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 […]

How a traumatizing relationship led me to Andrew Yang

Just recently, I finally came out of PTSD over the traumatizing end of a relationship with a sociopath. To summarize my PTSD tenure: I was suicidal for a month, had severe heart palpitations (almost took an MRI), high blood pressure, migraines, not to mention rebuilt my entire worldview from scratch, Descartes style. Looking back to before […]

Effects of Automation

AI will create winners and losers, and it won’t be fair. The middle class will give out first (those are the jobs AI will automate out first), polarizing wealth inequality and leaving most people tending to lower-class jobs like animal carers, baristas, and babysitters. If you believe in some definition of utilitarianism, you believe there’ll […]

When one reaches the end of morality

What is morality? Does it even exist? This lies at the heart of the compatibilism debate – whether the future is determined already, and if that affects morality. Compatibilists believe morality exists in a determined world. Among them, some go further and argue we need a determined world to have morality. Incompatibilists believe morality doesn’t exist […]