This is my two hundred fiftieth review on Goodreads since 2010. You can read them all, fiction, non-fiction, and all sorts of other stuff, at this link: Rich Magahiz’s reviews on Goodreads
This was a solid piece of work on the state of machine learning which is so rapidly changing that one of the main platforms she uses in her examples, GPT-2, has already been replaced by another one with capabilities a hundred or more times that of its predecessor. So while it gives a good account of the challenges in applying the technology, it will only be a snapshot in time of how far researchers have been able to go (until it is revised perhaps some day). It draws on her popular blog with examples of her own experiments along with descriptions of what other researchers have been working on as broadly as can be accommodated in a work aimed at a general audience. Although I do have some involvement with deep learning in my job, my own interest is that of someone who is interested in the technology in a general way.
In my past life I did a few years of work on neutrinos, enough to find it that something as small as the Earth could manage to
absorb them
when conditions are right.
True life crime can be more crazy than what thriller writers think up.
The story of
Susan Kuhnhausen.
You can search for any term you like in the
Trump Twitter Archive
to find out what our leader has opined on the subject.
Some of these
trilobites
look ready to get up and swim around.
I could watch these traffic intersection simulations
for far too long.
* Here is an exhaustive set of metrics on where to spend your
[retirement](https://wallethub.com/edu/best-and-worst-states-to-retire/18592/#main-findings)
around the U.S.
Some of the scores I find disappointing.
* I am of the right age to know about the
[B-sides](http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/hit_parade/2018/01/how_does_a_b_side_become_a_chart_topping_hit.html)
they're talking about in this podcast, but not obsessed enough to know the right answers to the trivia questions.
I actually had a few more, but these are the best.
Instead of passively consuming the nearly endless stream of content coming my
way I thought I’d gather together a few items to share with everyone here.
Forty-nine years ago this happened:
* I particularly like this polyphonic visualization
* We were moved when we saw the remnants of the Berlin Wall last October, so I
was pleased to see the site for the online
[memorial](https://www.berliner-mauer-gedenkstaette.de/en/)
* It's been over two decades since I was passed over for tenure but the feelings
this left behind are still pretty much as fresh as what I see in
[this account](https://www.chronicle.com/article/a-professor-and-his-wife-on-absorbing-the-shock-of-tenure-denial/)
of the experience. I wrote an account of my own experience
[on Quora](https://www.quora.com/What-is-it-like-to-be-denied-tenure-as-a-professor/answer/Richard-Magahiz?srid=XXIY).
* Along the same lines as the tongue in cheek stories of
[The Codeless code](http://thecodelesscode.com/contents) (unfortunately no longer
live on the web) are [The Unix Koans of Master Foo](http://web.archive.org/web/20180305224708/http://rationalfiction.io/story/the-unix-koans-of-master-foo)
* [Psychological safety in operations teams](https://www.usenix.org/system/files/login/articles/login_winter17_09_looney.pdf)
* This blog post was inspired by
[52 things I learned in 2017](https://medium.com/magnetic/52-things-i-learned-in-2017-d9fb0040bdcb)
A couple of years ago I was working for a company that allowed me to sit at
a desk in their office in midtown Manhattan in lieu of relocating all the way
across the country. It was still a kind of shock to adjust to the New York
style of life after so many years working for sedate firms in northern New
Jersey, with the commute by bus and the walk across Times Square and the
standing in line for lunch at one of the dozens upon dozens of eateries within
a short distance of the office, and the tech meetups around town. Now that the
economy was picking up after the shock of the late 00s there were plenty of
exciting things going on in the tech world, many of them right there in the
country’s heart of finance. Around then is when I first started hearing about
bitcoin when companies like Adafruit and
Overstock were beginning
to accept this cryptocurrency as payment for their merchandise. People had
even written phone apps which allow you to conduct transactions right from your
smartphone by then, which sounded both great and worrying considering the rise
of mobile phone dependence right around the same time. There were articles
describing how blockchain-based currencies could decentralize the global
monetary system independent of central banks, and help eliminate middlemen which
hinder micropayments. So, I decided I’d take
a small amount of money and find out where I could get my own stake in bitcoin.
Here is a list of what I have put together or worked on for some significant
amount over the last couple of years on the job.
Monitoring will get its own post eventually.
We migrated from a single service which ran on a single instance in Classic
EC2 to a half dozen services running in separate VPCs, each with autoscaling
instances behind an elastic load balancer to provide high availability. Getting
all the plumbing on this right was a major effort.
We also shifted our configuration management system from exclusively Puppet
at first to Chef, where we could take better advantage of community-written
cookbooks, and then brought
Wrote an automation script which packaged service config files into a
Debian package which would simply be pulled into a new instance like any other
versioned package.
Worked on a couple iterations of an ELK stack in order to accept logs and
structured data
Prototyped a stack which used Amazon IoT, Kinesis Firehose, DynamoDB, and S3
to accept mobile data streams and store them for business intelligence. The
components were held together with Simple Notification Service and Lambda
functions in a serverless fashion.
Hacked out numerous one-off scripts in bash and Ruby to automate the recurring
maintenance chores in our environments. For instance we needed something to
clean up user logins which were not needed any more, scripts to take reference
snapshots of volumes for safekeeping, and so on.
Worked on some scripts to transfer information from our services to a data
warehouse running on Amazon Redshift (so-called ETL scripts) so we would have
an analytics service for our own use.
Migrated some administrative tools off of dedicated virtual machines onto
containers which would run under Rancher. The idea was that we could pack
a bunch of light-duty tasks together on a cluster of instances which would run the
same workloads with much higher density, reducing costs and maintenance.
Wrote a simple Sinatra app which would gather information from our
environments (addresses, instance IDs, running state, and so on) and display
them in a tabular format. This saved me a lot of time switching between
different dashboards and running things through the command line interface
just to keep things oriented.
Kept track of our hosting costs in order to find out where we could benefit
from terminating instances or phasing out legacy services.
In 2016 I went to a bunch of technical talks, none of which I intend to discuss
right now, and all of which armed with a cameraphone along with everybody else
in the audience. In this day of Slideshare and
official corporate tech blogs many of the presentations will make it up to the
web in pristine form, so why would anyone want to take a crooked, out of focus,
keystone distorted, and sometimes half second too late picture of the screen?
