A few months ago I came across maximum mean discrepancy as a measure of distribution difference, and today I read this term and totally forgot what is means and had to find a youtube video to refresh my understanding. This happens a lot of times in my research. I feel like unless something is really basic (e.g. CNN, cross entropy, etc) and used a lot in my day-to-day model building, I easily forgot what I have read. I wonder is it just because I have a bad memory or I do not have a good way to organize information?

  • Zemeniite@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    Honestly, this makes me sad. I completely agree with you and experience this myself but it is disheartening.

    I’m currently way too overworked to do this but I have had the idea of making a personal wiki. Read a paper those bazillion times I need until I understand it (some great papers are truly poorly written) and make succinct notes (definitions, math, code, conclusions, usage cases). Then use the wiki whenever I forget something.

    I don’t know what platform / tool to use for the wiki because I don’t want to be forever required to pay for a subscription fee yet I want it accessible from multiple devices and have a nice search.

    • Seankala@alien.topBEnglish
      1·
      10 months ago

      Don’t be sad, it’s just a part of how things are you just have to choose a method and stick to it.

      I personally use Notion. I’ve created a database and added properties like date, venue, authors, organizations, etc.

      For example, the other day I needed to recap what the BLIP paper was about so I just searched the paper in the database and took a look at the page. On that page I’ve highlighted different text with different colors depending on when I came back to read it.

      Took me a while to get this working and into the habit of it though.

      • Zemeniite@alien.topBEnglish
        1·
        10 months ago

        I’ve been in the industry for 5 years. I don’t know how many papers I have read but I know that I recall only few. I regret not writing things down earlier but I never have the time. Ugh, I just need to swallow this up and start to do this

        • Seankala@alien.topBEnglish
          1·
          10 months ago

          Well I don’t know your situation but I feel like the “never have time” excuse may not necessarily be true. Even creating a page in Notion and writing down one line is enough for me. I feel like what was holding me back before was the trap of perfectionism. I wouldn’t want to write anything unless I could make it into some conference-poster-quality page.