Something about October
calls for u to be sober.
It feels like you'll never recover,
but routine will carry you over.
😓😣😤😐
1. I think I just found one of the things I wanted to be coming into programming: A serial product builder. Zoe Chew has a really neat website where she details the stuff she has done & is currently doing. Really impressive - I need to dig deeper!
Takeaways:
1. Product first, then tech stack
2. Detail documentation, recording everything
3. Solve your own problems, if u can't find it, why not build it?
4. Why take so long to build?
5. There is this filter in my head that keeps me from being honest
The low/no code stack she used 👀😮
2. Start/Home/NewTab page + Bookmark manager + RSS feed
> minimalistic with beautiful color combinations templates
- new but over-the-top cringe lifestyle photos
> organize bookmarks into types/tags
- can follow a drop down list or kanban style for the nested items
> need for managing/organizing bookmarks
- drag-n-drop into groups
- agile style kanban/to do list
- chatbot to talk to u when procrastinating
> instant bookmarking tool on browser
> should look like samsung home app group folder
Inspiration:
3. Blogging choices are currently lacking.
+ Input & output style is nice
- Text-editing could be like Google Doc
- Styling is super limited (could be like Google Sites Builder)
- Not user friendly editing pages
- Everything comes at a cost (domain name, storage, more editing)
> Try Github pages & Jekyll
> Try building a blog competitor from scratch
4. Auto-parking chair. Neat application of automation.
Nissan actually build it to promote their Intelligent Parking Assist Technology to a car drivers, by demonstrating through a simple daily object –
the chair. The robotic office
chairs tidy themselves away when people clap their hands. Cameras placed
around the office tell the chairs their location & suitable route
to the table.
5. Interesting websites around the Web
Been thinking about the web as a bookstore. They are so many to explore, some gems are hidden away, oblivious to the unknowing like me. So, I searched on "Interesting websites around the web". Here are some of the websites that catches my fancy.
6. Insightful podcasts
Might need to do some searching on similar podcasts to *insert chun podcast*
7. What we ourselves can't put into detailed description, machines can't do. 😲💥
Many people are fond of saying, “They will never make a machine to replace the human mind—it does many things which no machine could ever do.”
A beautiful answer to this was given by J. von Neumann in a talk on computers given in Princeton in 1948. He said: “You insist that there is something a machine cannot do. If you will tell me precisely what it is that a machine cannot do, then I can always make a machine which will do just that!”
What does he mean?
In principle, the only operations which a machine cannot perform for us are those which we cannot describe in detail, or which could not be completed in a finite number of steps. The only real limitations on making “machines which think” are our own limitations in not knowing exactly what “thinking” consists of.
8. Jordan Peterson Stuff from his subreddit
9. Kaggle Roadmap
He read 2 notebooks daily?
10. The fuck stanza for the ages
11. Bunch of useful generators
12. ELI5: why is it so easy to give others advice but hard to listen to our own?
This
has actually been researched in social psychology. The basic answer is
that when you give advice, you solve a simpler problem than the one the
person actually faces.
This was
studied through judgment and decision making research. When you give
advice to someone else, you pick one most important feature of the
problem and solve that. E.g., let's say your friend is in an abusive
relationship: you pick safety, weigh that at 100% importance, tell them
to leave their partner and call it a day.
But
when you're actually in a situation, it's not that easy. Sure, they
value their own safety. But they also place a value on their bond that
took time and effort. And there's the issue of rent/housing (assume they
live together); having to move and stuff is costly.
You
may think that stuff is not a good way to think or not important, but
again, that's a luxury of being outside the problem: you give 100%
weight to one judgment feature. As soon as it's your problem, you weigh
many more features in a more complex math.
This
is also why self distancing can be a good strategy to solve your own
problems. Self distancing is what it sounds like: ask yourself what
advice you'd give to solve your problem if it was your friend who had
that problem.
Anyway, sometimes
the advice giver is being unrealistic in how simple they're making the
problem, sometimes they're focusing on the issue that's most important.
Context matters.
Edit for source
since some people were curious. my response was primarily based on Kray
and Gonzalez (1999), but I also included two other interesting articles.
Kray,
L., & Gonzalez, R. (1999). Differential weighting in choice versus
advice: I’ll do this, you do that. Journal of Behavioral
Decision Making,12,207–217.
Lu,
Jingyi, Xiaofei Xie, and Jingzhe Xu. Desirability or feasibility:
Self–other decision-making differences. Personality and Social
Psychology Bulletin 39.2 (2013): 144-155.
Ubel,
P. A., Angott, A. M., & Zikmund-Fisher, B. J. (2011). Physicians
Recommend Different Treatments for Patients Than They Would Choose for
Themselves. Archives of internal medicine, 171(7).
13. Nice opening for a horror story. Unexpecting
A Trail of Blood / Blood on Tracks by Shuzo Oshimi
The manga series is still ongoing, almost concluding now.
It really shows elements of subservience, being over-dependent, being your own person. It's kinda relatable that people that knows what you're going thru are also the ones matured enough to see thru all the disdain & negative views from the masses, and actually be your friend. I suppose it goes to show that we all need someone that can relate to our troubles, that where u'll find the true friends.
For a girl to always ask permissions from a guy to do stuffs, and to always see through weird behaviors as someone experiencing problems rather than just being outright disgusted; that's a turn-on. Sticking with a troubled person & wanting to solve the problem together is a true display of unwavering loyalty, but behind that is a strong belief that things can get better & more importantly, the troubled person is capable of & does change for the better.
But at the same time, it also advocates being your own person & not being overly dependent on someone for approval, companionship to the point of not allowing the person his own freedom, letting go of your past. There's a recurring line (apart from "Sei, Honey") towards the end of the story: "I am my own person".
This genre is like that loyalty, devotion, helplessness, unspoken emotions, dilemma in doing the right thing.
After the second read, it was clear that Sei looks up to his mother and feels what she feels, striving to feel sorry for her. But, in reality, his mother was actually abandoned as a child & probably grew up lonely. She decided to marry & have a family but quickly realized that didn't make her any less lonely since she was a housewife. So, she wanted to disappear but couldn't do so as she doesn't want to abandon her child like how she was abandoned as a child herself. So, she thought the best way to break this cycle of loneliness is to kill her child & herself, so that both of them will not need to suffer loneliness. But after her first attempt of dumping Sei from a high ground, she realised it was futile & therefore continue to live while doting on her only child as Sei was the only one she cares & lives for. She also expects Sei to devote his love to her as much as she devoted to him & therefore cannot accept others having Sei. I think Sei's mother would not say the reason for pushing Shigeru off the cliff bcos she does not want Sei to know that she threw Sei down a hill in the past.
14. How to overcome attachment towards a character/world from an impactful manga?
- Watch other stuff
- Reread it
- Accept that attachment, & know that it takes time to dissipate
- Knowing that over-reading will turn it stale, so self-distancing is good
15. Lots of cool observations about AI & DL stuff
16.
17. One of the best fan moments on the mic
18. Very innocent & funny reactions on AI's attempt at finishing Schubert's Unfinished Symphony
19. Ludwig AI
Ludwig is a toolbox that allows users to train and test deep learning models without the need to write code.
It is built on top of TensorFlow.
20. Need to learn UX Design. Clueless on how to design website.
Figma Design course, maybe
21. Manga to read:
- Chainsaw man
- Her majesty's swarm
22. Techlead's 7 skills to work on
1. Empathy (Negotiation)
2. The ability to learn
3. Marketing
4. Ownership mentality
5. Money management
6. Learning a language
7. Learn some technical skill
Maybe should learn how to use API's (or API programming)
23. A Silent Voice: Touching, heartwarming, & sad story of turning over new leaf, public rejection, overcoming embarrassing moments, treating disabled people like normal people & that plot twist.
24. Classic Michio Kaku clips. Makes you feel a bit smarter than when you started it.
25. The wife of a some sort popular Japanese porn actor. She is certainly had the same qualms everyone would have about getting into a relationship with a pornstar. But the wisdom from her experience & the misconceptions she dispelled are inspiring and humbling. Or is it just that Japanese girls talk so politely that it's pleasant?
26. Some ideas from winning hackathon entries
libraries, app, robot
If u want to read more about hackathon winners & their documentations, u can check out DEVPOST
27. Just realised that NXFury (Discord server) news-feed channel has loads of interesting articles relevant to AI, technology, self-critic, changes, etc. All interesting stuffs (at least to me, that is). Finally, a news aggregator I've always needed but never spent time to make.
28. Streamlit. The fastest way to build data apps
Streamlit’s open-source app framework is the
easiest way for data scientists and machine learning engineers to
create beautiful, performant apps in only a few hours! All in pure
Python. All for free.
I also saw they were hiring Backend people. Something i'm interesting to master.
Backend Engineer
You excel at writing Python servers and/or libraries
You’ve
dealt with large-scale server deployments using Docker, Github, Apache
Arrow, and/or various AWS technologies including EC2, S3, and
CloudFormation
You have experience working in a team and/or in a large codebase
Backend ArchitectYou're comfortable using Go as your main language
You have 5+ years of experience building robust, scalable backends
You have 3+ years with complex server deployments using technologies like K8s, Docker, EC2, and Terraform
You’re a master at the modern suite of engineering tools, like CircleCI and Github
I see that they are men of culture & hobbies. Note their tech stack.
29. How L could have caught Light as Kira: By making him say something that only Kira would know
30. This slide deck website has a curation of amazing, informative slides on Python & Data Science by Jake VanderPlas (the author of the titular Python Data Science Handbook).
His Github (Got Python DS Handbook, sklearn tutorial, Altair library)
31. This is what real knowledge processing/connections & creative perspective that u want from an expert. Not something that the textbook says. It's like a deeper, simpler view of statistics.
The field of statistics has a reputation for being difficult to crack:
it revolves around a seemingly endless jargon of distributions, test
statistics, confidence intervals, p-values, and more, with each concept
subject to its own subtle assumptions.
But it doesn't have to be this
way: today we have access to computers that Neyman and Pearson could
only dream of, and many of the conceptual challenges in the field can be
overcome through judicious use of these CPU cycles.
The slide shows how you can use your coding skills to "hack statistics" – to replace
some of the theory and jargon with intuitive computational approaches
such as sampling, shuffling, cross-validation, and Bayesian methods –
and show that with a grasp of just a few fundamental concepts, if you
can write a for-loop you can do statistical analysis.
32. Modern plotting & data visualization libraries
Altair library is a interactive plotting & visualization Python library. Just what I was looking for. So, no need to make it myself, I guess. It's co-created by Jake VanderPlas.
HoloviewStop plotting your data - annotate your data and let it visualize itself. With
HoloViews, you can usually express what you want to do in very few
lines of code, letting you focus on what you are trying to explore and
convey, not on the process of plotting.
33.
34. Some wise guy from TechLead Discord server mentioned:
Great minds discuss ideas,
Average minds discuss events,
Small minds discuss people.
35. The air con trap: Cold air is heating the world
- Ironical feedback loop
Warmer temperatures lead to more air conditioning; more air conditioning leads to warmer temperatures. We used air con to solve global warming, but we end up contributing to the problem.
- Power failures
Hotter weather, more air cons are used, higher electricity demand on power grid, power grid's system failure (extreme temperature + high running temperature due to demand), blackouts in heatwave. In 2006, equipment failure left 175,000 people in Queens without power for a week, during a heatwave that killed 40 people. In 2019, Con Edison cut power
to 50,000 customers in Brooklyn and Queens for 24 hours, afraid that
parts of the nearby grid were close to collapse, which could have left
hundreds of thousands of people without power for days.
- Power hungry appliance
A small air con unit cooling a single room, on average, consumes more power than
running four fridges. A central unit cooling an average house
uses more power than 15 fridges.
(2018) in Beijing, during a heatwave, 50% of the power capacity was going to air conditioning.
- Ubiquity
In 2019, there's one single room air con unit for every seven people on earth (so 1bn air cons, projected to be more than 4.5bn by 2050)
- Actually built for industrial purposes, not for cooling. Gonna get into some historical chain of events here...
- Invented by Willis Carrier, an American engineer at a heating and ventilation
company, who was tasked in 1902 with reducing humidity in a Brooklyn
printing factory.
- They wanted to create the most stable possible conditions for industrial
production and in a print factory, humidity curled sheets of paper
and smudged ink.
- He realised that removing heat from the factory air would reduce humidity,
and so he borrowed technology from the nascent refrigeration industry to
create what was, and still is, essentially a jacked-up fridge.
- Then as now, air conditioning units work by breathing in warm air,
passing it across a cold surface, and exhaling cool, dry air.
- Air conditioning eventually came to
be seen as essential, a symbol of modernity and comfort.
- The invention was an immediate success with
industry – textile, ammunition, and pharmaceutical factories were among
the first adopters – and then began to catch on elsewhere.
- The House of
Representatives installed air conditioning in 1928, followed by the
White House and the Senate in 1929. But during this period, most
Americans encountered air conditioning only in places such as theatres
or department stores, where it was seen as a delightful novelty.
- It
wasn’t until the late 1940s, when it began to enter people’s homes,
that the air conditioner really conquered the US. Before then, according
to the historian Gail Cooper, the industry had struggled to convince
the public that air conditioning was a necessity, rather than a luxury. What fuelled the rise of the air conditioning was not a sudden explosion in consumer demand, but the influence of the industries behind the great postwar housing boom.
- Accelerated by housing & electricity providers
Housing developers can build uniform homes in places of different climates.
Power providers want to increase consumer electricity usage (more revenue to build more plants, as initial demand was low)
36. There is a Python computational library for general relativity. Enter, EinsteinPy
37. Angulia did some history & evolution of Computer Vision models. She recommended that:
- Fastest way to learn the code: choose your project, search for a github example of it, copy & use it, tweak where you want & see the changes
- For action sequence recognition, two CV models to try are S3D & I3D.
38. Seeing App from Microsoft is everything a blind person needs from his smartphone. - Turns the visual world into an audible experience
- Recognize friends and their facial expressions
- Read text quickly
seeing-ai website
39. Microsoft APAC AI for Accessibility Virtual Hackathon
Their website is quite neat. A model website in my opinion.
The Challenges are really cool! Some of the ones that i like are:
The Resources are comprehensive and targeted too. 👍
I think I should really learn to use Microsoft tools & software. Enough with the prejudice on them being inferior. Their no-code software should be applauded and seen as democratizing softwares & technologies that are otherwise limited to experts.
Man...the problem the disabled people face, knowing that they didn't choose to be born that way, kinda make me feel for them.
Employment
How can we positively impact the employment rate for people with disabilities through more intelligent technology?
Daily Life
How can we increase access to technology for people with disabilities while also decreasing the cost of such technology?
Communication & Connection
How can AI help improve the speed, accuracy, and convenience of communication for people with disabilities?
40. - Philosophical - I feel like I have this fear of:
- realising I'm not smart enough
- competing/participating with people I know or more capable than me
- doing something that entails a lot of effort
- looking dumb bcos I didn't say the "right" things or words
41. This could be the key to unlock the frogstand progression gap.
42. Full stack developer Roadmap : Picture
43. Writing training using Benjo Franko's method
Franklin Write website
1. Find a passage you would like to study.
For each sentence, write down notes on the content.
2. Rewrite the passage from memory using only your notes on each sentence.
This forces you to think.
3. Reread the original passage and correct any mistakes.
This teaches you sentence construction.
4. Take the passage and convert it into poetry.
This helps you practice rhythm and flow.
5. Convert your poem back to prose.
This reinforces your understanding of the passage.
6. Jumble your notes on each sentence, then reassemble them in the right order.
This teaches you structure and organization of ideas.
43. A computer vision football game on your own laptop
Light Buzz is a developer company that builds motion analysis AI for you.
Just give them your idea & they will develop it for you.
