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So what happened in 2017? Last year I thought I completed my basement arcade by getting Donkey Kong (see my blog post entitled “2016 in review”), but I was wrong! I actually got two new arcade games this year. The first one was an arcade machine I never thought I’d find in good working condition. It’s also the absolute coolest arcade game of the 1980s with its amazing vector graphics (as well as my all-time favourite arcade game)…….Atari..
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So what happened in 2017? Last year I thought I completed my basement arcade by getting Donkey Kong (see my blog post entitled “2016 in review”), but I was wrong! I actually got two new arcade games this year. The first one was an arcade machine I never thought I’d find in good working condition. It’s also the absolute coolest arcade game of the 1980s with its amazing vector graphics (as well as my all-time favourite arcade game)…….Atari..
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My favorite books out of the 102 books (~38,000 pages) that I read in 2017: Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Speculative Fiction Revelation Space series ( Revelation Space , Redemption Ark , Absolution Gap ) — Hard scifi space opera. Greatly enjoyable, with memorable characters, backstory, science, history, and of course the requisite galactic-scale threats. House of Suns — Set outside the Revelation Space universe, Alastair Reynolds manages ....
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My favorite books out of the 102 books (~38,000 pages) that I read in 2017: Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Speculative Fiction Revelation Space series ( Revelation Space , Redemption Ark , Absolution Gap ) — Hard scifi space opera. Greatly enjoyable, with memorable characters, backstory, science, history, and of course the requisite galactic-scale threats. House of Suns — Set outside the Revelation Space universe, Alastair Reynolds manages ....
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When NP-hardness pops up on the internet, say because some silly blogger wants to write about video games, it’s often tempting to conclude that the problem being proved NP-hard is actually very hard! “Scientists proved Super Mario is NP-hard? I always knew there was a reason I wasn’t very good at it!” Sorry, these two are unrelated. NP-hardness means hard in a narrow sense this post should hopefully make clear. After that, we’ll explore wha..
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When NP-hardness pops up on the internet, say because some silly blogger wants to write about video games, it’s often tempting to conclude that the problem being proved NP-hard is actually very hard! “Scientists proved Super Mario is NP-hard? I always knew there was a reason I wasn’t very good at it!” Sorry, these two are unrelated. NP-hardness means hard in a narrow sense this post should hopefully make clear. After that, we’ll explore wha..
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When NP-hardness pops up on the internet, say because some silly blogger wants to write about video games, it’s often tempting to conclude that the problem being proved NP-hard is actually very hard! “Scientists proved Super Mario is NP-hard? I always knew there was a reason I wasn’t very good at it!” Sorry, these two are unrelated. NP-hardness means hard in a narrow sense this post should hopefully make clear. After that, we’ll explore wha..
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As the year is almost over, more and more people start reflecting on everything that happened through the year, and start making plans for the new year. But the last day of the calendar year is just an arbitrary day. There is nothing special about it. It’s all in our heads. We assign that day importance, but it’s arbitrary. The earth rotates around the sun, and there is nothing special about its position on this date. It just happens to b....
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At best, it represents who you are and what you can deliver as a leader, and at worst, it’s a contract for what you aspire to be. I first wrote down my leadership philosophy about a decade ago by writing down all the values and practices I embraced. At the time, every great leader and commander I served with had a written philosophy—so, I thought I should craft one myself. It changed a lot since then, and I’ve changed a lot.
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At best, it represents who you are and what you can deliver as a leader, and at worst, it’s a contract for what you aspire to be. I first wrote down my leadership philosophy about a decade ago by writing down all the values and practices I embraced. At the time, every great leader and commander I served with had a written philosophy—so, I thought I should craft one myself. It changed a lot since then, and I’ve changed a lot.
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I spend a lot of time with dev tool and data companies. I think I’ve more or less banished myself to a life of working in the space, no consumer products for me. In that world a common topic that comes up amongst marketing teams is how do I get my team to contribute to content? Sometimes the person already has an idea of how they want the team to jump onto the bandwagon of their plan, sometimes they’re entirely open minded. I won’t get into....
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I spend a lot of time with dev tool and data companies. I think I’ve more or less banished myself to a life of working in the space, no consumer products for me. In that world a common topic that comes up amongst marketing teams is how do I get my team to contribute to content? Sometimes the person already has an idea of how they want the team to jump onto the bandwagon of their plan, sometimes they’re entirely open minded. I won’t get into....
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Here are my top album pics for 2017 (in no particular order) Note: This is by no means an exhaustive list, it’s just the top albums that really stood out to me and in all fairness, I’ve thought of several others since so there may be a follow up post (or two). Father John Misty - Pure Comedy As a bonus, a short film was released with the album: From Wikipedia :
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Here are my top album pics for 2017 (in no particular order) Note: This is by no means an exhaustive list, it’s just the top albums that really stood out to me and in all fairness, I’ve thought of several others since so there may be a follow up post (or two). Father John Misty - Pure Comedy As a bonus, a short film was released with the album: From Wikipedia :
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My good friend Joel Shea received a most unlikely gift this Christmas - A vintage HP 4951 Protocol Analyser. According to the HP Computer Museum : Original Price: $3595 The 4951B was replaced by the 4951C and 4952A in 1986. Both new models handled Async, BSC, SDLC, HDLC, X.25 and SNA protocols. The 4951C also handled DDCMP, while the 4952A did not. The 4952A handled X.21 while the 4951C did not. Both new analysers used a floppy dive ..
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My good friend Joel Shea received a most unlikely gift this Christmas - A vintage HP 4951 Protocol Analyser. According to the HP Computer Museum : Original Price: $3595 The 4951B was replaced by the 4951C and 4952A in 1986. Both new models handled Async, BSC, SDLC, HDLC, X.25 and SNA protocols. The 4951C also handled DDCMP, while the 4952A did not. The 4952A handled X.21 while the 4951C did not. Both new analysers used a floppy dive ..
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In my career I’ve had to conduct a number of retrospectives. Ahead of them it already sucked, there was an outage at some point, customers were impacted, and it was our fault. Never was it solely on our underlying infrastructure provider (AWS or Heroku), nope the blame was on us and we’d failed in some way. And as soon as the incident was resolved, it wasn’t time to go home and decompress with a beer, it was time start the process of a retr....
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In my career I’ve had to conduct a number of retrospectives. Ahead of them it already sucked, there was an outage at some point, customers were impacted, and it was our fault. Never was it solely on our underlying infrastructure provider (AWS or Heroku), nope the blame was on us and we’d failed in some way. And as soon as the incident was resolved, it wasn’t time to go home and decompress with a beer, it was time start the process of a retr....
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Editing gameplay videos in Premiere requires that you re-encode, thus losing quality. Instead, you can use FFmpeg to edit losslessly.
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Editing gameplay videos in Premiere requires that you re-encode, thus losing quality. Instead, you can use FFmpeg to edit losslessly.
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I share my top book recommendations for 2017, including Trevor Noah's Born a Crime and The Dictator's Handbook by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith.
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I share my top book recommendations for 2017, including Trevor Noah's Born a Crime and The Dictator's Handbook by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith.
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Diseases have always been fashionable. Tuberculosis brought us the fad of looking pale and skinny. Syphilis and it’s symptomatic light sensitivity and rotten noses brought us sunglasses and fake noses that were worn even by those not afflicted by the illness. I won’t go into detail as to why disease becomes fashionable - first, I don’t really know, and then there’s a whole conference on it. One point of interest for me is how a fa....
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Man's Search for Meaning offers a unique perspective on the Holocaust and introduces the theory of logotherapy.
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Man's Search for Meaning offers a unique perspective on the Holocaust and introduces the theory of logotherapy.
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tldr: The ubiquitous isotropic Gaussian prior for generative models doesn't make sense / doesn't work, which motivates work on priors. At NIPS, Dawen Liang mentioned Hoffman & Johnson's ELBO surgery paper offhand while talking about tuning KL divergences, and it's very interesting, so I thought I'd go over it. It's very clearly written, so I won't go into any of the derivations, but instead offer my interpretation. Motivation I worke....
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Here is the plan: Use docker to run a Service Fabric Linux cluster in a container Deploy a test app to the cluster and create 25 instances of it Aim: While developing the Traefik SF integration it will provide a simple cluster to use, debug and perform integration testing. *TLDR: Have a look the full code in this PR It was a fun journey but I got it working…
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Diving deeper and deeper into machine learning and neural networks I can’t help but notice how some of the techniques there are metaphors for what happens in our brains. After all, our brains a just a lot more sophisticated and larger versions of the deep computer networks that do computer vision, or predict clicks on ads. When I first grokked backpropagation, I was in awe about how elegant it is. An iterative approach to computing the pa....
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