Conformer: An interesting ML architecture that I'm abandoning

BirdCLEF is a bird-call recognition contest that runs yearly on Kaggle. (CLEF stands for Cross Language Education and Function.)

Last year, I participated in BirdCLEF because the domain was native Hawaiian birds, so even though I didn't know much of anything about audio ML, I had a leg up in …

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About Larry

Larry O'Brien sold his first program at age 16 and has been an influential voice in the software engineering community since 1989. He edited Computer Language, AI Expert, Software Development, and Game Developer magazines, founded the Jolt Programming Awards, and wrote the "Codewatch" columnist for SD Times from 2001-2015. Three …

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Sly Flourish's "Luck Replacing Inspiration" in D&D is +3 to players

We used Sly Flourish's Replacing 5E Luck With Inspiration in our last 2 sessions and everyone loved it after a few reminders to "you miss, but turn your luck die" (everyone has a D6 in front of them with 6 indicating 0 luck).

But this mechanic, unlike inspiration, happens a …

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Thoughts on Hawkins’ “A Thousand Brains”

Jeffrey Hawkins is the CEO of Numenta, a company that has been pursuing machine intelligence since the early 2000s. Prior to that he was the founder of Palm Pilot, the most successful Personal Digital Assistant, the sale of which presumably has funded Numenta this part quarter-century.

Hawkins’ approach is iconoclastic …

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Breakfast in Liliha

The other day we were eating breakfast at the counter of the wonderful Liliha Bakery in Oahu and were chatting with a local guy who told us he was 84. Really nice conversation until the pancakes were almost gone when he said "Not to get into politics but..." pregnant pause …

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Solution to "Can't open application 'xRC Simulator'" on Mac for FRC

The xRC Simulator or Autodesk's Synthesis allow First Robotic Competition teams to drive simulated robots around the season's field, allowing early practice with driving, viewlines, and team strategy.

While Synthesis seems to provide higher fidelity, xRC seems a little more user-friendly to me.

Installing on Windows is straightforward, but if …

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Noodling about with a Neural Network Markup Language

Felt potentially communicative, might delete later.

Some sketches of neural net layer annotations

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Interested in ML?: The math can wait

Focus on data transformation and scenarios, not math, if you want to get into real-world Machine Learning. Yes, you’ll eventually have to learn some math, but the abstraction level within ML engineering has already moved on.

Learning the theory and math at the foundations of Machine Learning is like …

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“Bright Young Women” review

Jessica Knoll’s “Bright Young Women”

Jessica Knoll's "Bright Young Women" has such strong beginning and ending chapters, with stakes that are truly life-and-death, that the middle chapters are a bit of a let-down. The central thematic premise of the book is that, for perverse reasons, serial killers become celebrities …

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My next project is melonheaded whales

Mantas Deployed, Time for Whales

Since last Fall, I’ve been working on reidentifying reef manta rays with “low k-shot” (few labeled examples). That project is now deployed to the scientists and, until they start giving me feedback (and hopefully, more labeled data) pretty much at the finish line.

My …

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