Privacycard: a collection of random loyalty cards
Why I built privacycard.meertens.dev — a free collection of shared supermarket loyalty cards, so you get the discount without the tracking.
Roland Meertens
Writing about AI, side projects, and things I find interesting.
Latest posts
My domain got abused on Github Pages
How a wildcard DNS record pointing at GitHub Pages let strangers spin up scam subdomains on my own domain — and what should change.
Passport Privacy: a watermark tool that respects your data
Why I built passport-privacy.meertens.dev — a no-tracking, no-cookies, fully client-side, open-source watermarking tool for photos of your passport and ID documents.
Three months of agentic coding - my experience
Last month I wrote my experience with AI-generated coding on this blog. I got a lot of positive feedback, so I created another chart for my work up till this month and wrote down the thoughts I had.
Tokidoki - practice Japanese grammar
I am trying to learn Japanese. This is extremely hard, especially the grammar. I now made a tool to help you practice!
Two months as a vibe coder
The last two months my work completely changed. My job changed from thinking long and hard about problems and coming up with the best few code to solve this, to full-on talking in English to my...
GPT stemt D66/GroenLinks/PVDA!
De verkiezingen komen eraan, en dus zijn er weer meerdere kieswijzers online. Nu we allemaal liever praten met ChatGPT in plaats van met onze vrienden in discussie gaan vroeg ik me af: wat zou...
Building a Pikachu Tesla Coil
This week I made a new project: a Tesla-coil powered Pikachu It’s essentially a 3D printed pikachu which emits sparks. What’s cool about it is that I can also play the pokemon theme tune through it...
Being a “Top Programming Voice on LinkedIn”
Looks like LinkedIn awarded me a “Top Programming Voice” badge. Although I am always quite vocal about the field of programming and machine learning I earned this badge by copy-pasting a single quote:
Dataset in a Day
How to efficiently create a machine learning dataset in a day — originally published on the Bumble Tech blog.
Point and Snap for my smart home
Having smart devices in your home is fun, but turning them off is still a hassle. Taking an app, talking to Alexa, or pressing a button all takes too much time. Why can’t we in 2022 just point at a...
Winning the Edge AnnotationZ Challenge
How the Kognic team won the Edge AnnotationZ challenge — originally published on the Kognic blog.
Unit Testing Your Perception System
How to apply unit testing principles to perception systems in autonomous driving — originally published on the Kognic blog.
Analysing my swim stroke
Recently I tried to improve my swimming skills. I’m trying to get better at longer distances, swimming with less effort, and going a bit faster. In some videos they talked about optimising the amount...
Landing the perseverance rover on mars
This week the perseverance rover landed on mars A big congratulations for everyone at NASA who made this possible It’s a stunning engineering feat which I followed closely on Youtube. Something I...
Sending a Neural Network to the Moon
Sending a neural network to the moon
Using emojis in mathematical notation
Math is hard to understand. Whenever I read technical documents I skip the mathematical equations. When I do read them I have to go over them multiple times to fully finally what the author meant. A...
Building a Jack Skellington Mask
This week it’s Halloween Time to dress up as something scary I decided that I wanted to make the mask of Jack Skellington, from “The Nightmare before...
Building a Remote Controlled IKEA Table
Inspired by the show Pat and Mat (Buurman en Buurman in the Netherlands) I decided to build a remote controllable IKEA table. For this project I got help from my friend Ilya, with whom we conducted...
Visualising lidar and radar in virtual reality
Last week someone pointed out the Astyx dataset to me. So far I only visualised lidar data in my virtual reality tool immersivepoints.com, so I was interested in seeing...
Microbe Obliterator (MO) from Wall-e on a mopping robot
My favourite character in the Disney Pixar movie WALL-E is M-O. A while ago I bought a iRobot mopping robot, which always reminded me of Mo. This week I decided to try to pimp up my robot by actually...
LEGO Apollo Saturn V Rocket Lamp
I absolutely love everything related to space When decorating our apartment we decided to add a little ‘space corner’ in the hallway for all space related decoration. One thing we bought for this is...
Visualising the PandaSet labels
In May 2020 Scale released their open Autonomous Driving dataset called Pandaset. Of course this is a great opportunity to inspect their data in Virtual Reality with...
Building a Cupcake Robot
Currently, as the corona crisis is causing heavy lockdowns, people have to keep a social distance. This made it difficult to celebrate special events, so as a challenge I decided to try to make a...
Looking back at the first AI Meet VR event
On May 1st 2020 I organised the first AI Meet VR event in Mozilla Hubs. I started organising it two weeks ago to see how a virtual get-together would look and feel like. After experiencing it, I have...
Visualise embeddings in virtual reality
When working with data and neural networks it’s good to know whether similar data is close together. This could be either in the original space of the data or in a deep layer of a neural network. In...
Immersive Points: a virtual reality point cloud visualisation tool
A couple of years ago I made a visualization tool for the Google Cardboard that could show you a brain by looking around(../brain-visualisation/). The two big...
My new years resolution in super-resolution
A new year is approaching, which means that it’s time for everybody to think about new-years resolutions to improve your life. An ideal moment to take your new-years resolution and turn it into a...
A 3D-printed Vehicle Coordinate System
If you work with self-driving cars you probably know about the vehicle coordinate system (also known as ISO 8855). This coordinate system is described extensively...
Scale your deep learning on the AWS platform using Horovod
“The more you buy, the more you save”. These are words NVIDIAs CEO Jensen Huang always utters at NVIDIAs GTC conference series. What he refers to is that in machine learning there are often many...
Showing kids what neural networks can detect
Last week the company I work for, Autonomous Intelligent Driving, held an open day for children. I showed the kids an object detector to teach kids what Artificial Intelligence can detect.
Lessons Learned During a Year at a Self-Driving Car Company
In January I have been a machine learning engineer at Autonomous Intelligent Driving (AID) for exactly a year To summarize for myself what I learned, and to inspire others, I...
I created the InfoQ Alexa skill
A while ago I started exploring the current state of voice interfaces and smart home technology. One particular interesting smart home application is Amazon’s Alexa. It’s a device with a speaker...
World’s longest palindrome?
In honor of the 20th of February, 2002, a palindromic date, Peter Norvig designed his worlds longest unique palindromic sentence of 21,012 words. With a new...
Painting by Prime Number
Two weeks ago I stumbled upon the concept of prime portraits. In short, prime portraits are pictures in which each color is assigned a...
Managing our budget with Excel and machine learning
A little over a year ago my girlfriend Lisette and I moved in together. A big part of living together was getting used to managing a budget, and knowing where our money went. Lisette made one of the...
Autonomous vehicles will lead others through congested cities
This weekend we got the second place in the Hack the Road Hackathon with our idea to let connected vehicles lead other vehicles through a “green wave”. As there will be a long period in which smart...
TRADR SIKS summerschool 2017
A few weeks ago I gave an introductory course to reinforcement learning with the OpenAI Gym environment. As content, I used the writeups I already put on my site several weeks...
Detecting bats by recognising their sound with Tensorflow
Last week I discovered that there are bats behind my appartment. I immediately grabbed my “bat detector”: a device that converts the ultrasound signals bats use to echolocate from an inaudible...
Introduction to OpenAI gym part 3: playing Space Invaders with deep reinforcement learning
In part 1 we got to know the openAI Gym environment(../getting-started-openai-gym/), and in part 2 we explored deep...
Introduction to OpenAI gym part 2: building a deep q-network
In part 1 we used a random search algorithm to “solve” the cartpole environment. This time we are going to take things to the next level and implement a deep q-network.The OpenAI gym environment is...
Getting started with OpenAI gym
The OpenAI gym environment is one of the most fun ways to learn more about machine learning. Especially reinforcement learning and neural networks can be applied perfectly to the benchmark and Atari...
The Zalando python client
The Zalando python client
Simple Introduction to Tensorboard Embedding Visualisation
Visualising embeddings is a powerful technique It helps you understand what your algorithm learned, and if this is what you expected it to learn. Embedding visualisation is a standard feature in...
Laser engraving a wine box
This weekend my dad turns 63. This year I created a very personal gift for him: a laser engraved wine box.
What I learned developing the Neural Voting Advice Application
Two weeks ago I put the neural voting advice application online (../neural-voting-advice-application/). In this post, I look back at two aspects: the end-user aspect...
Stemwijzer met kunstmatige intelligentie
Volgende week zijn er verkiezingen in Nederland. Met 28 partijen is dit een lastige keuze. Vaak orienteren mensen zich door een stemwijzer in te vullen. Door de 30 belangrijkste vragen van het moment...
Neural voting advice application
Next week the Netherlands will hold elections to choose who is going to represent the people in the house of representatives. There are 28 political parties participating, although there are 10 ‘big’...
Watching the TensorFlow Dev Summit 2017 – Livestream
Last night Tensorflow held the Dev Summit 2017. Although it was in California, they streamed all talks live through Youtube...
Visiting the CLIN 2017 conference – Computational Linguistics in the Netherlands
On 9 and 10 February, the 2017 edition of CLIN (Computational Linguistics in the Netherlands) was held. As I work a lot with neural machine translation, automatic post editing, and translation...