World of WOTAN and Other Stories

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…