Hacker Thinking About (Programming) Languages for a Side Project It has been about 10 years since I stopped working on my procedural landscape generation side project [https://harveynick.com/tag/procedural-landscape-generation/]. I’ve wanted to pick some of the the ideas from that project for a while now, but never really had anything which felt that concrete starting point.
Ideas Which Changed My Perspective Unknown Unknowns; or “Men Don’t Have Interesting and Varied Friendships” This idea differs from the others in this series, because I disagree with it. Strongly. I might even go so far as to say that I was offended by it, initially. Getting offended is rarely constructive, though, and in the end it made me stop and think. It also differs
Hacker Thinking About Languages for Deep Learning Right now Python [https://www.python.org] feels like the language of deep learning and data science in general. That’s not really surprising. With the right libraries (probably NumPy [https://www.numpy.org], Pandas [https://pandas.pydata.org] and MatPlotLib [https://matplotlib.org]) it can come close to matching
Ideas Which Changed My Perspective The Shocking Truth About Schrodinger’s Cat Another idea which changed my perspective, and this one still haunts me. It’s split across two different sources which I read in succession. Furthermore, because it pertains to quantum mechanics, it’s going to take me a little while, and two excerpts, to explain. The first is from Neal
Relearning Machine Learning Lapped by Fast.ai Well. This is embarrassing. At the beginning of last year I was working my way through fast.ai’s excellent Deep Learning for Coders [http://course18.fast.ai] course. Then, around the time I was due to start the last module, my life got very busy and complicated. To be
Ideas Which Changed My Perspective Shermer's Last Law The Laundry Files [https://amzn.to/2I6DzbL] is a book series which includes several subjects which are guaranteed to draw my interest, especially when combined: * Computer related stuff; * Espionage type stuff; * Lovecraftey [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._P._Lovecraft] stuff. They’re very fun, but if I’m being
Ideas Which Changed My Perspective Dr John and Fat Tony Continuing my short series on ideas which changed my perspective with a alternative approach to a tossed coin from a slightly controversial author.
Ideas Which Changed My Perspective Platypus Categorisation Part one of short series of posts on ideas which have changed my perspective one way or another. Starting with something which massively changed the way I look at systems of categorisation.
Blogger Suddenly, a Wild “Now” Page Appears A short explanation of the new “Now” page which has appeared in the site menu.
Relearning Machine Learning A Swing and a Miss: Trying to Reduce English Uncertainty in IMDB Review Classification My mostly unsuccessful attempt to use the part of speech tagging to reduce ambiguity and improve performance in IMDB review classification with RNNs.
Relearning Machine Learning Kaggle’s Yelp Restaurant Photo Classification Competition, Fast.ai Style: Part 2 Hacks, improvements and graphs. Lots of graphs. Part 2 of my attempt to grapple with the Kaggle Yelp Restaurant Photo Classification competition, using the techniques (and code library) from fast.ai’s “Practical Deep Learning for Coders” course.
Relearning Machine Learning Kaggle’s Yelp Restaurant Photo Classification Competition, Fast.ai Style: Part 1 Part 1 of my attempt to grapple with the Kaggle Yelp Restaurant Photo Classification competition, using the techniques (and code library) from fast.ai’s “Practical Deep Learning for Coders” course.
Blogger A Short Word About GDPR How this site will be handling changes required by the GDPR. Plus an aside regarding targeting types in Google AdSense.
Hacker An iOS Developer’s Opinions of Flutter A lengthy discussion of the Flutter cross platform UI framework and my feelings about it. TLDR: I like the Flutter framework a lot, but: I wish it used Swift as its programming language; and I find its facsimile of native OS components to be imperfect.
Relearning Machine Learning Fast.ai via iPad with Paperspace and Juno App Getting started with the fast.ai "Deep Learning for Coders" MOOC. Setting Paperspace to work as a compute backend, and using the iPad app Juno as the frontend.
Relearning Machine Learning Some Notes on Coursera’s Andrew Ng Deep Learning Speciality Notes on the Coursera Speciality which acts as a follow up to the Machine Learning course I discussed previously.
Blogger I Ain’t Dead In which I make the case that I haven’t entirely been sitting on my hands when it comes to writing for the web. Also: pontifications on the differences between Ghost and Wordpress.
Relearning Machine Learning Some Notes on the “Andrew Ng” Coursera Machine Learning Course Some notes on the MOOC which is more or less the standard text for basic machine learning. Comparisons are made with Udacity's Introduction to Machine Learning.
Blogger International Men’s Day As promised back in my International Women’s Day post [https://harveynick.com/2017/03/08/international-womens-day/], I’m now writing about its counterpart. International Men’s Day is the day I’m posting this: the 19th of November. As noted in the previous post: some people would say that
Blogger Blogging on the Quartz Curve A little while ago, over dinner, a good friend of mine introduced me to something called the “Quartz Curve”. Named for the online news magazine which coined it, it goes like this: if you plot the length of an article against user engagement, the resulting graph is bowl shaped. Specifically,
Blogger Mostly an iPad Followup Somewhat appropriately, I finished and edited my previous post about switching to an iPad for many of my computing use cases [https://harveynick.com/2017/07/30/thinking-about-going-ipad-mostly/] on an iPad. Luckily I have access to one which belongs to my employer and happens to be running the iOS 11
Blogger Thinking About Going iPad... Mostly Going “iPad only” is all the rage in some circles. I don't think it would really work for me. iOS still has too many limitations for that. But I do like the idea of using an iPad as my main “carry around” machine. Right now I use a
Blogger Should Have Paid for the Delivery, or: Value Your Time Just before the weekend I realised I needed a few items from Ikea at fairly short notice. Nothing complicated. A rug and some rails of the sort kitchen utensils dangle from. My in-progress kitchen would definitely remain in-progress without the latter. The obvious solution was the usual online shopping and
Hacker Smart Watches, Pilots’ Associates, and Travelling Salesmen I can probably be described as a wearable tech true believer. I bought in fairly early and have more or less stuck with it. As a device class it's still in the early stages, I think, but has a lot of potential. After all, humans have been putting
Hacker WWDC Predications Score Card Having made a point of making some WWDC predictions in my last post [http://harveynick.com/2017/06/04/yet-another-rambling-wwdc-predications-post/], it seems only right that I should look back at them after the fact and see how I did. I'd also like to talk about a couple of
