Last statement is a bit sus... Muon computes matrix sign function which can be defined as setting singular values to 1, though you can also define it without SVD. Muon itself doesn't use SVD because it uses a faster method to compute matrix sign. Adam doesn't do anything related to SVD or singular values. Also not sure what you meant by "second order singular values"

Just going to sound really pedantic here, but RGB does not capture the entire colour space. In fact, it only captures about 35% of the colours the human eye can perceive.

https://www.oceanopticsbook.info/view/photometry-and-visibil...

It comes up anywhere that youre working with data that has some sort of correlation structure.

In image processing, the SVD makes it possible to talk about all the rich spatial correlations in the image, and pick out the strongest ones and discard noise.

This is also why it's so ubiquitous in compression algorithms, and of central importance in stuff like quantum information.

what work are you doing in computer vision that isn't entirely ML these days?

> Claude and Codex are now generating all my code for me now, and I see them spitting out SVD code frequently -- often for very special cases.

I find this so annoying. I had to PR some Claude-generated gaussian elimination routine last month and making sure it got the pivoting logic correct was a waste of my time.