I have my own O’Reilly animal! Work continues on the book itself, but we’ll be delving into basic architectures, transfer learning (in images using ResNet architectures, in text staying right-up-to-date with BERT & GPT-2), TorchScript, and more besides! Coming to Early Access soonish, I think…
Night. 1am
THUD
scritch-scritch-scritch
door opens
And that is how Helvetica Black managed to jump over a wall constructed of tall cardboard boxes, worked out how to open doors, and walked all over me at 1am before falling asleep. I’m a little concerned.
In less terrifying news, we had a boardgame night this weekend! And I made desserts. A couple. A few.
I topped out at 10 different items when you counted the hot caramelized white chocolate. And that was after nixing the sous-vide cheesecake, crème brûlée, pâte de fruit, and popcorn ganache. I may have a problem.
Putting aside the vast quantities of sugar, we had a good time! I discovered another fan of Shut Up And Sit Down and we played Mysterium, Avalon, and The Insider. Fun was had, and Tammy was indeed mostly evil. You can never trust her when she’s playing Avalon!
Short blog tonight as I’m in considerable pain, but there will be a bite-sized update following this one.
It was interesting coming back to Durham. Given how white-hot the area still seems to be (apparently some houses in the street next to where I lived are now going for $0.5m. That’s a bit of an outlier, but everything seems to be inching into the 300k range in East Durham), I was surprised at how little change there’s been. Yes, the ugly tower of glass is finished and there’s a few shops in there, I guess, but the Cupcake Bar has been closed since…around June last year and yet in a prime area of Durham downtown, it stands vacant and with the old signage still up. Feels like there might be a slight softness in retail in the area at least.
Then there’s this absolute unit.
From what I can tell, the place has been gutted inside. The ceiling has been ripped out, the floors taken out (but they were in good shape and original!), the HVAC system lying by the side of the house, the vinyl siding all completely removed, and every window replaced. Even the new ones I put in. They’ve even made the house a tiny bit smaller by reducing the size of the storage space in the front bedroom to recreate something of a wrap-around porch. Which I guess is appealing, but the problem with that wrap-around porch is that it wraps around two sides of a busy crossroad, so I’m not sure how much of a selling point that actually is.
Oh, and the unit has gained another chunky boi next to it. Behold!
One plot, two houses. Not exactly where I would have placed house #2, but there you go. I might have set the house back just a little so it wasn’t right next to the bus stop, but again, what do I know?
I do think it’s funny that the tape holding the small front window together is now almost six years old.
Anyway, so that’s the main changes in Durham. I did get to meet up with many of the people I wanted to during my flying visit: Paakow, Andy, Elizabeth, Christa, Stacie, Kathy, and Luke amongst others. Perhaps strangely, although there was a sense of nostalgia walking through Durham, I can’t say that visiting made me miss the place. It’s alright! It has some things that Cincinnati doesn’t! Although Cincinnati has Jungle Jim’s and Kentucky just over the river. Admittedly, it doesn’t get to —20-30ºC in Durham. But! In Ohio, I can actually go outside in the summer for more than 10 minutes without my skin burning off. So there’s trade-offs…
Tune in back here next week for (hopefully) some news on the book front and other shenanigans.
Well that was fast. And so, all of a sudden, I have a month left of my thirties. I don’t think the mid-life crisis has started yet, or maybe it has and I just haven’t realized. Meanwhile, I have spent the week sorting out how to transfer my former 401(k) funds and begin the work on this year’s tax return. All the adult things. Of course, as I type this, I have discovered I’m wearing my top inside out, so there’s that…
Again, a quiet week. Starting to panic a little about the book, as I’m starting on the most involved chapter and it’s somewhat intimidating. Of course, it’s likely to be less intimidating when I properly get started, but there’s always a distraction.
Being extremely online since 2016 is not helping either. Yesterday? Yes, I should have been writing. But instead I took an hour and a half out of my day tracking down statistics of how the UK minimum wage tracked with RPI/CPI from 1999-2010 in order to fight an exasperating battle with leftists calling the minimum wage a betrayal of socialism. It was important dammit. I am getting increasingly fed up with adherents of a New Jerusalem wilfully blaming all of Labour’s ills on 1997-2010, as if Attlee et al weren’t Men of Empire and Callaghan was the one who brought in monetarism.
And of course the 2020 primaries are starting to ramp up, so more fun and nasty arguments to come when you question the idea of introducing a Medicare-For-All bill with no details on how you are going to pay for it (and it’s not hard! Taxes! But there probably needs to be a discussion on where those taxes fall, eh? Instead of just calling people ‘centrist sellouts’). So looking forward to that.
Anyway, back off to NC this week for the first time in almost a year. I’ll only be in Durham itself for under 24 hours, but it’ll be interesting to see what’s changed since I’ve been gone. I guess the tower that replaced @greenwalldurham will finally be open…
Things I learnt this week:
When I see public transport systems, I must ride them.
Back in the Bay Area for a week. There have been whiskey bars and watching Endeavour at high altitudes. Tomorrow I’ll be heading back to San Francisco proper for all the meetings and whatnot.
I am already so tired I could probably sleep for a week.
You know, when you’re not feeling well, and you only slept two hours the previous night, the absolute best way to start a Friday is to invite somebody in your house, who in the first thirty seconds tells you everything wrong with it and leaves you with an estimate for $21,000 in order to stop said house from doing a land-locked replay of those houses in Hastings that slowly slide into the sea. sigh
Still, as the snow comes down again this afternoon in Cincinnati, I think that next weekend I’ll be in the rain in San Francisco. Which both gets me a little excited, but mostly already beginning miss my actual bed and the easy access to proper tea. Oh, and dark chocolate digestives. Obviously.
But! I will be visiting Durham (okay, actually, I’ll be in Raleigh, but I will be coming to Durham at some point) at the start of March! There will be Cook Out. And IP3, if I can make it work. All the old haunts! It’ll be interesting to shat’s changed in the year since I left…
The post-war, pre-Thatcher Britain is lost. A bizarre world, locked in a secure time-vault never to be released, due to our shame of turning a blind eye to disc jockeys, TV presenters, and children’s authors. Coming-of-age books set in a fantasy Edwardian time, or the struggles of an upper class family adjusting to the New Jerusalem.
A time shot on 16mm film, capturing the essence of a past no longer seen; that point in the broadcast where it switches from OB to videotape, the difference between outside and in. Year Zero Estates springing up in harsh, beautiful concrete; a man in a donkey jacket bringing a Government to its knees. The three-day week somehow merged in consciousness with the Winter of Discontent, and we are not allowed to separate them; a past retconned away by May 3rd 1979 and St. Francis of Assisi. Time-locked, a decade of failure. But it wasn’t. Not really.
A world where Bowie lived alongside Lieutenant Pigeon, of decline even as the most advanced passenger jet plane ever built flies from British shores. British Rail invents the tilting train and sells it off to European dreams. System X a gleam in engineers’ eyes, unaware that it will form the backbone for a million fascists and their Twitter handles.
You can catch it in glimpses in YouTube. People uploading the past, the old adverts, Jack Regan brutalizing people in London, odd thirty-five minute documentaries about a day in a British Rail station, snatches of QED, the countless different users uploading the ‘Protect and Survive’ broadcast, laughing at how weird it was to be afraid of nuclear war. Degraded VHS copies of a world gone, lasting until the watchful eye of the algorithm zaps them on behalf of BBC Worldwide.
The Moors and the Ripper; Yorkshire in blood. Mud with their puppet show, The Likely Lads joking about schoolgirls. Tony Benn in the streets, Harold Wilson shaking with fear under the sheets.
It’s not my world. I grew up firmly in the new world, the one created that tossed all this aside. But you can’t destroy it utterly. Old books remain, songs get played on the radio, and the BBC had repeat slots to fill after all. Those Children Film Foundation films that got broadcast on a Friday afternoon - tales of factories, magical t-shirts, and boys who turned yellow, set in a bizarre time that never was. Jennifer Agutter dressing herself as she starts counting.
The Owl Service; a Britain haunted by its loss of Empire and collapse in standing, examining its old myths before Falklands tossed them all aside and gave us back the image of Britannia. Rejoice, rejoice, rejoice. Even if it was an illusion. rejoice on the old HP.
The odd series that pop up here and there - the clash of the Minders from ITV with the Boys from Hooky Street on BBC1. Shelley and Citizen Smith falling in to promote the alternative view. The insanity of Q, a show that started everything from Monty Python to sm:TV Live. “What are we going to do now?” a nation cries as the three-day week bites and Brexit looms. And our racism brushed under the carpet, from the Pakistani Dalek to the Black and White Minstrel Show. Curry And Chips. Bird recording as Idi Amin. Have I Got New For You lacerating the Government whilst creating Boris The Legend.
But all gone. The plays. The conspiracies, the intrigue. Guardians. The Donati Conspiracy. 1990. The 70s fear of a Labour Government while Knale digs deep in a cave to find objects from our forgotten past that will kill us all. The man from Granada Reports that sneaks out to bring punk to the nation. Everybody taking the piss out of Morrissey. Dennis Potter picking at his psoriasis scabs as he writes another play with sexual intrigue coming to the fore.
The Internet gathers around on a Thursday evening to watch repeats of Top of The Pops from 30 years previous. And how we laugh. But it’s really a wake, held every week to shared memories of ‘Oh God do you remember what Carl did the next day at school? And how Miss Jones from 6N had actually been to the Blitz?’ A church to a music world that we destroyed via T1 lines, fast Fourier transforms and everybody else waiting to share their bundles of maths to the world. We let them come in, we talked to each other as we set the music world on fire and let everything burn.
Our past colonized by Americans in the final twist of the knife, our own history subsumed as their history overtakes our own. Their music becomes our music, their games become our games, their television becomes ours. But it wasn’t like that. Not really. America was a foreign land. America could never have created the KLF. Nor New Order. Or The Day Today.
The old world is lost. But if you step into the Alexandra Road Estate, you can get a glimpse of a world that we imagined. A world that could have been something different. But instead we chose Thatcher. We chose nationalism, and we chose Brexit.
But in that brief period of time, we believed in a better way.
One of the secret things I was working on last month has slipped out into the wild. World of WOTAN is a monthly digest of things going on in deep learning. With jokes. New architectures, reinforcement learning, important news, the month’s most interesting arXiv papers, and laughing at terrible bugs in production releases, it’s all contained in a handy email you can sign up for at the website. There’s also going to be a Crap RL Corner competition coming in May/June which will combine the best of Your Sinclair and the most powerful GPUs in existence today, which promises to be amusing if nothing else. So go, sign up! Though probably only if you’re willing to accept bad jokes about Dropout.
(I’m doing it monthly mainly so I don’t burn out; I still have half a book to write, after all!)
I also seem to have some bits and pieces in Infoworld this week. I’ll have some more there in the next couple of months, after I sit down and write them.
In non-writing news, I have been mostly spending the week hiding from the polar vortex and being a stereotypical DL person by reading The Three Body Problem and the rest of the trilogy. This might have contributed to the reason that I was still awake at 3am Thursday morning. But the cold didn’t help, honest. Summing up the trilogy: we’re all doomed. Dooooooooomed. Bit of a downer. Which reminds me that it’s almost time to re-read the Red Riding Quartet again soon. Yay misery!
How did it get to be February? Off to San Francisco again in a couple of weeks. Sometimes I wonder whether the 2009 version of Ian could believe where I’ve ended up. An odd but mostly enjoyable ride…
I have become slightly blasé about the weather. Yes, it may be -4ºC and snowing, but I still went to the supermarket. Admittedly, the choice was between that and not eating next week, but I am adjusting. Which is good, as it’s going to be -20º again in the next few days. Fun times!
Mostly a quiet week. Some work on secret things, some work on, well, work things, and then an impressively middle-class Saturday grinding my own meat and playing boardgames (but very enjoyable!). Oh! I also booked my flight home for my 40th birthday; I’ll be back in Bicester (and London for a few days) in April. I will have a second suitcase just for Mini Eggs.
And I think that’s all I have this week. No deer sightings!