Quickly Annotate Your Machine Learning Dataset with One Weird Trick (It's Lisp)
Posted on September 7, 2021
| Chewxy
TL;DR - I wrote annotation-mode, which is a emacs minor mode for annotating text documents for machine learning purposes. Recently at work I had to annotate some text documents for a piece of NLP work. The annotation involves marking regions of the text with a category, as well as a rectangle which represents the region.
At first I thought to build a webapp to do the annotation. The webapp would load a text file would be drawn onto a canvas object.
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Random Thoughts on Empathy and Compassion, and Neural Pathways
Posted on July 4, 2021
| Chewxy
Earlier in my afternoon nap, I think I made the most interesting connection. It may well be wrong - my explanation is certifiably sloppy and unrigorous. It definitely needs a lot of refinement. Yes, this will be very bullshitty if you know anything about neuroscience or psychology. It also relies on some very unproved hypotheses of how brains work. I am mainly putting this brain dump down for myself anyway. But if you are a pop-sci author who wants to run with it, feel free to do so.
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The BNF Dream
Posted on February 25, 2021
| Chewxy
This post was originally a series of tweets I wrote on a dream I had last night. For posterity I’ll be re-describing the dream here. Words might be slightly different from the tweets given the lack of character restrictions.
I had a dream last night. It was a weird dream. I dreamt that all human languages could be shrunk down into a CBNF (C is for Contextual, or Chewxy)*There aren't such things as CBNF.
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On The Basics of Modeling
Posted on February 17, 2021
| Chewxy
I had a very interesting chat with a few data science students yesterday. Part of the chat involved the idea of statistical modeling. Throughout the chat, it occured to me that the students didn’t have a very good grasp of what modeling is. To their credit, they were proficient in the techniques of linear regression, and deep learning, but I got the sense that they were very much pushing buttons and watching things happen rather than understanding what they were actually doing.
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The SARS-CoV-2 Build Log
Posted on January 9, 2021
| Chewxy
Happy New Year!
2020 was definitely a weird year. The majority of the year was dominated by news of the COVID-19 pandemic. There were mass lockdowns across different countries. International travel halted to a trickle. Jobs were lost. Lives were lost. I am very thankful to not have been impacted as much by the pandemic. I didn’t get the virus, nor did any of my close friends or family - we are all safe.
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Double Your Linear Search Speed with This One Weird Trick
Posted on November 16, 2020
| Chewxy
Recently at work I optimized key-lookup for Ristretto, a caching library for Go, effectively doubling the lookup speed with one trick. This post walks you through what I did. The benchmarks and code can be found here.
Overview Ristretto is a fast concurrent cache library in Go. In the upcoming version, the cache is B-tree based. In this, the keys and values are stored in one flat slice of []uint64. Call this node.
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Some Thoughts On Library Design
Posted on January 30, 2020
| Chewxy
This post was [originally published in GopherAcademy](https://blog.gopheracademy.com/advent-2019/pkgapi/) for their Advent 2019 series. It's been republished here for posterity. As programmers we use libraries a lot. But library design is hard. In this article, I will walk through some considerations in designing a library.
We will start by bifurcating the acts of programming. We start by casting the act of programming as conversations. Then we examine the main activities that constitute what people call “programming”.
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The Y-Combinator MBA Project
Posted on October 9, 2019
| Chewxy
A friend of mine is doing an MBA. Her course this semester follows the Startup School model - each week they have lectures regarding issues a startup face while creating a startup at the same time. They have to create a product for the startup that they create. They first have to find customers and solve their customers problems, and create a product and startup around the problem.
The problem her team discovered was this: Graduating MBA students from her school cannot find jobs in Management Consulting, citing the lack of project experience as the reason.
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Writing Clearly is Clearly Hard
Posted on April 6, 2019
| Chewxy
These days I am slow in my blogging. I am trying to write my thoughts out more clearly. I don't think I am very good at it. Consider this snippet of conversation:
Chewxy: Star Wars is typical Campbellism. and here I use the word "typical" in the typical fashion which is to say, not the usual connotation of "usual" what I meant is "a representative of a type"
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Go is a Pretty Average Language
But OCaml is Pretty Great
Posted on February 19, 2019
| Chewxy
I had a data visualization problem at work. I’ve been thinking about set coverage issues, and wanted to test some ideas for visualizations. I had wanted to visualize the space of aggregate measures (i.e. things like means, etc). It later transpired that I didn’t need it, because my thinking around the issue had been wrong to begin with. I had written some code, and was eager to check it out. By the end of it, it had morphed into something entirely different, but it was a good entertaining night last night nonetheless.
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