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by ssivark 1438 days ago
IMHO, it’s very important for papers to lay out the idea lineage and contextualize their incremental progress (analogous to a codebase commit history). For whatever reason, ML seems to prefer the practice of framing each paper as a shiny nugget uniquely disconnected from the ecosystem of ideas, and with is own fancy name (as if it was born a fully developed rockstar).

Imagine isolated code dumps without the shared history leading to nightmare merge conflicts…

I think this makes its really hard for anyone not steeped in experience to parse through the outputs of the spraying firehouse, and organize their thinking rigorously — thereby fragilizing the field’s intellectual output in a vicious cycle.