Thing Of The Decade
Hello readers, as you know the decade is coming to an end so I thought I would give a thing the title of “Best Thing of the Decade” because people seem to like award shows and I want more clicks on this blog.
Now a serious article might say something like this: “these are all my opinions and may not necessarily be the best thing according to you”. While a humorous article would go: “these are all my opinions which means that they are correct and if you disagree with me you are nitpicking and biased”.
I find both of these to be incredibly overplayed by now, so instead I’m going to be original say this: “these are opinions if you disagree with them otherwise they are facts that reaffirm your bias”. I don’t really like telling people my favourite things because I don’t like being judged so I hope this means I can avoid being emailed mean things about myself because you think I’m a weirdo.
First, let’s go through some things that aren’t quite the “Best Thing of the Decade” but are pretty close (in no particular order).
JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure - Anime (2012)
Good anime. I don’t know how to talk about TV shows without spoiling them.
Also, Part 4 Jotaro is really hot and I have fantasies that he’d spit on me and call me a bitch…
Actually, I’ve been meaning to do a top ten waifus/husbandos for a while now so I might as well do it here. If you’re not a weeb and don’t care about this, feel free to skip it. It has nothing to do with what this post was originally about anyway.
- Shun Kaidou (The Disastrous Life of Saiki K.)
- Shiota Nagisa (Assassination Classroom)
- Jotaro Kujo (JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure)
- Narancia Ghirga (JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure)
- Ryuji Sakamoto (Persona 5)
- Popuko (Pop Team Epic)
- Kusuo Saiki (The Disastrous Life of Saiki K.)
- Yumehara Chiyo (The Disastrous Life of Saiki K.)
- Sae Niijima (Persona 5)
- Bernadetta (Fire Emblem: Three Houses)
Hmm… I’ve never actually written it down before and it’s seems to be very clear that I have a “type”. This definitely won’t help me convince you that I’m not a weirdo.
The Time I Got 20/20 For A History Essay On “Why Australia Joined the Vietnam War” (2015)
Oh this is one of my favourite things that happened during High School. History was my worst subject and on the previous essay I got a 5/20, so this was quite the surprise. Unfortunately, I didn’t keep it up and ended the year with a “C” grade.
I was also going to explain a bit about “Why Australia Joined the Vietnam War” here, but as it turns out, I’ve completely forgotten it.
This Blog (2018)
I was thinking about it, but I wouldn’t actually make this blog the “Best Thing of the Decade”. I’m not that narcissistic.
Attention Is All You Need (2017)
During work I like to open up a random arXiv.org paper on my second monitor because reading research papers makes you look smart. This was not one of those times however, I actually sought out and read it!
Here’s the abstract if you don’t know what it’s about:
The dominant sequence transduction models are based on complex recurrent or convolutional neural networks that include an encoder and a decoder. The best performing models also connect the encoder and decoder through an attention mechanism. We propose a new simple network architecture, the Transformer, based solely on attention mechanisms, dispensing with recurrence and convolutions entirely. Experiments on two machine translation tasks show these models to be superior in quality while being more parallelizable and requiring significantly less time to train. Our model achieves 28.4 BLEU on the WMT 2014 English- to-German translation task, improving over the existing best results, including ensembles, by over 2 BLEU. On the WMT 2014 English-to-French translation task, our model establishes a new single-model state-of-the-art BLEU score of 41.8 after training for 3.5 days on eight GPUs, a small fraction of the training costs of the best models from the literature. We show that the Transformer generalizes well to other tasks by applying it successfully to English constituency parsing both with large and limited training data.
NLP is a field I’m very interested in, so I’ve been trying to read papers to get a better understanding of it. I didn’t understand all of it, but just searching up new terms was enough for me to be able to get through it.
Wow! It’s now time to reveal what the “Best Thing of the Decade” is!
Pokemon Bidoof Version (2019)
I don’t know what you expected. The waifu list was a rouse, my real love is for Bidoof.
Incidentally, this is also the best thing of the year so that's pretty cool.