BirdCLEF is a bird-call recognition contest that runs yearly on Kaggle. (CLEF stands for Cross Language Education and Function.)

Last year, I participated in BirdCLEF because the domain was native Hawaiian birds, so even though I didn't know much of anything about audio ML, I had a leg up in …

2024-04-14

• My latest stupid idea is an underwater magnifying glass. Normal magnifying glasses don't work well underwater because seawater has a refractive index of 1.33 and common optical acrylics and glass are only ~1.50. There used to be a company in Belgium that sold an u/w magnifier …

2024-04-14

• The Sharkbots had a fantastic showing at the Hawaii regional, ranking 11th out of 42 teams and making it deep into the championship rounds. This is a really tremendous achievement for such a small, poorly funded school and I am working to try to maintain some of that energy …

Larry O'Brien sold his first program at age 16 and has been an influential voice in the software engineering community since 1989. He edited Computer Language, AI Expert, Software Development, and Game Developer magazines, founded the Jolt Programming Awards, and wrote the "Codewatch" columnist for SD Times from 2001-2015. Three …

We used Sly Flourish's Replacing 5E Luck With Inspiration in our last 2 sessions and everyone loved it after a few reminders to "you miss, but turn your luck die" (everyone has a D6 in front of them with 6 indicating 0 luck).

But this mechanic, unlike inspiration, happens a …

Jeffrey Hawkins is the CEO of Numenta, a company that has been pursuing machine intelligence since the early 2000s. Prior to that he was the founder of Palm Pilot, the most successful Personal Digital Assistant, the sale of which presumably has funded Numenta this part quarter-century.

Hawkins’ approach is iconoclastic …

The other day we were eating breakfast at the counter of the wonderful Liliha Bakery in Oahu and were chatting with a local guy who told us he was 84. Really nice conversation until the pancakes were almost gone when he said "Not to get into politics but..." pregnant pause …

The xRC Simulator or Autodesk's Synthesis allow First Robotic Competition teams to drive simulated robots around the season's field, allowing early practice with driving, viewlines, and team strategy.

While Synthesis seems to provide higher fidelity, xRC seems a little more user-friendly to me.

Installing on Windows is straightforward, but if …

Felt potentially communicative, might delete later.

Focus on data transformation and scenarios, not math, if you want to get into real-world Machine Learning. Yes, you’ll eventually have to learn some math, but the abstraction level within ML engineering has already moved on.

Learning the theory and math at the foundations of Machine Learning is like …