Work hard, be kind and amazing things will happen. - Conan O'Brien
Another year is coming to an end. What amazing year. This is the first year end video where I actually have videos taken during the year I want to include. This technology thing is crazy!
You get beautiful designs when you build simple things that compose correctly. - Chris Lattner I’ve been ramping on on writing software for AI, and Python is the language of AI. So I thought to myself, could I write a Cribbage Engine in Python, wrap it in Gymnasium and then use Stable Baselines to build an RL agent that could play cribbage well through re-enforced learning. Welp, I’m not there yet, because I built the cribbage engine and started doing some statistical analysis and have gone done the rabbit whole of programmatic cribbage and statistical regression. Cribbage holds a special place in my heart. When I first met Mrs.Chaos somehow the topic of cribbage came up and we learned that both of us had played a lot of cribbage. It is not a popular card game. She beat me at cribbage... a lot. So, all that time ago, being the nerd I was (am?) I wrote a little engine in JavaScript where you put in the six cards in your hand and it would do a very basic calculation to tell what to d...
When you get good at fixing things, you worry less about breaking them. - Alex Lindsay It is the 1980s. I am in grade school. Math consists of memorizing multiplication tables and performing long division. I wonder why I am asked to do this. I have a calculator. My watch is a calculator. It stores up to twenty phone numbers. The teacher informs me this is important because I cannot always depend on having a calculator with me. Yet, even in the 1980s, I already do. It is the 2020s. Everyone carries a far more advanced calculator in their pocket, embedded within a phone. The teacher was wrong. It is the 1990s. I am in high school. I have a TI-81 graphing calculator, though to me, it is not for graphing. It is for programming. In Pre-Calculus, I write a program that, given three points, determines the equation of the circle that passes through them. I show my teacher. She tells me using it on tests and homework is cheating. I write many more programs. I show her none of them. The nex...
Discrimination is no longer about harming people who are different, it is about withholding help. - Mahzarin Banagi How would you like more work and responsibility for the same pay? The basic concept behind this is called the "dry promotion" and most employees have gone through the experience of this. Unofficially, this naturally happens in every job, because the reward for a task well done is another more difficult task. If an employee is talented at their job and has a good work ethic, responsibilities will grow over time because they will volunteer for them and the company will trust them enough to give them more. As a manager, I would avoid giving a dry promotion at all costs. The deal you are making with an employee is that in lieu of compensating them what they are worth, you are going to titularly designate they ARE worth a higher value and make them more marketable to find a different organization that is willing to compensate them at that rate. You should expect ...