Cool cool, we’re cool. I get a little triggered when I hear people say that NN/DL models are “fancy statistics”—it’s not the first time.

In what seems like another lifetime ago, my first engineering job was as a process engineer for an refinery-scale continuous chromatography unit in hydrocarbon refining. Fuck that industry, but there’s some really cool tech there nevertheless. Anyway when I was first learning the process, the technician I was learning from called it a series of “fancy filters” and that triggered me too—adsorption is a really fascinating chemical process that uses a lot of math and physics to finely-tune for desired purity, flowrate, etc. and to diminish it as “fancy filtration”!!!

He wasn’t wrong, you’re not either; but it’s definitely more nuanced than that. :)

Engineers are gonna nerd out about stuff. It’s a natural law, I think.