Greg Egan latest short story collection “Sleep and the Soul” just dropped. It’s the kind of stories that I know and love him for, this time maybe with a touch more ambiguity and cooperation/trust as an overarching theme. In the remainder of the blog post, I’ll give a quick rundown of the stories. If you…
“The code is completely bananas. Don’t get me wrong, the guy who first wrote this must have been a genius, but he’s gone for a long time now and left absolutely no documentation behind.” “I always tell them to work in small increments. It’s critical to get feedback early and often to avoid wasted effort…
I feel techniques for making machine learning work with small data are not talked about enough. This makes sense because many ML applications are only possible by collecting a huge amount of data. And running Kaggle competitions on small datasets would basically be the same as running a “guess the random number” competition. For evaluating…
After almost 7 years working at meteocontrol, I decided to take a little break from regular software development and make one of my long term dreams come true: Developing a surfing game and releasing it on Steam. I thought about making a game like this ever since I was sixteen and learning to windsurf on…
In one of my last posts I puzzled over this section in Gravity’s Rainbow: And what is the specific shape whose center of gravity is the Brennschluss Point? Don’t jump at an infinite number of possible shapes. There’s only one. It is most likely an interface between one order of things and another. Pynchon, Thomas.…
The real story is the one not being told The Easy Chain. p.501 The Easy Chain white paper was released in 2008 by its pseudonymous creator Evan Dara. It’s called white paper because of its many blank pages and contains instructions on how to blow up the financial system. But that’s not the only advice…
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…
I didn’t do a math post in quite some time, so here is a quick one to get back into the game. It’s about some mathematical imagery in the Putzi’s section of Gravity’s Rainbow: Other souls move, sigh, groan unseen among the sheets of fog, dimensions in here under the earth meaningless—the room could be…
and at that point I came upon a photograph of a hardhat eating strawberry yogurt, and I suddenly heard myself thinking This is not innocent, this is not unknowing, every angle and facet and posture in this has been mapped out and calculated for maximal effect; Dara, Evan. The Lost Scrapbook This book was published…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
Niklas Riewald 