Tag: misc
Sat 25 October 2025
This week I had the pleasure of chatting with Matt Turck from the MAD Podcast, and it was a fun one! We talked trends in AI, RL and why it unlocks Agents, scaling and so much more.
You can find the episode on your podcast app of choice, or on YouTube:
For the curious, some links to what we talked about, and further reading:
Sun 23 August 2020
Ka-Ping Yee's 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). ...
Tue 30 June 2020
Recently, I was once again looking for a note taking solution. Over time, I had used many: Evernote, a markdown based one I wrote myself, Joplin. For one reason or another, I had stopped using each of them in turn.
My requirements were simple:
And the most important: Does it spark joy?
The best note-taking solution is of ...
Sat 02 May 2020
I'm sometimes asked if I'm aware of any open-source implementations of MuZero. In addition to the official pseudocode, a variety of researchers have made their own implementations and shared them online.
I have not checked these for correctness or completeness, but I still believe that you may find them useful. In no particular order:
If you know any others, please let me know and I'll add them!
If you want to replicate MuZero or try other ...
Thu 05 December 2019
I just installed CUDA on my Ubuntu 19.10 desktop, and it was a pretty quick process, if non-obivous.
apt install nvidia-cuda-toolkitdpkg -i. (I couldn't find it in the official Ubuntu repo, let me know if it is there)XLA_FLAGS=--xla_gpu_cuda_data_dir=/usr/lib/cuda/ so JAX can find the installed libraries.Tue 26 November 2019
Since upgrading to Ubuntu 19.10, I've had the issue that Ubuntu would just get stuck before or after the login screen.
After some searching I found the recommendation to remove quiet splash from the grub options, and indeed that fixes the issue for me!
Specifically, at the stuck login screen, change to a terminal by pressing e.g. ctrl+alt+f4, login, then run sudo nano /etc/default/grub to edit the configuration for grub (the bootloader). Find the line that says
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"
and change it to
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=""
save the file, then run `sudo ...
Fri 04 October 2019
This is more of an archival post for myself since part of the documentation for isostick (a USB stick that can emulate optical drives) is down and the project does not seem maintained any more.
Since isostick only supports FAT32 filesystems, ISOs larger than 4 GB need to be split up into multiple parts.
Here's the explanation for how to do this from the now offline isostick forum:
The isostick can only read files from FAT32 partitions. Unfortunately, FAT32 has a maximum file size of 4GB. To overcome this, isostick can read ISO files which are ...
Sun 14 April 2019
If you speak German but prefer using an English keyboard layout for programming (dvorak in my case), then you will frequently face the issue of how to conveniently enter Umlaute.
Luckily, there's an easy solution with xmodmap, just add the below to your .Xmodamp config:
clear mod1 keycode 108 = Mode_switch add mod1 = Alt_L keysym a = a A adiaeresis Adiaeresis keysym o = o O odiaeresis Odiaeresis keysym u = u U udiaeresis Udiaeresis keysym s = s S ssharp
Where 108 is the keycode returned by xev for your Alt key.
Mon 18 February 2019
Don't want to waste prime keyboard real estate on a key you never use?
First, find out the keycode of your Caps Lock key: run xev, repeatedly press Caps Lock, note the keycode you see in the logs.
Next, create or append to the .Xmodmap file in your home directory:
clear Lock keycode 66 = Tab
Where you replace 66 with whichever keycode you saw in the output of xev.
Finally, load the map: xmodmap .Xmodmap.
You can of course replace it with any other key as well, not just tab.
Mon 30 January 2017
I recently bought a new laptop because my trusty old Thinkpad (x230) finally got a bit too old for my taste (apart from the battery it still works perfectly though!).
After a lot of searching around and gnashing of teeth - how can current laptops be barely faster than my 4 year old Thinkpad?! And what do you mean, the laptop comes with at most 16 GB of RAM and I can't even upgrade it?!
Finally, I settled on the Alienware 13.
As a gaming laptop, it has a quad core i7 - 7th gen Kaby Lake ...