I've been having fun playing with Soundtrap. It runs in the browser, allowing you to access your projects on any device. I'm not sure if it can meet the needs of professionals, but for someone just starting out with music it has been great.
I really have always wished for reproducibility. Thanks for taking up this feature. How do you handle aliasing and references inside objects? Suppose I have
#Cell 1
a = [1,2,3]
b = (a,True)
#Cell 2
b[0][0] = 5
#Cell 3
print(sum(a))
Now if I change Cell 2 to
# Cell 2'
b[0][0] = 4
and execute, Cell 3's result becomes stale. Do you track such dependencies? Would really love to read more about the underlying implementation.
If you mutate an object itself, we can't really track that. There's no magic going on; you can break the state if you use mutable objects. It's less of an issue in Scala where immutable data structures are the norm, but I can imagine it would be disappointing in Python.
Currently it takes a shallow copy of the state output by each cell, meaning every value is going to be a primitive value or a reference. If it's a reference to mutable state, you're kind of on your own with respect to keeping reproducibility. I felt like this was a good compromise between strictly enforced reproducibility and practicality; if it turns out to be confusing we could consider deep copying the state, or having an option to do that (I could imagine it being pretty bad for efficiency in a lot of ML use cases, though).
I worked with MIPs for 8 years and commercial solvers have always been several orders of magnitude faster/better than open-source solvers.
This is generally true for domain-specific software -- unlike general purpose software, incenting a small pool of specialized talent to make open-source contributions is always hard.
The key to high performance in MIPs comes from having good heuristics, not necessarily from improving the basic algorithms (the algorithms are pretty standard -- simplex or interior point). Finding effective heuristics is hard and tedious, but they make a significant difference in solution speed. For instance, naive Simplex may take 40 minutes to solve a problem but with heuristics the solution time might be 5 seconds.
That said, Cbc is competitive for smaller problems, and here's the thing: many production sized problems aren't that big -- it really depends on your problem domain. I've deployed commercial solvers on Cbc (30k variables/constraints) and it was more than adequate.
I don't have any details on this, but Gurobi (a best of class solver) also offers an on-demand cloud SaaS which you can pay for on demand [1]. The economics of this may work out for some types of problems.
Also, if you're in academia, you can get Gurobi/CPLEX licenses for free (yes). My research group in grad school didn't spend a cent on these solvers, and we still got a taste of best-of-class solution performance (that's how they get you :).
I'm not OP, but work with MIP solvers. Yes, there is a massive difference between the commercial (CPLEX, GUROBI, and maybe XPRESS) versus the best open source solvers (CBC/CLP and GLPK). My industry can only use the open source solvers for prototyping small models and could never use one for production with the size models we have. The commercial solvers are extremely expensive too.
This is not necessarily a wrong thing to teach. As one progresses from old things that are well-understood to new developments,students will have to deal with fuzziness and gaps. They must learn to make progress using a heuristic feel for the subject instead of complete rigour. Too sensitive an alarm for missing foundations will actually stop them from being productive. Think of how much time passed between the invention of calculus and the development of rigorous analysis.
That's probably appropriate for quickly progressing fields, but not for fundamental physics which has utterly stagnated.
People wasting time on important but nearly intractable topics certainly happens (e.g., arguably myself on quantum foundations). But this is absolutely dwarfed by the number of researchers eager to springboard to a cutting edge, which hasn't moved much in decades, but who remain ignorant of the basics.
The terrible incentives for professors to quickly make graduate students useful, rather than invest in fundamental understanding that won't pay off for many years after they graduate, should also lead us to suspect the correct balance isn't being struck.
When it comes to masturbation narrowly defined, most people now accept that it is not harmful or sinful. Nor is it a sign of a failed sex life. I believe that we should have the same attitude towards more general forms of self-gratification.
When I'm at work the cost of a beverage is not just one dollar. It is the cost of lost productivity and time in going out to fetch a coffee, which may be so high that I'll have to make do with what's on hand. Given that I spend a larger fraction of my waking hours at the office that means the refreshments available determine my quality of life to a non-trivial extent, and a fall in their quality may make me leave from this direct effect alone. Specially if I'm good enough to get other offers which are comparable professionally.
For what it’s worth lots of good work-related ideas have come to me while I was being outside the office, apparently being unproductive (taking a walk, waiting in queue at the food-store outside the office to buy some yogurt and fruits etc). From what I’ve read on this website I’m not the only one experiencing this.
I think this is fairly normal for anything creative. During this downtime your brain plays around and that is often when the ideas come out. I frequently get these sparks when you're in the shower or on the toilet, your brain is free to explore.
It's different if you're just processing though, there is no creativity required to check a pile of 500 invoices; you just need to get on and plough though.
But ‘just processing’ jobs also need breaks, especially if accuracy is required, even more especially if the job is safety critical. If you are doing something boring AND dangerous then you have an accident waiting to happen
Even if I get up to go to the bathroom, refill my water, and get another cup of coffee 4 times a day, the point is still valid. If there is no coffee provided by the company that means I either 1) go without, or 2) have to venture out of the office to find it.
In many areas leaving the office for just about anything means taking the elevator downstairs, walking through a sprawling parking lot, making a 10 minute drive to the nearest Starbucks, spending 5 minutes in the drive thru, and then reversing the whole process. I could probably justify that once a day, but upwards of 30 minutes per trip is going to be a really hard sell any more than that.
Even as a freelancer who has no one looking over my shoulder and who works from home I'm simply not going to do that - I bought a coffee maker. Take that to the far opposite extreme and consider the call center employees who have hard stats for their productivity every day and have scheduled breaks... there's simply no way they _could_ do it, even if they wanted to.
So yeah, maybe it's an indicator for _some jobs_ of a poor work quality, but that was the entire point - it's a cheap and easy way to improve that work quality.
Where I work we have a simple policy: Any trip to a coffee shop for multiple staff members is a business expense.
The reason is to get people talking to each other across projects. The drop in productivity from going out for a coffee is more than offset by the benefits of cross-fertilization.
This is a problem only if the person is bothered by their lack of "success".
For some, being a dilettante may precisely be the life that they want. The problem is that if you are perceived as "smart" people all around you will push you to "succeed" in traditional ways, either because they want a share of the profits of such "success", or because they see someone not doing the boring grind as a moral failure, or out of concern that the dilettante is "throwing away their potential".
I'd say that if you are "smart" then it should make your life freer and not more constrained.
https://www.soundtrap.com/