Short Story: The Crying Of Those Who Refine

“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…

Some thoughts on machine learning with small data

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…

The math behind Gravity’s Rainbow (Part8): The shape whose centre of gravity is the Brennschluss point

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.…

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…