Alessandra Sierra has a great piece on this:
Couldn’t agree more. Had a hell of a time looking at how they were using RL after first use, but gave up in frustration when the remainder of the text was more use of undefined symbols/acronyms.
Re:The Second Half
by philipwhiuk on Thursday April 17, 2025 @12:21PM
(#43719021)
On this note - what's "i.i.d."?
Re:The Second Half
by Bernard_sha_256 on Thursday April 17, 2025 @01:40PM
(#43719983)
I believe this is referring to the probability concept of "Independent and Identically distributed".
In the usage in the book/page, it seems to refer to how tasks/problems are run in parallel and the learning averaged, whereas the author is advocating these problems run sequentially.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_and_identically_di...
Even in scientific domains where a high level of background knowledge is expected, it is standard practice to define each acronym prior to its use in the rest of the paper, for example “using three-letter acronyms (TLAs) without first defining them is a hindrance to readability.”