Recently I was curious about the amount of CO2 present while sleeping and working; I ended up buying an [cached]Aranet4 monitor. It's great to see the reading live, but I would also like to compare trends over time. The Aranet4 itself can only store a maximum of 7 days of data, so for longer term analysis I need to periodically export the data.
This is where a Raspberry Pi comes in handy! First, install the necessary packages:
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Use bluetoothctl to pair the Aranet4:
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The reason our childhood years seemed to pass so much more slowly than our adulthood is that they were filled with novelty and excitement, memorable first experiences: learning to ride a bike, entering a new school, making new friends.
Events, experiences, things are memorable not by some inherent quality, but rather become memorable by virtue of being different from our everyday life. What matters is the magnitude, not the sign: both the best and the worst times in your life will stick out in your memory.
Memorable experiences come in all sizes: cooking a new dish, meeting up with old …
If you've primarily used high level languages like Python, you may not be used to explicitly thinking about the ownership or representation of your values in memory.1 In system languages like C++ or Rust, we have direct control over these aspects, and are able to use the type system to explicitly represent when a function takes ownership of a value, vs when it only takes a (temporary) reference.2
First, different types of ownership, in order of preference:
T t. A normal owned value of type T, uniqlue owned. If declared as a variable it is stored on the …No matter how smart, there's a limit to how much you can keep in mind at once before you start forgetting something. In the context of software engineering, a common term for this is complexity budget: the maximum complexity of a system you can understand at once.
Just as fitting an entire task into the cache of your CPU is orders of magnitude faster than paging in from RAM (or worse, disk!), fitting the entire problem you are working on into your brain can make you many times more productive.
Every line of code you write, every feature you add …
I've been enjoying [cached]A Map that Reflects the Territory, a collection of the best LessWrong essays from 2018. While in general the essays are thought provoking and interesting, one set of essays gave me pause: [cached]Hyperbolic Growth and related chapters on fast vs slow takeoff.
The discussion repeats tropes that are common in the rationalist and futurist community, describing how economic and technological [cached]growth have been accelerating and suggesting that they will soon increase so quickly that we will be unable to follow:
However, we have to be careful not to mix up …
Last week, I had a chance to chat with [cached]Ben Popper and [cached]Cassidy Williams about MuZero and AI on the [cached]Stack Overflow podcast.
I had a lot of fun, thanks to Ben and Cassidy for being such great hosts!
To celebrate the publication of our MuZero paper in [cached]Nature ([cached]full-text), I've written a high level description of the MuZero algorithm. My focus here is to give you an intuitive understanding and general overview of the algorithm; for the full details please read the paper. Please also see our [cached]official DeepMind blog post, it has great animated versions of the figures!
MuZero is a very exciting step forward - it requires no special knowledge of game rules or environment dynamics, instead learning a model of the environment for itself and using this model to plan. Even though it …
I gave a detailed talk about MuZero at ICAPS 2020, at the workshop "Bridging the Gap Between AI Planning and Reinforcement Learning".
In addition to giving an overview of the algorithm in general, I also went into more detail about reanalyse - the technique that allows MuZero to use the model based search to repeatedly learn more from the same episode data.
I hope you find the talk useful! I've also uploaded my slides for easy reference.
Ka-Ping Yee's [cached]blog post about election methods and how to visualize them has long been one of my favourites. As always, a well chosen diagram or picture is much easier to understand than a verbose description, and can make corner cases directly leap into our face. The human visual system is a powerful pattern detector, we should make use of it whenever we can!
Inspired by Yee's blog post, I made an interactive simulator to allow you to explore the four main voting systems directly in your browser: Plurality (aka first past the post), Approval, Borda and Instant-runoff (Hare …
I've written and been paid to write code in a wide variety of languages - functional and imperative, statically and dynamically typed, verbose and concise. Over time, I came to appreciate the benefits of certain language features.
The one I want to talk about today is static typing. My programs in statically typed languages seem to be systematically more likely to work correctly on the first try, more robust against bugs introduced by refactoring or adding new features, and easier to reason about. In fact, the benefits are so large that I now use pytype even for Python scripts with just …
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