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The culprit I was minding my own business writing some type-annotated Python code when my type checker of trust did me dirty and nerd-sniped me. error: Return type 'list[A]' of 'list_method' incompatible with return type 'list[A | B]' in supertype 'ParentClass' [ override ] Oof. Let’s provide some context. Say we have a simple inheritance structure, where ChildClass inherits from ParentClass…
Wikipedia ’s definition of lifestyle creep looks as follows: Lifestyle creep, also known as lifestyle inflation, is a phenomenon that occurs when, as more resources are spent on standard of living, former luxuries become perceived necessities. Me rambling about this definition To be perfectly honest, I don’t find said definition to be particularly useful. Firstly, […] as more…
Since another year has come to an end, I can’t help but ask the question: What does my exercise data have to tell me? I did very similar things in 2023 2022 , 2021 , 2020 and 2019 . Executive summary Some background on the metrics Endurance measures how many endurance sessions (e.g. running, cycling, swimming, ..) I performed per day.
Just rambling about some music and books I’ve been exposed to in 2024. I did a similar thing in 2023 , 2022 , 2021 and 2020 . Records Quaranta - Danny Brown The album felt fairly old too me; quite slow, fairly monotonous and certainly dark. Only For Dolphins - Action Bronson A very easy listen I came back to when hosting people. Sergio is a true earworm. Sour Soul - BADBADNOTGOOD & Ghostface…
Generally speaking our behaviors (both actual and ideal), morals or personalities are very sensitive to the intricate contexts of life. It took me a while to realize that my behaviors and ideals in a given dimension are sensitive to whether I’m under the impression of dealing with an individual – ‘micro’ – or with an entity, an abstract organization or society as a…
I am way past a stage of a crush or merely being in love when it comes to pdb ; I’d rather call it a deep love. Miracurously I have perceived it to be both very flexible and powerful for advanced users as well as very simple and thereby beginner-friendly when catering to rather simple use cases. What adds to my appreciation for pdb is that - unlike, afaict, most debuggers - it sits rather…
2023 came with another edition of Advent of Code , an advent calendar with programming challenges. In many ways - e.g. the assessment of both performance of and correctness on official leaderboards - the programming challenges are similar to regular programming competitions. Yet, there is also a large part of the community approaching Advent of Code more casually: people playing around with funky…
Since another year has come to an end, I can’t help but be curious: What does the exercise data have to tell me? I did very similar things in 2022 , 2021 , 2020 and 2019 . Executive summary The following radar-plot compares the past three years in terms of endurance, variety, strength and consistency: To my surprise, the plot indicates that the polygons were almost subsets of each other. I…
Just rambling about some music I’ve been exposed to in 2023. I did a similar thing in 2022 , 2021 and 2020 . Live recording King Krule covered Connan Mockasin’s ‘Forever Dolphin Love’ on Annie Mac’s Radio 1 show. I don’t know whether there has been a single day of the second half of 2023 on which I haven’t listened to this recording. Treat yourself Records…
In no particular order; probably not mutually exclusive; certaintly not collectively exhaustive I seldomly ask for permission. I don’t care much for what time it is. I don’t look for confirmation. I don’t need technical private projects. I have colleagues who put ideas over people. don’t have a strong ego. are very driven but not totally obsessed. thirst for knowledge. take…
I long held the belief that knowing things (by heart) 1 was both overrated and not too important. Rather, I thought that being able to quickly access and digest information was the only thing that mattered. I still think that the latter is incredibly important, but I changed my mind on the former. Why remember? Tl;dr: I now think that knowing things matters to some extent and would like to…
The not so mobile-friendly calculator accompanying this post can be found here . The value of time, the value of money There are various ways of trying to assess the value of something. For instance, one might define the value of a resource by how much someone else is willing to pay for it. In the domain of time, we could ask the question of the hourly rate someone is willing to pay for our…
Ingredients Serves four people. For the sauce: 1.5 kg of tinned, diced tomatoes 5 onions 100g of sundried tomatoes 100g of dried artichokes 6 cloves of garlic 1 tsp of fennel seeds some capers some red wine Not for the sauce: 5 eggplants 450 g of mozzarella 150g of Parmesan cheese 2 large bunches of basil For the side salad: 500g of baby leaf spinach 100g of fairly soft sheep’s cheese 1…
Ingredients 1 large beet 50-100g of labneh 70g of hazelnuts 3-5 branches of mint 1 tsp of sumac 4 sour cherries some lemon juice 1 tbsp of tahini Should serve 2 people as a starter. Method Peel and thinly slice the beet and arrange it on your plate. Place a large dollop of labneh on it. Chop the hazelnuts in half and toast them in a dry pan until fragrant.
Motivation Assume you are working with a decision tree which as been constructed by a learning algorithm. Further assume that some of the leaves are relevant while others aren’t. For example, it could be that the outcome modeled in leaves corresponds to the probability of a successful surgery. In order to use this model for prediction/inference in production, one might imagine stripping all…
All of the definitions stem from Kevin Murphy’s Probabilistic Machine Learning: An Introduction . Many of the following primitives are defined for discrete as well as continuous random variables and distributions. Since they are analogous, I chose to only represent discrete versions for the sake of simplicity. Entropy $$\mathbb{H}(X) = \mathbb{H}(p) := -\sum_\mathcal{X} p(X=x)\log_2 p(X=x)$$…
What QoQa - I’m still very unsure about its pronunciation - is a Swiss e-commerce business. Per product category - of which there are ten - they usually offer a single product at a time. A given product is offered at a supposedly low price point during a fairly short time window, usually hours or days. Importantly, it is advertised as though QoQa had access to a fixed amount of stock per…
As another year is coming to an end I’m curious: What does the exercise data have to tell me? I did something similar in 2021 , 2020 as well as in 2019 . 2019 2020 2021 2022 running distance [km] 962 1295 1403 1150 #runs 107 123 127 127 share of running among exercise activities 79.26% 58.57% 54.27% 38.89% cycling distance [km] 1044 660 1340 #bike rides 20 18 36 #strength trainings 6 63 82…
Just rambling about some books and music I’ve been exposed to in 2022. I did a similar thing in 2021 and 2020 . Books What I Talk About When I Talk About Running - Haruki Murakami I’m reading this constantly wondering why I’m reading it but never contemplating stopping. Faserland - Christian Kracht The nonchalant absurdity sometimes reminded me of Jack Kerouac. So many things I…
What is a status symbol? While the Cambridge dictionary restricts status symbols to possessions, wikipedia takes a more permissive stance and defines them as a visible, external symbol of one’s social position, an indicator of economic or social status I’ll side with the latter. This, of course, bears the questions of what social status actually is, which I will, of course, eschew.…
Ingredients 300g of puff pastry 4-6 chicory heads 4 onions 200g of gorgonzola 200g of mascarpone 3 cloves of garlic 1 peach some honey some dry white wine 10 branches of fresh thyme 1 tbsp of fennel seeds 1 tbsp of mustard seeds 1/4 nutmeg Method Slice the onions and fry them in butter until golden brown, occasionally deglazing with a dash of white wine. Set aside. Halve the chicory heads and cut…
Every now and then I have come across prints of image collages or ‘mosaics’. Often it’s been ads, say a Greenpeace collage of small images portraying poorly treated puppies - that is, if you’re able to squint your eyes real hard - making up for the overall image of a happy dolphin, or so. Anyhow! - I’ve almost always found these collages to be aesthetically…
Ingredients 6 stalks of celery 8 carrots 2 onions 1 leek 3 large cloves of garlic 1 tin of chopped tomatoes 1 tin of coconut milk 1 tin of borlotti beans 1 stock cube roughly 50g of dried shiitake 4 bay leaves 1 tablespoon of curry powder 1 tablespoon of sweet paprika powder 1 tablespoon of ground turmeric 1 large bunch of flat-leaved parsley Method Roughly chop all of the vegetables.
Ingredients 1 large celeriac 250g of strawberries 100g hazelnuts 1 handful of radishes 1 large bunch of basil 3 tablespoons of tahini 3 large tablespoons of greek yoghurt 1 tablespoon of sweet paprika powder Method After trimming off the skin of the celeriac, grate thin strips of it. Sauté these in some olive oil, occasionally deglazing them with balsamic vinegar. Cut the hazelnuts in half and…
A system just can’t respond to short-term changes when it has long-term delays. Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems Always be closing. Am meisten erreicht man, wann man den Lustgewinn aus den Quellen psyschicher und intellektueller Arbeit genügend zu erhöhen versteht. Sigmund Freud, Das Unbehagen in der Kultur Be a parent to yourself. A wise Hacker News user Defend those who are absent.…
Ingredients 1 banana 1 apple (Braeburn) 1 orange 12 fresh dates 12 tablespoons of tahini 200g of greek yoghurt dash of milk juice of half a lemon 200g frozen blueberries a pinch of salt
Ingredients Serves two for a rather light or one for a truly lavish lunch. 1 large kohlrabi 100g baby spinach 8 radishes 200g greek yoghurt 100g blueberries 100g hazelnuts 4 tablespoons tahini half a bunch of parsley half a bunch of mint 1 heaped teaspoon of cumin 1 heaped teaspoon of smoked sweet paprika 1 teaspoon of sumac 1 teaspoon of coarse mustard black sesame seeds juice of 1 lemon Method…
The gym operators have three folders in their open office, one of which is titled ‘problems’. I’m gently reminded that I haven’t leetcoded in a long while and that the days taking classes on algorithms and data structures have long been gone while trying to find a pair of matching dumbbells of a specific weight . A guy once seriously protested that he cannot possibly not be…
The following is an illustration of a graph optimization problem. I chose to instantiate it with a decision making process revolving around a social setting. Yet I hope its general applicability comes across. Setup Let’s say we have the opportunity to invite people to an event. The pool of candidates is comprised of five people: Tony, Paulie, Silvio, Furio and Vito. What we care about is for…
I had long felt a slight discomfort with the word ‘inference’. Many people seemed to use it with confidence and the expectation that it would refer to a precise notion. And while it is not uncommon for a word to have different meaning in different contexts, it took me a while to figure out what the different meaning and what the different contexts are in the example of…
Motivation On the one hand, there are things we notice ‘automatically’, easily, without consciously paying attention to them. On the other hand, there are things that slip through the cracks unless we make a point out of monitoring them. It might seem very natural that whether something is effortlessly ‘visible’ is highly dependent on other properties of that very same…
Ingredients 300g of rolled oats 100g of dark chocolate 100g of pecan nuts 50g of Brazil nuts 3 massively heaped tablespoons of crunchy peanut butter 2 massively heaped tablespoons of coconut oil 3 tablespoons of honey (preferably runny) 2 tablespoons of cocoa powder 1 tablespoon of vanilla sugar 1 tablespoon of cinnamon a dash of salt Method Roughly chop the nuts and finely chop the chocolate. Mix…
I have long been an avid enthusiast of journaling. This has mostly been for the sheer sake of journaling. In other words: once written, never to be read. At the same time I would like to use information about my past when making decisions for the future. When simply winging this inference on empirical data, I’m always worried that some warping could have altered my recollection of these…
I have the pleasure of having impressive friends who have completed and continue to complete spectacular athletic feats. Some crossed the alps with a single speed steel tandem bike. Some run 10k in 35’. Some run half-marathons with more than 2000m of elevation literally called inferno . And then, of course, there is the camp of people who go about this whole ironman business. Personally,…
Previously, I’ve outlined some ideas on how to solve Suduko puzzles. One revolved around depth-first search in trees , one around linear programming . This time I tried my luck with a more adventurous, data-driven approach: Reinforcement Learning. First things first: the approach only works well for 4x4 grids - not for the typical 9x9. Please note that the approached subsequently outlined…
Quick to make, satisfying to eat. Ingredients Puff pastry Figs (preferably fresh ones; if not, dried ones are ok, too) Ricotta Rocket Method Cut some parts of the puff pastry. I figure both rectangles and squares should work. While all sizes ‘go’, I think that in principle one wants to use as little dough per fixed filling size as possible. In the same vein, I would try to make the…
Just rambling about some books, music and podcasts I’ve been exposed to in 2021. I did a similar thing in 2020 . Books A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments - David Foster Wallace I much preferred the short story about the dynamics of professional tennis over DFW’s hesitant adventures on the high seas after which the book is titled. The distinguishing…
As another year is coming to an end I’m curious: What has my running looked like this year? I did something similar in 2020 as well as in 2019 . The gist of it 2018 2019 2020 2021 distance [km] 430 962 1295 1381 avg distance [km] 6.61 9.08 10.53 11.05 #runs 65 107 123 124 #sports activities 81 135 210 231 share of running among sports activities 80.25% 79.26% 58.57% 53.68% max duration…
This is a really hearty dish. I’d claim that the filling of the pie can easily be prepared in advance. Core ingredients Serves 4 okay-ish hungry people. 1kg smoked tofu 1kg green beans 500 ml coconut milk ~500g shortcrust dough 2 cans of chickpeas 3 carrots 3 large yellow onions 3 gloves of garlic half a thumb of ginger small chili soy sauce black bean sauce tomato purée soy sauce red wine 1…
Ingredients Serves 3 hungry fellows. Tofu 1kg firm tofu 200 mL unsweeetened soy milk 100 g flour 3 tablespoons [0] corn starch 200g unsweetened corn flakes Dipping sauce 4 tablespoons peanut paste 4 tablespoons black bean sauce (see below for an image) 4 tablespoons tomato purée 2 tablespoons of rice wine vinegar dash of soy sauce soymilk corn starch Salad ~500g carrots 2 large cucumbers sesame…
Abstract As discussed in this previous post , a given Sudoku puzzle can be modeled in a multitude of ways. Different algorithms ought to still lead to the same solution, since a correct Sudoku puzzle comes with a unique solution. In this post we’ll rely on optimization’s poster child: Linear programming . Idea A linear program, subsequently referred to as LP, comes with three central…
Abstract Solving a Sudoku board can be done in many ways. Let’s explore a depth-first search approach in this post. Idea Depth-first search or DFS implies (at least) two things: a graph, or rather, a tree a search This bares the question: What’s the tree and what are we searching for? The tree A tree must consist of nodes and edges. We define the nodes to represent a…
I caught myself making the mistake of thinking I wasn’t holding expectations when in fact, I was. When telling myself to not have a certain expectation against someone, I did usually make sure to control my behaviour towards them. If I anticipated that I shouldn’t have the expectation of an event taking place, I made sure not to make the responsible person feel negatively about the…
While I think that I’ve been doing okay when it comes to not caring too much about other people’s perception of me, I believe to have spotted some weak spots recently. I think there is still a distinction to be made when it comes to ‘caring’. I feel like there is a qualitative difference between caring about what exactly others think of me when in their presence and caring…
Just rambling about some books, podcasts and records I’ve been exposed to a bunch over 2020. Books How to Solve It - George Pólya Classical asymmetry: obvious once you see it. Slaughterhouse Five - Kurt Vonnegut I think I’ll remember the poor soul claiming to have lived through much worse until he didn’t. Consider the Lobster - David Foster Wallace This was when I realized how…
Yet another year’s almost over. Let’s have a look at my year 2020 in running, just as I did in 2019 . Yearly comparison 2018 2019 2020 distance [km] 430 962 1295 avg distance [km] 6.61 9.08 10.53 number of runs 65 107 123 share of running among sport activities 80.25% 79.26% 58.57% I picked up going to the gym in late 2019 and started cycling every now and then in 2020, hence the lower…
When looking into the future, the definition of ambitions is often intertwined with an assessment of their feasibility. There are two, frequently opposing, guiding principles at work: Be who, how and what you want to be. The past tells you what works for you and what doesn’t. The former being a fairly idealistic and empowering maxim, possibly reminiscent of rationalism, I like to think of…
Many discussions regarding software tooling had me facing the argument that while my suggestions might decrease the duration required for the task at hand to some degree, the magnitude or quantity of the savings were not sufficiently significant, that they would not amortize. Despite acknowledging a taste of truth to that, I typically felt that there was an aspect to the topic escaping the debate.…
TL;DR: Spend thought not money. Think about your edge. Don’t buy beans for a hobby roaster. I’ve often felt strongly about gifts made and received and always had some vague intuitions floating around in my head concerning distinctive properties. Finally have I sought to distill them and make them more explicit. Reflecting on past gift-finding processes, I came to realize that I would…
Ingredients 300g shortcrust dough large bunch of basil ~200g Soft, creamy goat cheese, e.g. Chavroux ~400g of figs (both fresh and dried are ok) 4-6 red onions 2 cloves of garlic zest of one lemon ~3 eggs ~80ml cream [0] some lemon juice some nutmeg some sweet paprika powder seasoning Method Slice the red onions in rings and fry them under medium-high heat with both olive oil and butter. Consider…