Hi Folks,
This introduction might be a bit longer than usual since I am trying to make sense of the tools we use on a daily basis. It might even sound like a personal essay on its own. So, please bear with me. :)
**emotion intensifies**
The week was hectic with most of the work spent on improving our new API on computer-vision. I had a few lapses of being In The Zone where one night I spent very long hours trying to figure out an algorithm (hint: eyeglass detection on the face without using Machine Learning). The next morning I was able to come up with a personal algorithm and nobody has noticed this (my serotonin levels were pumped up). Previously, I was using someone else's algorithm to do so, but it didn't quite work well for me. So out of frustration and this inability of not knowing much about the “black box” pushed me to the zone. I am glad that the algorithm is working better than the previous one. Nevertheless, sometimes you do break away from Analysis Paralysis.
Meanwhile, I am sad to announce that I am moving away from Roam for now because of its upcoming pricing (at this point it's free but soon will not be, which I will not be able to afford). Obsidian seems to be a promising alternative, which obviously has a free plan and works offline too. There are other things I’ve tried like TiddlyWiki and Athens.
Tools We Live By
This had me ponder about the tools we use, not just digital but something we have in our daily lives. Say, that coffee cup you have. How much do you think it has affected you? The shape, the volume, and its reach to you? I recently switched my cup from small to a relatively larger one and my caffeine intake seems to have bumped up a little. Just in case, you can imagine a water bottle. Where is it placed in your room? And has the size and placement affected your mindset on how much water you drink?
Another way to look at this is that you have a smartphone. It might not be wrong to say that you're reading this from your smartphone. How intertwined has it become to your life? Do you feel that without this tool your everyday life can't function quite well?
Similarly, the note-taking tool you use. Is it pen-and-paper or some digital tool you're using? Can you for once move away from them and live normally?
This chain of thoughts fits well with us humans. From hunter-gatherer to modern society, we have shaped our tools which in turn have shaped our lives. Sometimes, it even feels that when you are resonant with your tool it can become an extension of your body, like when both of you are "flowing"(more to that in the reading section).
Maybe that’s the symbiosis we are heading into in the long run.
Likewise, building a personal knowledge base has been an obsession (might not be the best word that reflects the emotion) for me. Throughout years, I have tried maintaining a pen-paper based journal. Coming from an engineering background, we used to take notes during our lecture hours. While doing projects, it was inevitable that we started using GitHub as a tool to manage the knowledge of our coding. As an individual, we're growing not just physically but with knowledge as well. It's hard to remember things that matter (and irrelevant ones aren't even in the picture).
As a learner, I used to gather information via Evernote, Google Keep, Google Doc, and what not? At one point, I was writing a Markdown-based journal in my private GitLab repository. I can even say that I used to maintain [[Today I Learned - TIL]] which didn’t work well for me in terms of “accessing” the archives. It’s tempting enough to store whatever we encounter, but it’s a difficult task to access them and re-assess in the future.
To be honest, I have been keeping my journal entries for years now in a single Google Doc. But discovering Roam (I appreciate my friend Bijay for letting me know of it) was like opening a new portal in my life where storing personal knowledge made much more sense than traditional hierarchical tools. I am not implying traditional tools aren't good. They have their own use-cases. But I feel we have become too dependent on tools that it's inevitable that at some point that dependency backfires. No wonder, Roam had me hooked in for a month and now I have to move away.
Finally, how do we become "mindful" about our tools? Or just keep on digesting whatever "revolutionary" comes in? Does “new” imply “better”? And if so what's the "proper" way to approach it? After all, tools are, well… “tools” and it depends on how effectively you use them, right?
Maybe it all boils down to one's own self and how one is willing to build upon his/her (damn, it’s hard to be unbiased even in pronouns :/) previous self. I am not sure if these questions make sense for you but then like anything else maybe they are futile.
Maybe all good things eventually come with a price. And that's perfectly fine.
~ Reading ~
The love that lays the swale in rows
Nicholas Carr | 29 min
An interesting read I'd say because as we humans keep on progressing forward, we tend to develop new tools and technologies to make our life easier. And in the process, sometimes we become too much resonant with them that those tools seem to be a part of our own life without which we couldn't function efficiently.
Sometimes, we are so much used to the tools that they feel like a part of us and true efficiency is achieved when our everyday mundane tasks are performed with such level of symbiosis. This can be seen in the poetry from [[Robert Frost]], how when one gets engulfed into the beauty of his/her work, every mundane task seem enthralling; a hypnotic state where we seem to perform with our max efficiency.
The abstract of this read is “We shape our tools, and tools shape us.”
The full note can be found in pieces and peaces.
You're probably using the wrong dictionary
James Somers | 15 min
There’s an amazing thing that happens when you start using the right dictionary.
I will never see “the” dictionary with the same perspective again. Modern dictionaries are very distilled without any essence of context and familiarity. Words should reflect the essence of familiarity in their meanings and contextual usages.
A dictionary is like any other tool and it depends on how effectively you're using it.
I think I will try to be more aware of the words in the future. Although I do look into various synonyms and antonyms, with contexts, whenever I have to search for a word.
This read might have triggered a new perspective of wordplay in me. That's fine!
On Old Photos of Oneself
The School Of Life | 5 min
We realize that we want to live inside photographs, not the life they purport to tell us about.
This flow of words moved me like The School Of Life does always. It's like watching a video from an old camcorder; you're just there imagining what it was like through the passage of time with love, sadness, happiness, fear, miseries; how we flowed. A reflection of one's self, of the world within, of the world that surrounds us.
:)
10 Tips for Research and a PhD
Sebastian Ruder | 10 min
It might be a cliche to have advice on Research and Ph.D. However, as a person who is struggling to give direction to his ever-increasing "indefinite" research interests, I feel good after reading this.
Play to your strengths might be the best tip for now.
Maybe a lack of self-confidence is one of my weaknesses.
Intern or visit a university or Collaborate.
In my life of working with different people and institutions, I have always learned new things that helped me with who I am today. Currently working at [[Docsumo]] I have been able to learn so much about Computer Vision that I feel this might be something I can invest in life. However, not sure if that works out eventually or not. :)
Write a blog.
Writing helps. It helps a lot.
Be proactive.
Research Paper: Language Models are Few-Shot Learners (GPT-3)
Building on to the previous newsletter, I tried reading the whole paper (had to make few passes, skipping few contents...well...you get it… how it is... :D).
Although I barely know anything about the ever-growing [[Transformer Model]] (one of Artificial Neural Network architectures, popular among Natural Language Processing tasks), there are few things I feel I can't "digest" well enough as an independent "tinkerer" (researcher?).
First, I am not that great of a "fan" about the increasing tradition of "Bigger, better". GPT-3 seems to underperform on tasks that require intuition-like reasoning, say natural language understanding tasks.
Second, I have a question that has been bugging me about larger models in general.
Is it simply compressing the training data?
Perhaps, that's the reason it fails at Natural questions?
Since it's trained on almost all the major internet sources, it "seems" (for anyone) to have "reasoning". But, in hindsight, it might just be memorizing its training data as well.
These things are getting out of hand with the philosophy of [[Brute Force]] (just throw in heavy data with heavy computations) training. When we evaluate these things, it's simply trying to remember the training data and interpolate accordingly. No wonder, GPT-3 “underperformed” in Natural Language Understanding tasks.
Imagine yourself [[Rote Learning]] (memorization technique) every text in your curriculum. In exams, you just have to "remember". I feel that these "bigger" models are doing similar things.
This is just my speculation from a very naive (lack-of-knowledge) perspective. I might have to dig deeper.
~ Listening | Watching ~
What is Flow Theory
5 min
Last week from Bijay's Things of Note #04, I got to know about this concept of "flow", a state of being In The Zone. Sometimes when you are so lost in the work you're doing, you lose track of time; your mind and body harmonize with each other.
I didn't know the term, but I guess I have had experienced a few of being In The Zone moments while doing coding or playing guitar or while solving a certain mathematical problem.
Spaced Repetition Systems - The Algorithm for Memorizing Anything
20 min
There's is a concept of forgetting curve which is not static. And I am sure you can relate to that chilling sensation when a certain thought is there at the tip of your tongue but you're not quite sure what that is. Perhaps, that information wasn't relevant?
One key point to understand is there's a certain dimension to space repetition systems that fit quite well. However, it's not always good to have such a system; it's hard to contextualize.
For example, when you're learning vocabulary from a tool like Magoosh, there's no contextual information. There isn't any way to connect the dots between those words. However, it's definitely better than just cramming every word in one single long pass.
The Art of Code - Dylan Beattie
Dylan Beattie | 1 hr
This was fun to watch.
The whole talk was a superposition of Programming and Art with a wide spectrum, mainly:
[[Conway's Game of Life]] (Cellular automata)
Imagine it as how bacteria grow and behave with each other but highly simplified in the algorithm (like a cell dies if it has no neighbours or overcrowded neighbours).
[[Mandelbrot Set]] (complex number system) and Fractals
If you zoom enough, you will see recurring patterns of the zoomed-out version (another simplified statement here)
[[Quine]]
A computer program that outputs its own source code.
This isn’t that “simple” as it sounds.
Godel, Escher, Bach is also introduced here. :)
Different obscure and Artistic Programming Language
[[Whitespace Language]] (the whole language is written is whitespaces)
[[sonic-pi]] (live music using coding)
In fact, the speaker Dylan Beattie is the creator of [[Rockstar Programming Language]] which he created as a Joke. The language is written in wordplay that reflects lyrics from 90s hard rock bands. But it gained a lot of popularity overnight that he started to improve it seriously. This can be seen in how he mentions he started studying compiler designs.
The Incredibly Strange, Sad Story Behind The World's Most Ambitious Demo Tape
Laz Rojas | VICE | 26 min
During the 1990s, Laz Rojas created a 4-hours long mysterious video where he played more than 100 characters all by himself. He meticulously portrayed characters ranging from women to men to lover to anything.
The videotape comprised of over 50 different cinematic scenes. All scripted, shot, edited by Laz himself.
I guess this is a next-level DIY project. What fascinated me was that kissing scene (as mentioned in the VICE video) which Laz created using a mirror and lipstick imprinted on it.
This is an inspiring story nevertheless. The ending of the documentary with that lovely hug is cute. :)
Sometimes you just need to retract all your steps, all your issues, and get inspired by people who are less-known for their art, their creativity, their passion. And it is about these humbling experiences of getting to know about the existence of such people.
~ Fascinating Things I Discovered ~
This Website will Self Destruct
This reminded me of Reddit's social experiment [[The Button]] where the "great" button is on a 60-seconds countdown before it freezes. However, the real fun begins when a user clicks it and the countdown resets. A user can click only once. There's a whole cult around this - all the philosophical debate and implication of the experiment.
Likewise, the website has a mechanism for anyone to send a letter to it. If it doesn't get anything within a day, as the creator says, it will be offline. While spending my 30 minutes (which I thought was insignificant initially), I started to notice that most of the notes were empathetic and caring. It was like a therapy session where people's love, happiness, sadness...everything could be seen.
It's beautiful how sometimes small things in life matter more than anything else. I am glad that I went through the notes people wrote on this website. :)
At the time of writing this newsletter (June 6th, 2020), the website is still alive.
~ Music | Poetry ~
The Local Train: Choo Lo
I've been listening to this band again after a long time.
This song is close to my heart. ❤️
Ma Badal Haru Ma Kaid Chu: Kavi G
I am trapped among the clouds. :)
~ Ending Thoughts ~
I want to end with a little piece of a quote from George Mallory about climbing Mt. Everest:
People ask me, 'What is the use of climbing Mount Everest?' and my answer must at once be, 'It is of no use.'There is not the slightest prospect of any gain whatsoever. Oh, we may learn a little about the behaviour of the human body at high altitudes, and possibly medical men may turn our observation to some account for the purposes of aviation. But otherwise nothing will come of it. We shall not bring back a single bit of gold or silver, not a gem, nor any coal or iron... If you cannot understand that there is something in man which responds to the challenge of this mountain and goes out to meet it, that the struggle is the struggle of life itself upward and forever upward, then you won't see why we go. What we get from this adventure is just sheer joy. And joy is, after all, the end of life. We do not live to eat and make money. We eat and make money to be able to live. That is what life means and what life is for.
I guess that’s all for now.
Do share the newsletter to your loved or “meaningful” living entities (cats and dogs included…maybe cactus will also do fine) if you want to.
Cheers,
Nish