Ocassional Notes
22. February 2022
Happy 2s Day.
I was chatting with my brother the other day, and he opined that I may live in Canada’s largest municipality that doesn’t have a municipal bus transit system. Of course I was interested to find out which is the biggest Canadian city without buses, so here we go.
17. February 2022
One of the paper handouts my child used to do at school was the “word ladder.” The exercise is a starting word and a series of instructions, with a hint/definition of the word that will be created.
11. February 2022
I had access to udemy courses back when I was working at Deloitte Digital. One interesting course I did was the introduction to deep q learning from Pieran Data. Deep Q learning is a way to use neural nets to do reinforcement learning. It was an interesting course and I learned a lot, so I’ll give a recap here.
25. January 2022
My old work (TWG) had a 3D printer for employees to play with and use. In the summer of 2019 my son was getting into model rocket launching, but we kept losing them in trees. So I decided to try 3d printing some rockets. It never really worked out, but in my new spirit of blogging failures, I’m posting about it. My goal was to make my own easily produced reusable rocket.
18. January 2022
Wordle is a popular word deduction game. The aim is to guess a word given six guesses. You can only guess valid English words that are in wordle’s dictionary. Each wrong guess will yield hints. A letter highlighted in yellow indicates it matches the target word somewhere. A letter marked in green indicates the correct letter in the correct position. I feel like a branching strategy (preferably choosing from common letters) is the best. But what word should you start with? And what is the worst word to start with?
29. December 2021
When I was a child, they had a plotter at my mom’s office. I don’t remember the model, but it was something like a HP 7550A. I was fascinated by it, and I’m sure I watched it go for many hours. From that, I’ve always loved plotter technology. I’ve always kind of wanted to make my own. Last year, the urge became too great and I tried out the branchiograph project. I didn’t get the best results for various reasons.
02. November 2021
Non-negative matrix factorization is a fast technique for generating embeddings from a dataset. More concretely, given a matrix you can decompose it into two matrices that are approximattely multiplicands of the matrix. I.e. given matrix M, it finds matrices A and B such that M ≈ AB.