Category: programming
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Samyro 0.0.2 – sampling structured inputs
New version of Samyro (0.0.2) now uploaded to Pypi. Github repo has the details, but I’ll brag about the new features: samyro write accepts a –seed argument, which allows the usual temperature-based decoding *after* the engine has progressed through the given seed. The default seed is now the BOS character, which plays nicely with the structured…
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Samyro 0.0.1 – development update
Last week I posted a new Python package to Pypi: Samyro, my toolkit for doing RNN-based character synthesis of new text from given text. I summarize in tweets the journey to the release of the project. There’s lots more to do, but much of the experimentation now is based on changing the input texts that…
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Leaving LA
“Data Science” in this era, like “Cognitive Science” in the nineties, seems to be several intellectual neighborhoods in search of a city.
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“Grad school” is a collaboration anti-pattern
To quote Wikipedia: an anti-pattern is: a pattern used in social or business operations or software engineering that may be commonly used but is ineffective and/or counterproductive in practice. [emphasis mine] I’ve been exploring patterns for actually working on software — not for designing it — and I realized that I myself spent a lot of time…
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“Bank heist” collaboration pattern
Here’s my favorite collaboration pattern so far: the Bank Heist collaboration pattern. This pattern, which we know from The A-Team, Ocean’s 11 and Leverage, among others, shares many properties with an excellent developer team: You don’t have to like following orders to be on the team. Everybody’s a generalist, and an expert in one area (pickpocket, cat burglar, safe-cracker, grifter, etc)…
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Software collaboration patterns
Software development is a fundamentally social process: it’s all about working together. We (software developers as a caste) have expressions like “programming by contract” and design patterns like “Delegation” that reflect how we humans work together – and we use these patterns to describe how we instruct our robot minions to function. We think about…
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As random as I oughta be
From John D. Cook‘s Probability Facts twitter feed, discovered the infamous RANDU, and this absolutely marvelous quote: One of us recalls producing a “random” plot with only 11 planes, and being told by his computer center’s programming consultant that he had misused the random number generator: “We guarantee that each number is random individually, but we…
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Recommendations roundup for “TPC”
My brother Daniel introduced me to a new term he and his security-geek friends are trying to encourage the rest of us mere mortals to adopt: “TPC”, or “Trusted Physical Console”. In short, it’s the sturdy, small laptop running a trusted operating system, to which you (and probably only you) have control of the tools available. (Probably…
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pair programming
I discovered last week that Java does not have a Pair<X,Y> generic class because of Reasons. That’s annoying, but surprising to me. Scala, for example, supports heterogeneous typed tuples (including a 2-tuple, of course), and of course my beloved Python does as well (though type enforcement in Python is, well, weak). I’ve also been learning…
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Looking for work, 2012 edition
A short note (implied by my updates on Twitter), just to say: I was laid off last week from my previous employment in an abrupt downsizing — a company pivot, evidently away from the work I like to do. I’m looking for work now. Below the jump: what I’m looking for.