Hong Kong and why my favorite anime is banned in China

Attack on Titan is my favorite anime of all time. In it, humanity is caged in walls and their survival constantly threatened by incoming Titans who try to eat humans alive. The anime is notoriously good for its unforgiving brutality, plot twists but ultimately its characters, who touched many of the owners of its 100 […]

Chess as a Game of Life

Recently I’ve become an enthusiast of chess. It was summer 2019 and my internship hours were slowly eating up my right brain. Famous scientists and philosophers have echoed that creativity comes in bursts, and I was living right across my company, so I decided to extend my daily working hours by interspersing intellectual diversions throughout. […]

Nihilism and Nietzsche

I came across a good Nietzsche and Nihilism series by Academy of Ideas. If it’s too long, here’re the points: If you’re not a nihilist, you believe in some version of a true world. A true world can either be a) the future of our earthly one (i.e. Marxism), part of us already (i.e. Hinduism) […]

Sugar makes sweet a bitter truth

I just had my first boba tea in recent memory. I asked for no sugar, yet it was sweet af. I thought, the sugar in my sip does nothing more than make me take the next sip. It has no nutrients other than unnecessary calories, yet the very fact one sip makes you take the […]

Machine Learning Internship (Weeks 3-4)

These two weeks, I took the object detector model and began finding ways to improve it. I probably trained a hundred different models this week, on various learning rate schedules, number of frozen layers in the base network, and batch sizes. The object detection benchmark I used is validation/test mAP. Within the first week, I […]

Google wants to patent basic math

I still have a hard time believing this. My view on Google had a near 180 degree shift this morning, after coming across an unpopular tweet calling out Google for trying to patent batch normalization. Batch normalization is a stupidly simple but effective technique to standardized your data being fed through a neural network by […]

Machine Learning Internship (Weeks 1-2)

This may be helpful for those wondering what a machine learning internship is like at a medium-sized and established company. I’m doing a ten-week internship at Synaptics, which specializes in chips for interfaces, sensors, and IoT devices. Their chip is what’s used in Chromecast, the Google dongle. They’re currently working to integrate their chip into […]