Is there anything an "early" programmer like myself can do to play around with this stuff without a background in the related math?
I'm dying for this stuff to be dumbed down enough where Joe WebUser can feed in arbitrary data in a csv or point an app at a data source and get some sort of meaningful results.
It truly seems like an area where once the barrier to entry is greatly reduced, the creativity of laymen will lead to some truly amazing executions.
I'm dying for this stuff to be dumbed down enough[...]
It kind of already is. Have you read the docs/examples? I don't think your mentality is fruitful. Having argued with people who shared your point of view, it seems there will always be something too difficult that prevents them from being good at X.
There's no substitute for sweat. Have fun with the code they gave you and see where you end up!
I think we have different definitions of what "dumbed down" means.
I never said I could/would never put in the work to learn it. I'm saying that the place it is in right now is still too advanced for someone with my background to pick up and play around with without sitting down to seriously study the underlying concepts that are objectively fairly dense subject matter that can require advanced math and CS backgrounds.
To be clear, I'm not advocating that everything should be dumbed down for the sake of it. My point was largely that when the barrier to creation gets low enough, more creative types that don't have the heavy technical backgrounds can pick it up and create things that more technical users may never have imagined.
Not everything is best served as remaining elusively complex for the layman.
Also, for the record, I will probably read up on some of this stuff because I find it interesting and enjoy learning. I just wish it was a step more accessible than it is today, even with this development.
I agree with Shostack. He is talking about removing friction, easing out the learning curve.
The command line make command on GNU/Linux is an example of something that "dumbs down"/makes easy a quick start , as opposed to editing and configuring the Makefile yourself.
Similarly, yum/apt-get take this "dumb down" one step further.
Nothing wrong with removing friction.
Infact this is an idea for a startup right here, remove friction from machine learning/NLP/API.
That is why I responded to shostack in the first place. The response was specific to his question and I got plenty of downvotes on my karma. No worries there :)
I wasn't trying to bring you down. Maybe what you're looking for is a visual programming environment, where you can drag and drop functions, data, etc?
Not sure I even need a visual programming environment as I'm comfortable using a command line and hacking stuff together in Sublime.
However I am highly visual and visualizing the impact on the results would be really helpful. I deal with a lot of analytics and data as part of my day-to-day managing digital media. I often find that I can easily spot trends just by glancing at data visualizations, and infer insights from them.
Further, being able to visualize the nature of the functions/data/etc. would also be very helpful. I tend to need to visualize something to fully grok it.
If you have any suggestions for a more visual take on machine learning that is beginner friendly, I'd love a link.
It's probably best to understand what you're doing if you use something like this. I'd recommend at least going through an intro ML book/course to learn the basics first.
Hi shostack,
You can try out ThatNeedle API. http://www.thatneedle.com/nlp-api.html . While it is only catering to retail for now. The underlying capability is broader and generic.
If you have specific needs, let's get in touch and discuss. You should at least take a look at the gif demo on the site.
I'm dying for this stuff to be dumbed down enough where Joe WebUser can feed in arbitrary data in a csv or point an app at a data source and get some sort of meaningful results.
It truly seems like an area where once the barrier to entry is greatly reduced, the creativity of laymen will lead to some truly amazing executions.