I’ve found spatial vector algebra pretty confusing, as commonly found in most physics engines. So I wanted to derive a few properties here for my own sanity. Spatial vector algebra combines linear and angular parts of motions, forces, and transformations into 6D spatial vectors (see Rigid Body Dynamics Algorithms by...

I’ve wanted to add a 3DMM of my face on this blog for a while. I wanted it to track mouse movement and be a drop-in placement for the logo. So I finally tried it out, but found it to be too creepy to put on the front page. Instead,...

A cross country ski trip I wanted to take in Norway got cancelled due to COVID. So I figured I would go bike camping in Maine, socially distancing and getting a good break from the city. I didn’t have all the gear I would want, but after watching a few...

La voile aux Glenans. Paris Coz Castel - La Base de Paimpol à St Malo - en deux fois Retour à Paimpol Il ne fait jamais trop chaud en mer. Bon vent et bon beurre!

Here are some boxes drawn with html canvas. Fiddle with the settings!

UPDATE (02/23/2020)! The first five (5) people to email me at baruch [at] tabanpour [dot] info will have the opportunity to share ramen with me at Ramen Ishida. I will pay for one bowl of ramen :D. Limited time offer! I have wanted to start a ramen log for a...

Here are some snags I found when running Tensorflow models on Docker that can increase memory usage up to ~7x and increase inference time up to ~30x running on CPU. 1. CPU issues When running tensorflow in docker, tensorflow thinks that it owns all the resources on the machine that...

What is the No Free Lunch Theorem? The No Free Lunch Theorem was posited by David Wolpert and William Macready, which first appeared in the paper “No Free Lunch Theorems of Optimization” in 1997. The abstract says: “for any algorithm, any elevated performance over one class of problems is offset...

Extending context managers to collections of dictionaries and lists: What is a context manager? A context manager is what allows you to use the with statement in Python. For example if you wanted to write to a file, you could do this: f = open('test.txt', 'w') f.write('hey!') f.close() assert f.closed...

Staring at displays is easier on the eyes with apps like f.lux and iris, which apply color filters to our displays to reduce the amount of blue light our eyes consume. If your screen has mostly white colors and you use f.lux, the display is still sometimes too bright. This...

In the last yarlp blog post, I ran Double Deep Q-Learning on Atari, which took around 1-1.5 days to train per Atari environment for 40M frames. I wanted to implement something faster, namely A2C (Advantage Actor Critic). It’s related to A3C by Mnih et al, 2016, without the asynchronous part....

I wanted to re-create the latest Deep Q-Learning results on Atari, a huge milestone for AI Research in the past few years. Apart from the official code in Lua, I found several Python implementations on github, notably this one from OpenAI or this one among many others. Few Python implementations...

There are a lot of RL packages out there, tensorforce, rllab, openai-lab, baselines, and the list goes on. It’s hard to know however, how any of those implementations stack up to published state-of-the-art results. There are several reasons, some are: The standard RL tasks (Mujoco & Atari) are extremely sensitive...

I’ve been wanting to go cross-country skiing since my dreams were shattered last winter in Stockholm (X-country ice-skating instead of skiing). So we made it happen in Montana at the Izaak Walton Inn. If you do want to visit Montana or Glacier National Park in the winter, I highly recommend...

OS X 10.12.6 was working great for me…until I wanted to run tensorflow on GPU. OS X 10.13 didn’t help. Unfortunately tensorflow isn’t Mac friendly, because “As of version 1.2, TensorFlow no longer provides GPU support on Mac OS X.”. I don’t even understand what that means since you can...

After building a desktop a few months ago, I left it running on Linux. It wasn’t all that bad, as long as I didn’t need to use any applications with a real GUI 😂. This left me in a state of dismay, not using my new build as much as...

There are a lot of packages out there for deep Reinforcement Learning (RL), and so it became obvious to me that there needed to be yet another implementation! I’m calling it yarlp, Yet Another Reinforcement Learning Package! I’m developing it mostly for educational purposes. Here are several great implementations that...

A two week trip to Stockholm, Chamonix, and Budapest. Where I saught snow, I found ice, and where I saught ice, I found snow. But when I wanted goulash and hot baths, I found them in Budapest. Stockholm At least the monarch in Sweden is illegitimate. Trumpsplaining wasn’t pleasant. Gotta...

I finally decided to build a computer, after using the same macbook pro for 8 years (although upgrading the RAM and SSD made it a bit easier to bare)! I highly recommend building your own computer if you don’t like spending too much money on stuff (like AWS or expensive...

Check out this 2D race car learning to drive through a track by using On-Policy Monte Carlo control. The car doesn’t know anything about the track; it only sees its current location, velocity, and rewards it gets while driving. The car can choose to change it’s velocity by 1 unit...

Chat with climatechangebot here! I’ve been concerned about climate change for a while now. My girlfriend and I finally found a way to share that concern with everyone else on this planet! It’s called climatechangebot, the first ever climate change chat bot. If you’re ever feeling concerned about climate change,...

Peruvian Andes Huaraz Laguna Churup Laguna Ahuac Laguna 69 Vallunaraju Took a 6-day mountaineering course with Skyline Adventures; thank you for teaching us first and foremost an awesome mountain mentality!

Do you need a non-negative square matrix converted to a doubly stochastic matrix? That is, you want all rows and columns to sum to one? Well here’s a package just for that! I had the function lying around for a project I was working on at Columbia, and I thought...

We’ve all heard people say, “oh you should be more optimistic!”. But honestly, besides having a prettier outlook on life, what’s the point? Doesn’t optimism set us up for disappointment anyways? Why even bother arguing for or against optimism? Why even bother writing a blog post? … Maybe I’m getting...

1. Tokyo 2. Ueda 3. Nagano 4. Matsumoto 5. Kamikochi 6. Shirahone 7. Yakedake 8. Takayama 9. Kyoto 10. Nara 11. Kagoshima 12. Zamami Seriously healthy dogs: Shiro - dog statue that matches Maririn on Zamami. Found at the port. Shiro was a famous dog that swam from Aka to...

After a 3 week wonderful sejour in SF, I decided to go to Mexico City with my girlfriend for 4 days. I wanted to share my experience about hiking on the outskirts of the city, since it was pretty interesting. Also, I have some time to write this post since...