septimus111

Thank you for sharing your experience.

There is adverse selection at play. The top/world-class programmers are too busy to write blogs.

What annoys me about using Apple products recently is the glitches. When I scroll up to find very old messages on my iPhone, it randomly snaps back to the most recent message. Trying to edit text on a touchscreen is also still a nightmare in 2022. My brand new MacBook randomly crashed and turned itself off the day I bought it. It wouldn't bother me if the products weren't literally the most expensive things I own aside from my house.

Yes it could be that they got a bad review from someone else and retaliated on the wrong person. Where is the fun in not getting peeved by these things though? ;)

This is an excellent point! I suppose I could normalize by the number of total reviews. It hasn’t been an issue so far as I am only filtering out cases when there are multiple reports of the same issue, and I care more about eliminating bad options than detecting all good options.

This is why there is such “grade inflation” in reviews. The way I read reviews is now: - look at the reviews with lowest ratings. They have the most signal (the walls were paper thin and the bathroom was dirty) as opposed to positive reviews (beautiful room in a great location). You can usually tell if the reviewer is being unreasonable. - search for specific negative keywords in the other reviews - “noisy”, “loud”, etc. Often people will leave a five star review but discreetly complain about something.

I had a non-masked Uber driver report me for not wearing a mask (I was wearing one). It was very strange, my guess is they didn’t like me for some reason and used the feature in a petty way…?

Any time I’ve looked into passive income, I’ve come to the same conclusion: the simplest and most effective way to increase my income is to focus my energy on improving my main career.

If you can't find someone to review your stuff, is there someone you can raise this with who might be able to help? It sounds like a management/communication issue.

Moka pots make great coffee but I found it really hard to get the brewing right - the most important factor was the grind size. If I change it even slightly, I get much worse results and unlike Aeropress there are fewer other variables to adjust. So to answer your question I would say yes if you're also travelling with your own grinder.

"Directness" is an excuse that I sometimes hear to justify aggressive or rude behaviour, but it's possible to be direct in a polite manner. "This new plan is stupid" is rude, whereas "I'm frustrated about this new plan, it won't work because X" is assertive without being rude.

I have started unsubscribing to any subreddit the moment I notice a post is generating a negative emotion. Nowadays my feed is mostly woodworking, cooking and photography.

I would encourage everyone who struggles with procrastination to try CBT techniques as described in "Feeling Good" by Dr. Burns. These address the psychological reasons for procrastination directly.

CMU stats courses are stellar - especially this one, which was written by Cosma Shalizi, I believe

I agree - and what about all the high end bars/cafes/shops full in the same areas? Working at startups has become a relatively comfortable lifestyle for twenty-somethings who don't necessarily generate value.

From a pedagogical point of view, I think it's a very strange choice to go with gradient descent in this case. It makes linear regression look like something much more complicated than it actually is. People might be misled into thinking they need to hand code gradient descent every time they do a regression, for their 100 point dataset.

This is a great article. One thing I can particularly relate to is when working on a 'blue sky' project, how easy it is to rationalise away the obvious red flags and keep going until everything falls apart. When one has invested a lot of time and built up the momentum, it's very hard to admit failure and accept the big changes that must come with letting go of a project.

I think it's particularly hard for people who are used to, and enjoy being successful - is that perhaps why university dropouts often make good company founders?

I spent a lot of time messing with PDEs as a student but sadly that knowledge hasn't been very useful - I've only seen them come up in quite specialised areas like optical flow...

This is a great list of the main concepts to know.

These are all brilliant books, but I feel like anyone who is ready for them wouldn't need to be asking this question.

Not knowing anything about you, I'll assume that

- you are starting with the equivalent of a high school level of maths

- you want to take a ML course or read an ML book without feeling totally lost

As some commenters have said, Calculus, Probability and Linear Algebra will be very helpful.

Some people like to recommend the "best" or "most important" books which you "should" read, but there is a strong chance these will end up sitting on a bookshelf, barely touched. So I will recommend some books which are perhaps more accessible.

- Calculus by Gilbert Strang

- Linear Algebra by Gilbert Strang

For Probability: I don't have any favourites, sorry.

This is something I want to believe, but history shows us that scientific progress often comes with the loss of traditional, magical views of the Self and of the universe which are taken for granted: Newton "unweaved the rainbow", Darwin showed us that we are quite close to monkeys, and so on. If AI reaches a point where it can mimic great art, it will be a shock to humanity similar to when we discovered that humans are only a minuscule part of time and space.

I agree that it's a shame our society doesn't place more importance on these 'grand visions'. That being said, I think the reason so many people are learning programming and studying computing is because there are big companies like FB where they can make a good living. So it's not like corporations are 'stealing' the talent away from academia, etc.

I think we are going to see a lot of interesting artistic applications of AR. There is a lot about FB that I don't like but this here is a good thing.

This is just entertainment - hardly anything to get depressed about. What's so terrible about giving people a bit of joy and fun?

So much cynicism here! Facebook knows they have to appeal to teenagers and so they are working on features that do (c.f. success of Snapchat). Yes, perhaps it would be better if teenagers spent their time reading Kant instead of sharing silly pictures! :)

Thank you. It's just too convenient a time isn't it?

Ummm... I'm sure Uber's PR team had absolutely nothing to do with this article ;)

That does surprise me, in a good way! My concern, aside from salary, would be job security - in London it's possible to find a new job within days... I will look into Edinburgh :)

Well yeah, his contributions are immeasurable, my argument is more about the social utility of placing the money there.