What Underlies Modern Search? Simple Concepts. — How many times do you search the web daily? 5, 20, 50? If Google is your search engine of choice, you can look at your history of searches here. Despite how deeply search underlies our daily activities and interaction with the world, few of us understand how it works. In…

Rethinking these hyperparameters will improve your model’s real-world performance — Gradient descent is one of the first concepts many learn when studying machine or deep learning. This optimization algorithm underlies most of machine learning, including backpropagation in neural networks. When learning gradient descent, we learn that learning rate and batch size matter. Specifically, increasing the learning rate speeds up the…

Why Analog AI is About to be in Everything from Alexa to Your iPhone — Neural networks keep getting larger and more energy-intensive. As a result, the future of AI depends on making AI run more efficiently and on smaller devices. That’s why it’s alarming that progress is slowing on making AI more efficient. The most resource-intensive aspect of AI is data transfer. Transferring data…

How to Tackle the Carbon Footprint of AI — Deep learning is bringing many benefits to the world: solving the 50-year-old protein folding problem, detecting cancer, and improving the power grid. While there is so much that deep learning is powering, we also need to consider the costs. In the quest for more accurate and generalizable models, there has…

Two of the Most Common Mistakes Even Top Developers Make With all the talks of AI, have you ever thought about how good ol’ technology can help develop you as a software engineer? Applying software analysis tools to your code can seem tricky, yet it’s getting easier. I applied LGTM to a few public codebases to identify common mistakes. See…

With This Knowledge, You Could Save a Life Living in a world where alcohol seems to permeate every social function, where being a teetotaler (person who does not drink alcohol) is a social faux pas, what do you do when you can’t drink? …

And What To Do About It Legacy code. Technical debt. These two make up software engineers’ worst nightmares. How much exists in your repository? Learning software engineering practices usually happens in two forms: Educational content — books, courses, lectures, etc. Code reviews However, what about the gaps? Perhaps a book missed a common coding mistake or…

Save Debugging Time by Switching to #pragma once If you’ve worked with C or C++ for any non-negligible amount of time, you’ve likely run into“error: redefinition of…” To avoid this, developers often add include guards to prevent header files from being imported multiple times into one file. For example, in dog.h: #ifndef DOG_H #define DOG_H // Contents of header file #endif…

Unlocking the Power of Function Templates Generic programming is growing in popularity, with Golang finally scheduling generics for its 1.18 release after it being the most-desired feature for years by Go developers. By allowing your algorithms to be used across datatypes, you minimize code duplication and save yourself time. C++ is known for its compile-time optimizations…