Notes

I am one of those people who function better by writing things down. One day, I realized that most of my notes don’t have to be private, so here they are - my second brain. Be warned that, if you stumble upon something here that doesn’t make sense to you, it isn’t meant to!

Ted Talk - How to Achieve Your Most Ambitious Goals

I learnt a possibly powerful new idea in the following Ted Talk today. The speaker pitched that all you need to do to achieve big goals is break them down into small chunks and doing them one by one. Another way I’ve seen this idea before goes like this: how do you eat an elephant? One piece at a time. ...

Expectations from an E6-level Facebook interview

Scope of role. Work at the level of a 2-pizza team. Cross function influence. Collaboration > influence other team. Conflict resolution. Empathy - to understand other side of story. Empathy. Doing it the right way vs doing fast. Motivation. What do you do when you are blocked. Example where the other side won. What mistakes did you make? And, more importantly, what did you learn from them? How do you explain problems to the audience the way they can consume? 2 coding, 1 design, 1 behavioral. ...

Setup blog and email on custom domain for (almost) free

The number of ways you can setup a website/blog such as this can be overwhelming these days. In this post, I will talk about my requirements from my setup and an overview of how I solved them. Requirements I always wanted a small space for myself on the internet and I tried Blogger, WordPress and Twitter at various times to get there. (In fact, I once wrote about how I preferred WordPress to Blogger and would stick with it for long!) Following are some of the factors that are important to me. ...

First car

I bought my first car last month, on June 15th to be precise! It’s a Subaru Outback Premium 2020, fully loaded, in green metallic color. I spent little time on research this time. I decided to go with Subaru early on because of its insistence on safety before everything else. I initially wanted to buy a used car so as to save on depreciation costs. But when I learnt that there wasn’t a substantial difference between used and new cars for Subaru, I was left to decide between Outback, Forester and Crosstrek. ...

Today I learned

Fastai: Dense blocks use more memory but are a good choice for lower resolution images. In CNNs, you usually double the number of channels whenever you do stride 2. Otherwise, with stride 1, you keep the number of channels the same. (I say usually because I don’t know if this is a universal recommendation.)

Today I learned

Fastai: Res-blocks decrease the bumpiness of the loss landscape, thereby helping in improving results.

Today I learned

Fastai: Unets are useful when the size of your outputs is similar to that of the input. So, any kind of generative modeling such as segmentation or decrappification. They don’t make sense for classification problems. Unets have a downsampling and upsampling path. These parts are also called encoder and decoder respectively. A layer in a neural network is always an affine function, such as a matrix multiplication, followed by a non-linearity, such as a relu.

Change user information for Git commits

Run the following to change Git user information globally: git config --global user.name "Ketan Vijayvargiya" git config --global user.email "[email protected]" To change on a repository level, simply omit the --global flag.

Today I learned

On the AI/Fastai front: If x is a torch.Tensor and x.shape is torch.Size([4, 3, 5]), it means x contains 4 2D matrices with 3 rows and 5 columns. Also, x is 3D matrix, the technical term for which would be a rank-3 tensor. When images are represented using PyTorch tensors, the first dimension corresponds to the number of channels in it. (For e.g., an RGB image will contain 3 channels and, therefore, the first element in the tensor shape will be 3.) Matplotlib’s imshow function expects number of channels at the end and you can modify a tensor to that by applying the permute function.

Effectiveness vs efficiency

The following Youtube video reminded me to focus on the more important things in life. Lately, I’ve been worrying too much about non-essential things. I should instead constantly remind myself of what’s essential and reorient my priorities towards that. The video also mentioned how 20% effort leads to 80% result. And often times, I can offload the remaining 20% results to someone else (for some work-related projects) or not do them at all (in personal projects). So, it’d be a good idea to try and identify where to put the first 20% effort in any project. In other words, be effective before efficient.