I really want to get away from Adobe's outrageous subscription costs. I am not a professional photographer but I take a lot of photos. Worse, I take a lot of nature action photos, which means that about 90% of my photos show either a blank blue sky or a blank …
If you happen to have stock in Microsoft (MSFT), you've perhaps noticed a certain underperformance in recent weeks. Well, months, but had been a pullback from an all-time high near \ \(550/share to the low \\) 500s has turned into a nosedive touching $400 today. This on the backs of their …
I've been a vocal skeptic of quantum computing economic opportunities. I poo-pooed a recent poll showing that 25% of business executives felt that quantum computing would have a significant positive impact. But I read today, Satya hyped quantum in a quarterly phone call . Satya's no fool and I don't think …
I'm setting programming aside for the next year. I'll continue to mentor HS students in programming and I'll continue writing short programs and scripts to help me deal with large amounts of data (particularly, in my case, my 80,000+ photographs), but I won't be embarking on a third version …
A while back I wrote about how we needed a word for citing statements that had been sourced from an LLM but which are low-stakes enough not to have been fact-checked. I like the word "sprently," for this. It's already an English word that seems more or less interchangeable with …
I found myself writing "s/apparently/according to Claude 3.7 Sonnet/". There needs to be a word. (That string is programmer code for "whenever I write 'apparently' switch it to 'according to a possibly-hallucinating LLM.') The essay in which I found myself writing that substitution doesn't use "apparently," except …
OpenAI claims ChatGPT 04-mini-high is its best model for coding. Screw that. The thing lies about its ability to correct its hallucinating behavior after I gave it every chance to clarify its shortcoming. If I were a junior, much less "vibe" coder, I would likely believe its assurances about doing …
If there are two equivalently capable paradigms, the one with the shallower learning curve will enjoy a positive feedback loop of learning resources and tooling. The result will be more people learning the arguably less elegant paradigm. (This is my kinder version of “worse is better.”)
ML Architecture and papers Scaling Monosemanticity: Extracting Interpretable Features from Claude 3 Sonnet Really important article, seemingly a breakthough in peering inside LLMs. A nice adjunct to this article is the less dense An Intuitive Explanation of Sparse Autoencoders for Mechanistic Interpretability of LLMs . My big worry about this is …
“ Hundreds of Beavers ” restored my faith in the comedic art of cinema. It's a silent b&w movie that combines a few live-action actors with Terry Gilliam-style animation to tell the story of Our Hero learning to survive and become a competent-enough trapper to win the hand of The Fur-Trader's …
LLMs are bland. Two new papers, Art or Artifice? Large Language Models and the False Promise of Creativity and A Robot Walks into a Bar: Can Language Models Serve as Creativity Support Tools for Comedy? An Evaluation of LLMs’ Humour Alignment with Comedians ] reinforces the findings of a more rigorous …
There’s a new version of YOLO: https://github.com/THU-MIG/yolov10 I’ve studied this proposal for hours and I still can’t figure out if it would be a help or a hindrance. It’s a diagramming language for tensor math, which is a good idea, but I …
Interesting article about a classic pen-and-paper game: Ace of Aces: or, why you should Do Maths as a game designer Activism is not a Social Club “AI” Presets for Underwater Photography: Adaptive AI Preset Pack This is a good idea, especially if they really are doing the feasible thing, which …
BirdCLEF is a bird-call recognition contest that runs yearly on Kaggle. (CLEF stands for Cross Language Education and Function .) Last year, I participated in BirdCLEF because the domain was native Hawaiian birds, so even though I didn't know much of anything about audio ML, I had a leg up in …
Larry O'Brien sold his first program at age 16 and has been an influential voice in the software engineering community since 1989. He edited Computer Language, AI Expert, Software Development, and Game Developer magazines, founded the Jolt Programming Awards, and wrote the "Codewatch" columnist for SD Times from 2001-2015. Three …
We used Sly Flourish's Replacing 5E Luck With Inspiration in our last 2 sessions and everyone loved it after a few reminders to "you miss, but turn your luck die" (everyone has a D6 in front of them with 6 indicating 0 luck). But this mechanic, unlike inspiration, happens a …
Jeffrey Hawkins is the CEO of Numenta, a company that has been pursuing machine intelligence since the early 2000s. Prior to that he was the founder of Palm Pilot, the most successful Personal Digital Assistant, the sale of which presumably has funded Numenta this part quarter-century. Hawkins’ approach is iconoclastic …
The other day we were eating breakfast at the counter of the wonderful Liliha Bakery in Oahu and were chatting with a local guy who told us he was 84. Really nice conversation until the pancakes were almost gone when he said "Not to get into politics but..." pregnant pause …
The xRC Simulator or Autodesk's Synthesis allow First Robotic Competition teams to drive simulated robots around the season's field, allowing early practice with driving, viewlines, and team strategy. While Synthesis seems to provide higher fidelity, xRC seems a little more user-friendly to me. Installing on Windows is straightforward, but if …
Felt potentially communicative, might delete later.
Focus on data transformation and scenarios, not math, if you want to get into real-world Machine Learning. Yes, you’ll eventually have to learn some math, but the abstraction level within ML engineering has already moved on. Learning the theory and math at the foundations of Machine Learning is like …
Jessica Knoll’s “Bright Young Women” Jessica Knoll's "Bright Young Women" has such strong beginning and ending chapters, with stakes that are truly life-and-death, that the middle chapters are a bit of a let-down. The central thematic premise of the book is that, for perverse reasons, serial killers become celebrities …
Mantas Deployed, Time for Whales Since last Fall, I’ve been working on reidentifying reef manta rays with “low k-shot” (few labeled examples). That project is now deployed to the scientists and, until they start giving me feedback (and hopefully, more labeled data) pretty much at the finish line. My …
Reading Susan Orleans' On Animals I'm struck by how essentially different from LLM-generated text her essays are. Now, of course, Orleans is at the highest tier of talent so it may not be saying much that "Well, that kind of writing isn't going to be usurped by LLMs soon." But …
Reading Recommendations: Machine Learning for Non-Coders The best orientation to machine learning (ML) I could find is Machine Learning Explained from MIT Sloan. That gives a good overall orientation, even if it, like all texts, suffers from underestimating the speed at which ML capabilities are evolving. I don’t think …
ResNet-style CNNs To Predict Freshwater Algae Blooms in Satellite Imagery: Mediocre Results Although I have no domain experience with satellite imagery, I've used convolutional neural nets with aerial photography to recognize marine debris. So when I saw the DataDriven challenge 'Tick Tick Bloom' I took a glance at the dataset …
The Mastodon API is very straightforward, as is the OpenAI API for its NLP models. I wrote a quick proof-of-concept program to do sentiment analysis of "toots." .
My current project is re-identifying individual manta rays ( Mobula alfredi and Mobula birostris ) by their distinct belly patterns … er… ventral markings. Every night at two spots on the Big Island of Hawai’i where I live, dive boats shine bright lights that attract plankton. Most nights, the plankton in turn …
The "attention" in ML is "what you should attend to," not "alertness." In the sentence "They crossed the to get to the other bank." you need to "attend to" the word to disambiguate "bank". If is "street" then it's "bank" as in "financial institution" (most likely). If is "river" then …
If you have a large FastAI (v2) DataLoaders and you're trying to debug something at epoch-scale (such as a custom metric), an easy way to train on a small subset of your data is: subset_size = 100 # Or whatever selected_items = np . random . choice ( dls . train_ds . items , subset_size , replace = False ) # Swap in …
The Chinese Room is a 1980 thought experiment from the philosopher John Searle. The Wikipedia summarizes the setup: [S]uppose that artificial intelligence research has succeeded in constructing a computer that behaves as if it understands Chinese. It takes Chinese characters as input and, by following the instructions of a …
Short version for index and feeds
I just deleted my intermediate data and models for Kaggle’s Happywhale competition. I did terrible , never getting much above pure random guessing. Which was frustrating, because it’s a problem in Machine Learning that I’m very interested in (and want to do more work in). Happywhale, Sad Human …
Don’t join a team too quickly. Once you’re on a Kaggle team: You cannot choose to leave The team leader cannot choose to remove you Unless you have a very good sense of what exactly your teammates are bringing to the competition, including their: Knowledge level Time commitment …
At the risk of saying, “Yeah, it’s in the docs,” this is what I did. I think the crucial thing is installed things in the proper order, so I would advise going step-by-step: Have conda installed ( brew install conda if not, I suppose) Create a conda environment with conda …
Get the source code and data on Github This demonstrates how you create a multistep AzureML pipeline using a series of PythonScriptStep objects. In this case, the calculation is extremely trivial: predicting Iris species using scikit-learn's Gaussian Naive Bayes. This pipeline could be solved (very quickly) using this code: import …
I received my Orange 30 in a well-packed box via DHL. My box did not contain a manual, which I think might be an indication that it was among the first few hundred printers shipped. (It did, however, have a USB with what would apparently have been the printed manual …
One of my big weekend projects (for longer than I care to think) has been trying to create a pipeline for identifying individual whalesharks from photos. The project had kind of grown moribund as I repeatedly failed to get any decent level of recognition despite using what I thought was …
OMG I can't believe I missed this competition. It's exactly in line with my whaleshark identification project. https://www.kaggle.com/c/humpback-whale-identification Here's a baby humpback whale that swam up to the boat a few weeks ago. In the second photo you can see it popped it's head up …
I'm a big fan of using a pair of identical networks to create output vectors that are then fed into a network that is trained to judge whether it's two input vectors are the same or different. This is a powerful technique for "low k-shot" comparisons. Most ML techniques that …
Ricky Jay was one of my heroes. I first became aware of him in the pages of the remarkable “Cards as Weapons,” an oversized paperback that I bought at age 13 because it had a few pictures of topless women in it (you really can’t appreciate how much the …
Once upon a time, when I, a C programmer, first learned Smalltalk, I remember lamenting to J.D. Hildebrand "I just don't get it: where's the main() ?" Eventually I figured it out, but the lesson remained: Sometimes when learning a new paradigm, what you need isn't a huge tutorial, it's …
I’m a hair’s-breadth away from declaring that “The Deuce,” HBO’s Sunday night “prestige drama” about flesh-peddling and pornos in Times Square and 42nd Street in the mid-70s, is an exercise in trolling, some kind of meta-level commentary on the lack of drama, characterization, or stakes in, y …
This last weekend I participated in the "Hack for the Sea" hackathon. As part of that, I needed to store images and structured data to Azure Storage. The process is very straightforward using F#'s async capabilities. First, you'll need the connection string for your Azure Storage: Use that to …
In Xamarin, if you observe / subscribe to a particularly-named NSNotification in an object that is IDisposable (this includes any class descended from NSObject !), you MUST explicitly unsubscribe from it in your Dispose handler, or you will get a segfault (the system will attempt to call a method at a memory …
Whalesharks are the largest fish in the ocean, but very little is known about their movements (where they breed, for instance, has been a huge mystery, although there's now pretty good evidence that some, at least, breed in the Galapagos). Whalesharks have a "fingerprint" in the form of distinct spots …
They say to never write a negative review of a book until it has received too many positive ones. Which brings us to “Enlightenment Now: The Case For Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress,” by Steven Pinker. The tl;dr is that he doesn’t actually argue this case, he just …
fun-ny Faces : Face-based Augmented Reality with F# and the iPhone X Each year, the F# programming community creates an advent calendar of blog posts, coordinated by Sergey Tihon on his blog . This is my attempt to battle Impostor Syndrome and share something that might be of interest to the community …
Create element without an explicit Frame . Set TranslatesAutoresizingMaskIntroConstraints = false Create an array of NSLayoutConstraints Work top-to-bottom, left-to-right, or vice versa. Do this consistently throughout program Use Layout Anchors Use the top-level UIView s SafeAreaLayoutGuide to position relative to the Window / screen For each dimension, set its location ( LeadingAnchor /…