3rd Year, Conundrum & Neural Ordinary Differential Equations David Bowie (for those too tired to click the links) David Bowie disappeared from music (to indulge in other creative avenues) for nearly a decade before returning with The Next Day , everyone thought it was the end but he had Blackstar scheduled for his 69th birthday. Who would have thought that would become the permanent end of his legacy? I admire him far too much to initiate that release schedule, so here's a post after only 1 year of disappearance, not ten. Somewhere between entering in second year, juggling different technical fields and trying to understand what exactly I'm doing with my life, writing quietly dissolved into the background (or did it ?). But unlike vanishing gradients, this disappearance never fully converged; somewhere underneath all the noise, the loss was still propagating. Bowie might not have had the opportunity to properly bid farewell to his listeners, but I apparently have ...