Paper Review: “MetNet: A Neural Weather Model for Precipitation Forecasting”

Is it possible to replace numerical weather prediction with deep learning? Certainly not yet. But first work is being done to investigate this question. In this post I want to discuss a paper called “MetNet: A Neural Weather Model for Precipitation Forecasting” that Google Research published back in March 2020 and in which they try…

Pokemon Team Report SwSh Season 13

Season 13 was the first one since Season 1 that I got some laddering done. As I built a pretty fun team, here is a short team report. The team was built around my favorite Pokemon: Entei! I used these two teams as inspiration: Unfortunately Entei is so heavily outclassed by other Pokemon, that it’s…

Book Review: Invisible Planets

Ken Liu, the Editor of this story collection, spends a part of the foreword to warn the reader: Given the realities of China’s politics and its uneasy relationship with the West, it is natural for Western readers encountering Chinese science fiction to see it through the lens of Western dreams and hopes and fairy tales…

Book Review: Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges

If Borges had been born at the end instead of the beginning of the 20th century, we might never have been blessed with his wonderful stories as he would have become a software developer instead. At least he seems deeply fascinated by topics like recursion, logic and infinity. Some of his essays could have been…

Pokemon Team Report: Armor Beginnings Cup

I stopped playing competitive Pokemon for a while because I have some networking issues on my switch. It always takes multiple tries to find an opponent, presumably because I have no ipv4 address. But when I realized that there was an interesting tournament this weekend I couldn’t resist participating regardless. In the Armor Beginnings Cup,…

Book Review: Instantiation by Greg Egan

Greg Egan’s latest short story collection “Instantiation” consists of 11 hard science fiction stories that were published between 2013 and 2019. His ideas on how technology and science might evolve are as interesting and mindblowing as ever, and you get a quite diverse set of them here. Just to name a few examples: What would…

Short Story: Solving Theodicy for good

Why does God permit the manifestation of evil? I think it’s probably for the same reason that there are small, well-known bugs in every sufficiently large piece of software: The pain that would be caused by trying to fix the bug would outweigh the potential benefits. See, God is a pretty intelligent fellow. He figured…