Software Engineer
Welcome to The Internet The internet sucks. I think everyone feels the same level of disgust when going online in 2024 and seeing the enormous volumes of content, most of which is garbage, inaccessible, inconvenient, or locked behind walled gardens. The modern internet is an “ecosystem” in the same way that a landfill is an ecosystem. We are like seagulls, picking through mountains of trash…
This blog post won’t be very interesting to anyone who knows what they are doing, but it’s helpful for me to document my own progress. Back in March 2023 I put together an app called ai-arena the idea is that you can write some code in the browser to control units in a RTS-style game, and then upload that code to a server where the code competes 24/7 online for control of a galaxy. I got the idea…
I think Quadtrees are cool. Trees are definitely my favorite data structure, hands-down. There is something about Log efficiency that makes them amazing. Tries, Quadtrees, Octrees, are great and simple! I have yet to implement a K-D Tree or a BSP Tree, mostly because I haven’t had a reason to. The main appeal of trees to me, and I hope to everyone else, is their ability to give the illusion of…
I have been working through the SLAM book and also working on building a robot from scratch with some cheap parts as I go. My goal is to learn all the theory behind Monocular Visual SLAM and implement it on my robot. I started off doing localization from fiducials, which was a concept I got exposed to during my brief stint at Amazon Robotics. The core idea is this: you have some marker, with an…
End result Requirements Basic linear algebra knowledge. Understanding of javascript and basic 3D visualization. Background I recently started learning about robotics. I reached out to my network for some good book recommendations and looked at class curriculums and settled on two main texts: Modern Robotics and Probabilistic Robotics. For a more in-depth understanding of these concepts, please…
I am still very much an ML novice, but I have been having a lot of fun playing around with GPT-Chat. Something I have been testing out with it is the ability to write OpenGL shaders. Shaders Shaders are basically a way to determine what color gets drawn on a pixel in screen space. The language of shaders, GLSL, is a special subset of C++. There are some globally available values called “uniforms”…
Over the weekend I decided to do a project in Three.js and host it online once it was finished. https://foxholemap3d.app/ Hosting a static website with https is something that I do frequently enough to need to know how to do it, but infrequently enough that I don’t remember all the steps every time. So I’m deciding to make a post to help myself and others. The .app domain only works with https,…
For my website ai-arena, I needed to run arbitrary code from users on both the front-end and the back-end. The game is a strategy game where ships compete to gather resources and destroy each other’s base. Users write the code that controls the AI of their team. Constraints Users cannot modify the game except through API exposed to them Users may not access the DOM, Ajax, or any globals from…
Back in February of 2022 I had the idea to train a GPT transformer to generate NES music. I chose NES music because it has a few very useful constraints. The NES soundcard only has 4 channels, two (PWM) square channels, a triangle channel, and a noise channel. I also happen to really enjoy the way it sounds. 1943 - The Battle of Midway The amount of character that’s able to be conveyed through…
When I was working on a project to try generating NES music with Huggingface transformers, I was surprised by how little resources there were on making a compatible Docker image. Maybe it’s because it’s pretty standard practice to train toy models in Google colab, but what if I want to do inference with my trained model in some sort of server, in this case Flask? It turns out that setting up…