Immigration is a weapon in the cold war for talent, and the CCP’s censorship of Chloé Zhao’s Oscar was an ineffective defense. Rumour has it that she said something unflattering about China a few years ago, but that seems like a red herring. …

Original post: casey.li/udacity-react-nanodegree tl;dr: Excellent gamified learning for picking up basic React skills. Know basic HTML+CSS, JavaScript and ES6 before starting. Do not count on the Udacity community or credential to get you a job; only you can do that. Fast and helpful online technical mentors. Strong intro to Redux…

The original version of this blog post, with formatted LaTeX formulas, can be found at casey.li/pca Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is often described by intro machine learning courses as follows: Dimensionality reduction. Decorrelation of features. Singular Value Decomposition / matrix factorization: M=UΣV^T Projecting the data onto a subspace spanned by…

The trope that engineers lack emotional intelligence is grounded in this truth: when someone expresses a need, the objective function that they really want you to maximize is almost never the one that they are telling you to maximize. And here’s the kicker — it’s almost impossible to get people…

Post originally published at casey.li/tensorflow-from-source tl;dr: Yes. I got ~40% faster CPU-only training on a small CNN by building TensorFlow from source to use SSE/AVX/FMA instructions. Look at some example build flags. Then do it! MNIST is the “Hello World” of machine learning, and TensorFlow’s MNIST For Beginners is a…

I’ve run my blog off WordPress for 6 years, but finally made the switch to a static site generator and never looked back. For more thoughts on why you might want to choose a static site over Wordpress, check this article here. Jekyll’s front page quickstart instructions literally do get…

Original: casey.li/dogs-vs-wolves Current tech fear-mongering seems to be centered around two concerns: The AI singularity will occur and super-intelligent robots will enslave us.¹ There will be mass unemployment due to automation. Let’s talk about #2. Certain jobs should disappear due to automation. These are the jobs that should have been…

Read any collection of reviews on George Packer’s 2013 book, The Unwinding, and you’ll find something remarkable: a range of incongruent opinions, all claiming this book as validation of their particular place on the political spectrum. They stand testament to Packer’s skill as a journalist in capturing something as complex…

There are many things in life worth fighting for — the Ivy League rat race should be knocked a few notches down the list. — On Monday, July 18 2016 at 12:45am, sitting on the beach off Highway 401 in Cape Canaveral, I watched the SpaceX Falcon 9 shoot into the midnight sky. It was like watching a man-made sunrise. A team of human beings, in pursuit of one mission, had created a rocket which…