Dai-X Again?

In case you were wondering, do not decide one week to go back to your childhood and re-watch Star Fleet when it pops up briefly in your YouTube recommendations. Admittedly, the original Japanese version is 40 years old this year, but you’re better off watching any episode of Stingray. As at least with that, you get this:

(Lots of “what?” parts, the biggest of which for me was towards the end where Dai-X destroys the mothership by flying into its landing bay. Why didn’t you try that back in episode 2, lads? The back half of the show is a lot more into using Dai-X than the first 12 episodes too, which makes me think that they realized that getting a man dressed up in a robot suit was probably a cheaper way to fill time than all the puppetry)

Honestly, I think I had more fun watching the first series of Hi-de-Hi!

Bit of an odd week at work, but I finally got around to playing with Optuna, which has turned out to be very easy to use even for scenarios that aren’t entirely envisioned by Preferred Networks’s documentation. If I’m feeling bored in the next few months, I may add a short tutorial into my PyTorch book repo. Completely free and exclusive online content! And not included in the new Russian-language version:

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(I’m guessing the German version of the book should be out in a month or two. It’ll have all the expanded content I have added so far on quantization and self-supervised training, along with a bunch of PyTorch 1.6 fixes. The definitive version! If…you can read German)

Finally, I have begun exploratory work on the Christmas festivities. This will eventually form the basis of my “Toblerone, but not” chocolates (they’ll be in a triangle log mold):

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There’s very little chocolate in this - the filling is just hazelnut praline mixed with cocoa butter, passed through a cream whipper and left to set at a 50% vacuum. It gives a bubbled texture that’s much lighter than my normal aerated chocolate and instead approaching the texture of a real Aero bar. And as there’s nothing else to cut the flavour, it is very hazelnutty. Mostly a success - though I need to work out how to cut out enough of the filling to give the chocolates a proper capping. Next week: a pastry experiment!