sure you can find any related information with one Google search? Again, to me that looks like wanting to be spoon fed.
I have no idea why you think the world owes you endless 101-level discourse, but I hope you recognize you're setting yourself up for equally endless disappointment. If you take a little responsibility for your own education, you'll be happier.
My theory is that anyone wishing to elucidate a complex technical concept is better served with contextual details.
I think one method is superior to another.
Anybody, anything, obligated, and any related information are hyperbolic terms I would have avoided. I understand with a weak position people often resort to hyperbole.
I believe adding more terms to be googled is superior to fewer search terms. When working with ideas from first principles sharing the roots and development is superior to making no reference.
I have no idea why you think the world owes me anything. I was describing what I prefer.
I'm not sure why you think I'm not already endlessly disappointed by the state of the world and it's discourse.
not having expectations always helps.
I think that if you stop projecting ideals on strangers might help your mood.
If you were trying to describe a preference, you didn't do a very good job. You stated it as a universal.
But taking you at your word, if there are things that don't meet your personal tastes, maybe move on to the next thing to read? Not everything has to be for everybody. There are plenty of audiences where people are capable of digging deeper when they want it. Personally, I prefer writers who don't spell everything out. The kind of writing you favor I generally find tedious. I'd much rather read something that shows a little faith in the audience.
I was replying to a comment that was undecided and outlined two choices. I described the reasoning of my preferences and even provided a caveat that my reasoning applied to a subset of the audience.
The overall message and impression of a text has to give the right picture regarding what's new, where the info comes from, etc. It's not about any kind of Google search. It's not about extra info. It's about intellectual honesty.
Often the most straightforward way to walk through an idea while teaching it is not the same order that the ideas were developed, and might not even use the same set of ideas in building up to it, so it can be tricky to get both the best explanation of the idea and the historical context in at the same time without making things more confusing.
I like to see ideas presented as the evolved. Each solution is developed as a perceived reaction to the shortcomings of the previous. This becomes a contrast and comparison as to why one idea is appropriate for a particular context.
I agree. Simple albeit imperfect solution would be pointing even to a wiki page. That alone would signal acknowledgement/awareness that it's building on other stuff.
I'm speaking in general terms and I have not studied much on this subject so I don't have specific suggestions for this post. Please refer to earlier posts in this comment chain for a general idea of what citations would be useful.
First off: What is your goal here? My comment was one sentence and wasn't specific to this article. Why are you acting like I said things I never said? But okay I'll try to answer.
> What are your thoughts on the other comments in this chain that claim that the references and citations as they are in the linked post are acceptable?
> Why do you disagree with them?
Which comments in particular are you talking about?
And I mean, the post doesn't have "references and citations" plural that I can see. It has one clear reference. I see two comments defending that reference, and a whole bunch of comments saying that a post like this doesn't need references.
I don't need to disagree with any of those comments. My point isn't about whether a post that lacks citations is "acceptable". I was talking about whether a post could add historical citations without losing momentum, so it could do a better job of fitting into context. A dozen notes sprinkled around about when/where different ideas came from, not just the mention at the very end of what decade arithmetic coding is from and the mention of the 2023 paper.
I will say it's bad that the 2023 paper is described as "arguing that language modeling and compression are two views of the same thing", emphasis in the original. That very much makes it sound like a new idea when it isn't.
I don't mean to pick on you, it's just then just saw a bunch of negative comments on an article I enjoyed reading and found informative, so I picked a few to reply to for clarification of their position.
I'm confused by the comments that seem to imply that the author is taking credit for ideas that they're writing about, as I didn't get that impression from writing in the article at all.
I'm also confused by the idea that they didn't provide enough citations for concepts in a non-academic source. I feel like in the day and age of Wikipedia it should be sufficient to colourize / bold terms like "Entropy coders" or "Huffman Encoding" to indicate to the reader that these are important terms that they can research for more details if interested.
Overall I guess my position on this is that ~80/285 comments on this post are related to whether not this is a good post which I think is far too many. There are slight issues with the post but they aren't worth 80 comments.
Where I replied to wasn't that the author is taking credit but making it hard to get the context for where the ideas came from. (With the one citation implying a very wrong thing about how old that idea is.)
Specifically the comment I replied to suggested it was a style tradeoff but I don't see why you can't do citations in either style. That's all I came here for.
> I'm also confused by the idea that they didn't provide enough citations for concepts in a non-academic source.
It's useful information about how we got here. That's good in any long story about an idea.
> I feel like in the day and age of Wikipedia it should be sufficient to colourize / bold terms like "Entropy coders" or "Huffman Encoding" to indicate to the reader that these are important terms that they can research for more details if interested.
It works to some extent but some of the concepts don't have fancy words for them and then they don't get that searchability.
> ~80/285 comments
Sometimes tangents spark a discussion. I don't think those numbers are an issue. And they're mostly not calling it a bad post, they just have an objection.
They did not come up with the ideas themselves, so they got them somewhere. Follow the source and all the citations show up. It must be a modern thing where online blogging randos pretend they are all geniuses.
Better too assume they are just not aware. Technology is multi-layered cake of development. I have no doubt the only reason I know a lot of details is that I lived their development.
When standing on the shoulders of giants it's hard to tell what is below them.
If they are not aware they are geniuses who rediscovered a bunch of shit in one blog post of effort. Better not to assume anything and let the writer tell you what's going on, if just an endnote
The con is that you don't get to understand and see any of the history of the ideas or even the ballpark when it was discovered, you attribute it to the blog mentally and you don't know what is how new or old and can't reference it properly when talking to others.