Code Notelets

The good Recently, the Photos app on my Android phone automatically curated some of my photos into a "highlights" album for me. I thought this was a fantastic idea. I love this use of AI - it does something quickly and easily that would otherwise take a lot of human time.  The only downside was that the AI included a close-up pic I'd taken of a spot on the skin behind my husband's ear so he could see it. Now, if this AI had instead been for a self-driving car, then too bad, we likely would've had a terrible wreck at this point - endangering myself, any passengers, and other drivers on the road. But since this application of AI for photo selection did not have any life-threatening consequences, I was all for it. The bad I've said before, and I'll say it again, that AI as it currently stands should not be used for self-driving purposes and I have explained clearly why. Indeed, I believe that AI should not be used for any purpose that may have life-threaten...

I used to think neural networks were a reasonably good technology, until I decided to try setting up a neural network myself. After some experimentation with neural networks, I dramatically reversed my stance. I now believe neural networks should not be in charge of any decisions such that could have life-or-death impact. Find out why below. Disclosure: These are my personal thoughts about neural networks based on my limited experience with them. I do not claim to be an expert in neural networks. First I'm going to propose a definition for a neural network: An interpolation system whose behavior becomes undefined when extrapolating beyond its training data. In simple language, "undefined" may be thought of as "random by human standards". OK, how did this definition come about? It all started when I desired to make a system for classifying fonts a year or two ago. Even Google Fonts had at the time very few parameters for manually finding suitable fonts. For pick...

These are a collection of favorite tutorials I've read relating to algorithms. These mostly use pseudocode and are not specific to a particular language. Some may have examples in a particular language, but rest assured the main explanation of the algorithm is given in a way where no particular language is needed. I've collected these here as a reference guide in case I ever need to come back to them. I hope they might be useful for someone else too. Manacher's Algorithm - used for finding the longest palindromic string in a sequence. Bitwise comparisons - this article is about Lisp operators, but don't let that stop you! The bitwise comparison section has one of the best and most concise explanations I've seen. If you don't understand bitwise comparisons (in any language), it will all become clear after you read the explanation, even if you don't know Lisp. Faces of Fibonacci  - An absolutely superb explanation of the "How Many Ways to do x?...

Let's suppose you're making changes to your code in emacs and... now your code indentation is all out of whack. It would be too laborious to re-do the indentation manually. Rest assured, you can easily have the whole file automatically re-indented in emacs, as described in a StackExchange question (see reference 1).  The command for this is first to select the entire file, then to tell it to re-indent the region, as follows: Select the entire file: ctrl-x h Re-do the auto-indentation: alt-x indent-region The correct Emacs terminology is M-x indent-region, but I've called it alt-x here because that's the exact keys I would press on a PC keyboard. Cited sources: 1. Can I have emacs automatically indent my whole code after it is all written?   Stack Exchange.

Hi! I'm Vera. A long time ago, I took computer science courses at university. I used my coding skills occasionally when I was working as a scientist, but it wasn't a big focus at all of the work I was doing. Fast forward many years from there, and I installed Linux on my computer. My computer ran so much faster and lighter that I could get a lot more done in less time. Woohoo! Fast forward another year, and I decided that running Linux without doing any scripting or programming was a bit like owning a sports car and driving it only to the supermarket and back. So, I decided to (re)-learn some programming. There were good and bad points this: good, that I had learned programming when younger. Bad, that enough time had passed that I had forgotten a lot of what I'd learned. On a positive note, this freed me up to not tie me to a particular language. I'd have to learn a full language from scratch anyway, so why not let it be a language that would work for the p...