> FWIW, a friend of mine (and not "a friend of mine")

What? Do you mean a coworker or something as compared to a friend?

They are clarifying that "a friend of mine" is not a euphemism for themselves, because it's more common to use it as a euphemism for yourself than it is to actually talk to strangers online about your friend's life, problems, opinions etc.

Oh, huh. I now recognize what you're referring to but I never would have realized that without being explicitly told so. Thank you.

Glad you liked it! Just curious, what else would you like to see to make the post more complete? I had focused on getting through the basics of diffusion training and sampling as concisely as possible, but perhaps in future posts I can delve deeper into other aspects of diffusion.

That's actually hard for me to answer. I'm afraid to taint it. Honestly, I'd be wary to touch it especially being advice coming from someone already well versed in the domain. It's too easy to accidentally complexify and then you end up losing your target audience. But maybe the connection to VAEs could be made clearer? Maybe a bit clearer or better introducing the topic of optimization? But again, it's a hard line to walk because you've successfully written something that is approachable to a novice. This is the same problem I suffer when trying to teach haha. But I think the fact that you're asking and looking to improve it's the biggest sign you'll continue to do well.

For later topics I think there's a lack on discussions about things like score modeling, the difficulties of understanding latent representations (so many misunderstand the curse of dimensionality), and Schrodinger Bridges. There's so much lol

The better advice I can give is to listen to anyone complaining. It's hard because you have to try to see beyond their words and find their intent (I think this also makes them more digestible and less emotionally draining/hurtful). Especially consider a novice isn't going to have to right words to correctly express their difficulties parsing and it may just come out looking like anger when it's frustration.

Just keep doing your best :)