Introduction

A few months ago I discovered fast.ai’s fastbook. It was released in August with an accompanying set of YouTube videos that serves as an introductory course in the topic of deep learning. The content is made very approachable by the authors Jeremy Howard, Rachel Thomas, and Sylvain Gugger.

I already had a cursory knowledge of AI having taken a class in college, but I wanted to dive deeper into the inner workings — ideally all the way to the metal. I purchased the book on Amazon in August, but I’ve been slow to go through it since some of the video lectures are rather long, and I learn far better by reading and doing versus listening.

This week I’ve decided to pick up where I left off. I had been thinking about starting a early today (why not), and one of the sections of the book/lecture specifically calls out the advantages of starting your own blog which is rather strange for a book about deep learning. Anyway, that section of the book pushed me over the edge, so now here we are.

To give a quick introduction of myself: My name is Jerred Shepherd. I’m a software engineer working at Amazon Web Services. I work on problems regarding distributed systems and scalability which has been really fun. I love computers and programming, and I often spend my free time working on side projects as a hobby.

Posts from blogs I like

Pikmin 3: No Fruit, No Problem - 0 Fruit in 2h24m

Want to watch this in your video player of choice? Take this: https://cdn.xeiaso.net/file/christine-static/video/2024/pikmin-3-0-fruit/2/index.m3u8 Recently I saw @TheBacklogs do a Pikmin 3 challenge run where they collected 0 fruit to beat the game. I thought I could do better, so I beat it in 2 hours 24 minutes. Full run without commentary: https://youtu.be/nHFIn74-mLk @TheBacklogs' run: https://youtu.be/eSEUdgVX7o4 My website: https://xeiaso.net My Mastodon: …

via Xe Iaso's blog May 04, 2024

Copyleft licenses are not “restrictive”

One may observe an axis, or a “spectrum”, along which free and open source software licenses can be organized, where one end is “permissive” and the other end is “copyleft”. It is important to acknowledge, however, that though copyleft can be found at the opposite end of an axis with respect to permissive, it is not synonymous with the linguistic antonym of permissive – that is, copyleft licenses are not “restrictive” by comparison with permissive licenses. Aside: Free software is not synonymous with copyle…

via Drew DeVault's blog April 19, 2024

Airfoil

The dream of soaring in the sky like a bird has captivated the human mind for ages. Although many failed, some eventually succeeded in achieving that goal. These days we take air transportation for granted, but the physics of flight can still be puzzling. In this article we’ll investigate what makes airplanes fly by looking at the forces generated by the flow of air around the aircraft’s wings. More specifically, we’ll focus on the cross section of those wings to reveal the shape of an airfoil – you can see…

via Bartosz Ciechanowski February 27, 2024
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