A Socially-Distanced Thanksgiving for ML Engineers
Description
A two-panel meme that contrasts appropriate and inappropriate ways to celebrate Thanksgiving, posted in November 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic. The top panel has the heading, 'How you shouldn't gather on Thanksgiving:' and shows a warm, inviting photo of a large group of friends and family gathered around a dinner table, toasting with wine glasses. The bottom panel, under the heading 'How you should gather on Thanksgiving:', displays only text. It shows the command 'TORCH.GATHER' in a large, monospaced font, followed by a screenshot of the official PyTorch documentation for the function: 'torch.gather(input, dim, index, *, sparse_grad=False, out=None) → Tensor'. The humor is a multi-layered pun for the machine learning community. It plays on the word 'gather,' contrasting a dangerous social gathering with the 'safe' alternative of using a specific function from the PyTorch deep learning library. It's a niche, clever joke that was particularly resonant during the social distancing mandates of its time
Comments
9Comment deleted
My family's Thanksgiving seating chart is basically a `torch.gather` operation. You provide the input tensor of relatives, the dimension (table), and an index of who can sit next to whom without causing a segmentation fault
This year I’m torch.gather-ing relatives across dim=0 with index=ZoomIDs - cheaper than airfare, fully deterministic, and I can .detach() the moment politics backpropagates
After 15 years of explaining tensor operations to stakeholders, I've realized torch.gather() is still easier to understand than why production models suddenly decide to gather NaN values right before the quarterly demo
The real Thanksgiving miracle is when your torch.gather() operation doesn't throw a dimension mismatch error at 3 AM while you're trying to implement attention mechanisms. At least with family gatherings, the only thing that crashes is your patience, not your training run
Thanksgiving architecture: we only “gather” with torch.gather - invitees are a LongTensor index, out-of-range cousins raise IndexError, and sparse_grad=False because we’re not carrying emotional gradients into Q1
Family gatherings: unpredictable shapes and relational drama. torch.gather: precise indices, consistent output, zero small talk
Thanksgiving policy: torch.gather - the GPU can survive non‑coalesced reads; the family can’t survive non‑coalesced opinions
Хехе, торч Comment deleted
Prosto dunul sladko Comment deleted