Tea

Tea has become my favorite beverage, bar none.

With flavors stretching from light and sweet white and yellow teas all the way to dark and earthy pu-erh, no other drink can match its variety of flavor.

Best enjoyed freshly brewed from whole leaves in a small pot, you need very little to start drinking great tea.

1. Some hot water, from a kettle or pot, doesn't matter.
2. A tea pot or infuser with lots of space for your tea to expand, see mine as an example:
3. Loose leaf tea!

Some of my favorite tea includes:

• [cached]Yunnan Dragon Pearl Black Tea …

Work Rules!

Work Rules! is the title of a great book by Laszlo Bock, SVP of People Operations at Google.

It's a pretty accurate portrait of life at Google (at least from what I've seen over the last three years), and at the same time it is a great guidebook for companies that haven't yet come as far along the path of employee empowerment.

If you are in any way involved with work - be it employer or employee - this is a must read, with lots of practical advice on how to improve your organization (and your life!). It may also give you …

WaniKani on Anki

[cached]WaniKani has long been my favorite way of studying Kanji, but I've always disliked the need to type in every single reading and meaning. At 300 reviews a day that's a lot of typing!

Today I finally had enough. First I considered making a user script for WaniKani to make it work a bit more like Anki (where you don't type the answer at all, you simply indicate how well you knew it with one tap). But then I realized that I might as well just use Anki directly.

I quickly found [cached]wanikanitoanki.com, which is great to …

Usability Testing on 10 Cents a Day

I just read Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think and while I really liked the whole book, what especially stuck out was the chapter on usability testing as often as possible.

It doesn't need to be an expensive or time intensive process - just grab 3 people for 45 minutes each, pay them 50$, show them your website or app and ask them to use it while thinking aloud. Maybe give them a few simples tasks to do.

Repeat this process regularly - say once a month - and you should be able to catch a significant fraction of the usability problems on …

Standing Automation

I've had a standing desk at work for a long time, but I've always felt that I wasn't using it enough, that I still spent most of my timing sitting.

This week I finally decided to do something about it.

I bought a small sonar sensor (LV-MaxSonar-EZ1), hooked it up to an Arduino and added a little Python script to sample the sensor once a minute.

The sonar is mounted to my table and measures the distance to the floor, and with ~3 cm accuracy it's very easy to distinguish whether I'm sitting or standing.

Since the Sonar happily runs …

Big Problems

After having been sidetracked by AlphaGo for nearly a year, I finally had some solid thinking time for myself today. Mostly inspired by an [cached]interview with Yanis Varoufakis and a remark he made about why we need basic income, I started thinking about the big problems our world has and what I can do about them. These are from my perspective as a privileged first world citizen in the 1%, my aim is to identify the steps that are necessary to bring us to the next level as a species.

As an example - there are two ways you can …

Distractions

Reddit, Hacker News, Tumblr, Twitter, Imgur, Netflix, YouTube. The onslaught of pseudo information and conversation is relentless, it's easy to get lost in the comments. Feeling as if you are learning a something new all the time, a little gem in every post.

Somewhere along the way our natural curiosity and joy of learning has been hijacked and we waste away our lives reading and responding to useless chatter that seems useful and educating.

Every spare moment is filled by a quick glance to our smartphones, no time for thought and introspection left at all. Yes, that one post was …

AlphaGo - Lee Se-dol

After 5 long and exciting games AlphaGo finally managed to win 4:1 against the legendary Lee Se-dol, the first time in history a computer program managed to defeat a 9 dan professional player in an even match. And not just any 9 dan player, probably the best player of the decade. It was even awarded an honorary rank of 9 dan professional itself!

Obviously we are all extremely proud of this achievement, you can find out more about the details in our Nature paper. Most importantly, we still used roughly the same amount of hardware! This was a true …

Mastering the Game of Go with Deep Neural Networks and Tree Search

Today we published our [cached]paper on beating the human state of the art in Go, the only major board game where humans (or at least top professionals) could still beat computers. No more. Our program AlphaGo achieved a 99% winning rate against the strongest existing Go programs, and defeated the human European champion by 5 games to 0.

(That's me playing at 0:10)

The first major breakthrough in computer Go - after remaining at weak amateur level for decades - came with the advent of [cached]Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) around 2007, massively improving playing strength. Still, Go programs …

Nutrition Information

Recently, I ran across a very useful website: [cached]Examine.com. They collect and summarize studies about many common nutrients and supplements. If you were wondering whether to take Vitamin D or what to think about creatine, this is the website to check.