Right before the arrival of the first LLMs, I co-authored a book on Model Risk from a machine learning perspective. Rather than taking a (purely) financial view on the topic, we wanted to break open the term Model Risk to cover all predictive modelling failure cases that lead to harm …
I have a nasty habbit of starting quick new Python projects somewhere in my chronologically organized Google Drive, uv init -ing them, and start adding packages. By default, this means every project gets a .venv directory alongside its pyproject.toml . That works perfectly on a single machine. It also works …
Yesterday (6 Jan), someone showed off a small clever puzzle game on Hacker News, called enclose.horse . An example puzzle looks like this: The game is played on a grid of grass or water tiles. The goal is to place walls so that the horse cannot escape (i.e. exit …
Last year: 2025 , and doing this again this year. Not so many books as the year before, sadly, but overall still a good haul of books I read this year: Title Year Author Rating Not a Speck of Light: Stories 2024 Laird Barron good The City and Its Uncertain Walls …
On LinkedIn, you can play a variant of the N-Queens problem. A community version of the puzzle can be found here . An example puzzle looks like this: The idea is that each row, column, and colored region must contain exactly one queen. Queens cannot be placed in adjacent cells, including …
A huge mess at the moment. Binary wheels point to the wrong location ( Library Python install). I don t want to use Homebrew on this Mac so resorted to compile from source. First set up a project directory: mkdir pygtest cd pygtest Init with a Python version and Torch version …
The last time I did this was in 2017 , but I m in some mood to do it once again. With Summer Games Fest , Next Fest , the PC Gaming Show , the Future Games Show , Fan Fest , and so, so many more shows , even a hardcore fan of gaming would be …
At the end of 2023, certain events in my life led to a realization that I was spending way too little time on reading in the years past, even though I have always been an avid reader in my youth and adult life. Facing some weltschmerz and not finding enjoyment …
If you re at all interested in procedural generation, digital art or game development, it s very likely that you ve heard about the wave function collapse ( WFC ) algorithm before. It s incredible popular, has been ported to virtually every language and engine, and used in several games.
A friend of mine recently asked whether there was an easy way to introduce new levels (i.e. items) to an embedding layer in Keras and only training the embedding layer for those new levels, i.e. keeping the weights for the existing indices fixed. Note that this is not …
I ve recently bought a reMarkable 2 and am happy with it. Since teaching is still happening online for the most part at the moment, I was curious whether I could use it as a drawing tablet, share the screen with my machine, and then pick that up in e …
TL ; DR : very likely not. A student once asked me whether it would make sense to tune the probability cutoff (a.k.a. threshold) for trees in a random forests. Let s explain first what we mean by that exactly. Assume a binary classification setting. Say we ve trained a …
In 2019 , I wrote on the topic of discovering which features interact in a model agnostic manner, using an approach from a paper by Friedman and Popescu entitled Predictive Learning Via Rule Ensembles. I wanted to revisit the topic briefly and expand on it somewhat, given that scikit-learn has progressed …
It s time to setup a new machine, so once again I m jotting down a list of apps I generally install right away, slightly updated again. Chrome Google Drive FileZilla Microsoft Office (including Skype for Business) Microsoft Teams 7-Zip Everything f.lux Paint. NET Sumatra PDF and Adobe Reader …
I was going to spew this out as a Twitter thread as is the fashion these days, but I decided against it. Blogging is still cool. Especially once I realized this is not the first time I ve done this Meaning that I m sitting at my machine and realize …
Like many others, I m a huge fan of Jeremy Howard s fast.ai courses . Even when having worked in the machine learning field for years, I still find the material to be packed full with interesting …
It s time to setup a new laptop, so once again I m jotting down a list of apps I normally install right away, slightly updated again. Web Chrome Google Drive FileZilla Optional: qBittorrent install once required Dropbox to be replaced with Google Drive completely, after their 3 device limit …
Earlier last month, a security researcher called Victor Gevers sent out a tweet stating that he had stumbled upon a number of open MongoDB databases hosting what was apparantly logged chats from a number of Chinese applications such as Weixin (WeChat) and QQ : Around 364 million online profiles and their …
About two weeks ago, Hacker News was discussing a new R package called brickr , which relies on another relatively new and excellently crafted R package called rayshader to enable its rendering goodness. The latter package was originally constructed as a means to generate good-looking 2D and 3D hillshaded maps of …
Update: this post now has a follow-up with some further details . Throughout the past year or so, both R and Python focused data science practioners have picked up on a paper by Friedman and Popescu from 2008 entitled Predictive Learning Via Rule Ensembles. Interestingly enough, the meat of the paper …
It s time to setup a new laptop, so once again I m jotting down a list of apps I normally install right away, slightly updated again. Web Chrome Dropbox Google Drive FileZilla qBittorrent Skype is avoided, use web version once again. General Microsoft Office 7-Zip Everything to locate files …
I think that Age of Empires II is probably the game I ve been playing on or off for the longest amount of time. In fact, it is this game which pushed me to write a custom tool to prevent DirectDraw palette issues more than eight years ago , before custom …
Getting a reliable, real-time screen of an Android device is more challenging than one might think, e.g. for the purpose of training a reinforcement learning agent. This post describes a basic approach: adb shell screencap -p Sadly, adb mangles binary output and has a tendency to convert \n to …
A while ago I was interested in performing some HTTPS MITM analysis on an Android app, without having to rely on a real device but instead using an Android Virtual Device, or in other words: an emulated device. It turns out that this is surprisingly tricky with a lot of …
Say you have video such as this one on Facebook. Most of these come with hardcoded subtitles, which we d like to extract (for whatever reason). Opening the page in Chrome and inspecting the network requests quickly uncovers the media URL : https://video-bru2-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t42.9040-2/10000000_703970666457205_4416008794480312320_n …
I ve been interested in computing since I was a kid. The ability to tinker with the internals of a machine, the brutalism of DOS , Windows 3.1 and Windows 95 s interfaces (those big grey buttons) It was a great time for young persons to get started with IT …
Update: code is available at https://github.com/Macuyiko/gmail-cleaner . I ve been getting increasingly frustrated by my overflowing Gmail inbox lately. I ve been using Gmail as a primary e-mail service since 2005 and have collected tens of thousands emails over the years. Lately, I ve been finding it …
In case you d ever want to integrate Word s spell checking capabilities on top of your Python app, here s how you would do so: The only requirement is having Word installed (with the language packs installed for the languages you want to check), as well as the Python …
2016 turned out to be a great year for gaming, with Dishonored 2, The Witness, Doom, Overwatch, Superhot, Thumper, Hyper Light Drifter, Cogmind, Devil Daggers, Furi, Brigador, Age of Empires 2 HD keeping me entertained throughout most of the year. Which games am I looking forward to in 2017? Below …
Conway’s Game of Life is one of the most popular examples of cellular automaton. However, did you know that Stephan Rafler proposed a version of Game of Life in 2011 which works over a contious domain, called SmoothLife? Cool, isn t it? The basic idea is that the grid …
Our local Belgian media was just reporting on a study showing that air pollution has a negative impact on the cognitive abilities of children ( link in Dutch ). With that in mind, I was reminded of the World Air Quality Index team , which keeps track of pollution values across the world …
If you ve been trying to send e-mails from a program using your Gmail account, you ll probably have encountered the following error message: SMTP Error: Could not authenticate. Error: SMTP Error: Could not authenticate. 535 5.7.1 Username and Password not accepted. Learn more at 535 5.7 …
I enjoy firing up Audiosurf 2 from time to time to have some rythmic musical fun. One of the things that has been bothering me, however, is the fact that Audiosurf 2 only integrates with Soundcloud for its music streaming. You can use local files, but since I stream all …
This blog post is an update for this one . I was recently contacted regarding the original post no longer working. Indeed, the scholar.py version used there is being blocked by Google Scholar. Looking at the scholar.py GitHub page, we do find an updated version from about 8 months …
I routinely use Python, R and Java during my day-to-day tasks, but have been itching recently to get up to speed or try out some of the following languages. This list basically serves as a note to myself to start experimenting with some of them: Haxe basically in combination with …
Imagine you have an Apache server set up with a virtualhost configuration listening to some domain, e.g. my.domain:8080 You have a Flask app running at: localhost : 5000 You want to add a mod_proxy directive so that: http :// my . domain : 8080 / app_location / ---> http :// localhost : 5000 Most resources will …
Again that time of the year where Windows s being reinstalled, so once again I m jotting down a list of apps I normally install right away, slightly updated versus last year. (This list last updated in May 2016.) Web Skype is back. The web version was not robust enough …
I ve been looking at various Java decompilers recently for a project I ve been working on in spare time. Java code obfuscation is something I have an interest in for no particular reason, mostly because you see a variety of cool approaches popping up in the wild to prevent …
Ever ran across a PDF export of a Powerpoint which looks like this? Turns out it is not so easy to convert this to printable design (at least not without having access to the original presentation file, that is). Adobe Reader already allows to do the following: Press Ctrl+K …
Summary and Changes This post describes how you can create a Python interpreter for a CanaryMod Minecraft server, providing access to the full internal Canary API (CanaryLib). Commands are issued on a separate console window and do not require players or server administrators to be running the game itself. Following …
I though it was just me, what with being busy and older and all, but it kind of looks like everybody agrees that 2014 has been a generally shitty year for gaming. Summarized, the arguments boil down to one of the following: Triple-A titles are released on-schedule, instead of on …
Introduction It should not come to a surprise that the Chinese technology giants are just as their western counterparts, rolling out their respective versions of cloud storage services such as Google Drive, Dropbox, or OneDrive. They are approaching it like most of their offerings: Explore and learn from foreign competitors …
I ve been reinstalling a lot of Windows machines lately (cleaning house and such), and just wanted to jot down a list of apps I ll install before doing anything else. To get the base system running, so to speak, mostly as a reminder to my future self. Web Chrome …
Although I now have moved on for most part from PHP , I am still maintaining a number of websites build on top of Joomla. Ever since Joomla 3.0 was released, Joomla 1.5 has reached end-of-life status, meaning that there will be no more updates nor security fixes for …
Just a small post. I ve been using this project lately to set up some quick static-only-but-Markdown-enabled project pages for a while now. Basically, it allows you to set up a static website with minimal theming, but with the content rendering offloaded to the browser (in Javascript) instead of relying …