I’ve recently finished reading the last book of five written by those behind the Basecamp company. I read some of them a while ago, so my memory about their content could be better. Still, I’ll compensate for that by describing my impressions. I’m going to list the books in the order in which I read them, starting from the one I read first. These books can be classified as business books, but, to me, they are also excellent self and time management books, with a focus on productivity and work-life balance. All of the books discuss different processes that allow people at Basecamp to work efficiently and happily. I should explicitly mention that the books are well-structured and written in concise and straightforward language.

This post is a walkthrough of the winning solution for the ML Prague 2021 Hackathon problem that my teammate Michał and I came up with. We were given anonymized data containing approximately 524k Czech policyholders, 44k clinic departments of 273 different types, and 332 ambulance stations. We were tasked with assigning each of the policyholders to the closest of each of the 273 clinics, in addition to the nearest ambulance station. The closest clinics and ambulance stations were supposed to have been picked by the driving distance. To help us with the routing, we were given $200USD in MS Azure credit, which was enough to make 40k routing requests (or 400k if we were willing to go under the 50 queries per second limit). This amount is nowhere near the one required for a brute-force solution, not to mention that it would take a while. We had five days to come up with the solution. On top of that, we were tasked to present our results using SAS Visual Analytics on SAS Vija.

You are developing a react-native app with Tensorflow JS? Then you may have tried using the tfjs-react-native backend in Android SDK Emulator only to find that it doesn’t work. This happens because tfjs-react-native requires GLES 3 / WebGL 2. You can enable it in Android SDK Emulator via:

Waking Life is a very unusual animation movie created in a unique style and full of almost random philosophical dialogues that leave you with a lasting impression which is hard to describe. I can say with a high degree of certainty that most of you’ll feel dizzy while watching it, and I don’t have the slightest idea whether you’ll like it or not. Nevertheless, I highly recommend it to you because it’s not just a movie — it’s an experience worth its while. The film captivates you, and if you want to experience it to the fullest, I would recommend you watch it on a large screen, or better, in a cinema, a projector, or VR. Give it a try and let me know how you feel about it.

People often ask me for a good place to get started with AI, machine learning, and neural nets. course.fast.ai — this is a pretty good place. It’s modern (the current version of the course was released this August), centered around the relevant practice, teaches you by doing, going deeper only when needed, and it goes with the book that was released this August, too. Overall, it’s a pretty good introduction to the field.

TL;DR: 10/10, highly recommend. The book is a collection of the most impactful papers written by Rogers over the course of decades centered around the idea of becoming. Life is guided by a changing understanding of and interpretation of my experience. It is always in process of becoming.

A strong gust of dry, warm salt-smelling air blows into my face, making my hair flow all over the place. I stand still paying attention to the surf’s sound crashing into my ears, mentally moving me before falling down to my heart, resonating deep inside. A few seconds pass before I open my eyes and look down at the craggy coastline. The turquoise waters of the Black sea are as marvelous as always. I sit down, dropping my legs off the cliff’s edge. I remove my backpack and pull out a shiny metal thermos displaying the word “Rvonics”, in a somewhat frayed font.

The fact is that there is nothing as dreamy and poetic, nothing as radical, subversive, and psychedelic, as mathematics. It is every bit as mind blowing as cosmology or physics (mathematicians conceived of black holes long before astronomers actually found any), and allows more freedom of expression than poetry, art, or music (which depend heavily on properties of the physical universe). Mathematics is the purest of the arts, as well as the most misunderstood.

Usually, I leave my small apartment around six-thirty in the evening when I’m done with work. It’s a calm neighborhood with a lot of single-story traditional buildings showing off their facades made of charred wood. Usually, I’m quite hungry by that time, and I proceed by heading directly towards the closest LAWSON convenience store. Don’t get me wrong, I do prefer 7-Eleven, but the closest one is much farther away than LAWSON, and — as I said — I am, usually, quite hungry by that time. There are not many people on the streets during this hour — I meet only a few on my way to the store. In the store, I usually pick up an onigiri or two (or three — depending on how hungry I am), something to drink, and then walk towards the Shijō Bridge.

You woke up, the summer sun ruthlessly frying you through the window blinds. You slowly open your eyes to find out that the white sheet you were supposed to cover yourself with is a messy waistband. You close your eyes and open them one more time to double-check that it’s actually morning. “Ok, Google, what’s time is it?” you ask. “It’s six-fourteen AM.” Precisely sixteen minutes before the alarm is due. You roll over to the edge of the bed and sit yourself down in one smooth motion. You find your slippers without looking and proceed with the routine by walking towards the bathroom.