Index | Archive | Tags | Atom Feed | RSS Feed

Reading The Intelligent Investor

My quest of figuring out how to sensible invest my money continues with [cached]The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham. Regarded as a fundamental work by many, I decided I should read it sooner than later.

It presents Graham's philosophy of [cached]value investing, along with comments from a modern point of view. It became clear very quickly that picking stocks according to these principles is actually quite a bit of work, more than I'm willing to do. Nevertheless, there are a few important principles that hold true for any kind of investment activity.

Portfolio Policy: The Defensive Investor

Start …

Reading Fooled by Randomness

To make more of the books I've read and remember them better, I've started to keep notes while reading. I mostly follow the [cached]procedure outlined on Farnam Street, but realized that realized that publicly posting my notes forces me to put a bit more thought into them. So here we go!

The main point of the book is that we humans are incredibly bad at dealing with probability, our only hope is to acknowledge our weakness and work around it. According to Taleb, the core generator of these ideas:

We favor the visible, the embedded, the personal, the narrated …

Beemind your Papers

If you've seen my post on motivation hacking then you know that I'm using Beeminder to track a wide variety of things. I try everything I can to automate the tracking - import learning data directly from Duolingo, have a custom script poll WaniKani for my current level, track how long I practice piano by reading midi output over USB, integrating with Runkeeper to track how often I run, etc.

Now I've also found a good way to track the papers I read: Every paper I'm interested in I add to [cached]Mendeley. Then once I've actually read it I can …

Immortality is already here, it's just unevenly distributed

Often we are told to "pursue what you really want, not just what pays the bills" by pithy blog posts, filled with thoughtful quotes from successful people. We are encouraged to follow our dreams, to stop doing things that don't bring us enjoyment. After all, we all only have a finite amount of time, 24 hours a day, a few paltry decades, maybe close to a century if we are lucky.

But what if this advice is terribly wrong? What if doing some more of that horribly boring work could get you disproportionately more time, if you could just buy …

Learning Machine Learning

Fortunately, it is getting easier and easier to get into machine learning. Just today, there was a post on HackerNews about a [cached]JavaScript neural network library. Can't get much easier than this:

var net = new brain.NeuralNetwork();

net.train([{input: [0, 0], output: [0]},
           {input: [0, 1], output: [1]},
           {input: [1, 0], output: [1]},
           {input: [1, 1], output: [0]}]);

var output = net.run([1, 0]);  // [0.987]

There's more and more [cached]free online courses, and even a [cached]good introduction to Deep Learning.

I've also come across a very neat …

Playing Games with AI

[cached]Playing Atari with Deep Reinforcement Learning is certainly the most catchy paper I've read in years. But before I start talking about the paper, you should definitely watch this video from it's presentation:

The basic idea is very simple - to train and evaluate the AI, let it play a variety of computer games. This has several advantages:

Training and Evaluation can happen faster than real time
Using several very different games can prevent over-fitting
Games are usually created to be challenging for humans, thus containing an implicit requirement for intelligence.

DeepMind achieves this by letting it's Deep Reinforcement Learning …

Towards General Artificial Intelligence

I you haven't slept under a rock for the past months you've surely heard of Google's acquisition of DeepMind, an AI company that is still quite young. For general facts about them I'll just refer you to Wikipedia or the usual news articles, but much more interestingly they've actually published quite a few papers about their methodology:

Motivation Hacking

After [cached]Anna recommended that I read [cached]The Motivation Hacker, I went down the rabbit hole. I had already discovered [cached]Beeminder the day before, and now I was truly motivated to set myself up with some goals.

You can see them on my public [cached]goal page, but for now they are primarily about keeping up my language studies, spending a bit more time on piano and making sure I go for a run regularly. I'm not sure if I actually care about the money betting features, but just seeing the steady line of past effort is quite …

Halfway There

Just recently, I passed an important milestone for my Japanese: 1000 Kanji learned. That's half the way to the official 2000 you supposedly need to read everyday newspapers, as well as other normal texts.

And indeed I have started to read Manga, Naruto and Death Note for now. It is still quite difficult to read, often I don't know what a sentence is supposed to mean, but luckily English translations are readily available on the Internet (I mostly use mangafox).

I've also built some [cached]dynamic grammar flashcards for Anki, though I have yet to use them. Oh the akrasia …

On Learning Languages

I've made an attempt at summarizing everything I know about learning languages into one page, also adding useful resources and books. It's both a personal reference and in the hopes that it will be useful to somebody else - it will certainly be nice to have when making recommendations to friends, be able to point them at a single resource.

Feel free to message me if I left out some essential book or grammar guide, I'll be happy to include them and use them myself!