Introduction

A few months ago I discovered fast.ai’s fastbook. It was released in August with an accompanying set of YouTube videos that serves as an introductory course in the topic of deep learning. The content is made very approachable by the authors Jeremy Howard, Rachel Thomas, and Sylvain Gugger.

I already had a cursory knowledge of AI having taken a class in college, but I wanted to dive deeper into the inner workings — ideally all the way to the metal. I purchased the book on Amazon in August, but I’ve been slow to go through it since some of the video lectures are rather long, and I learn far better by reading and doing versus listening.

This week I’ve decided to pick up where I left off. I had been thinking about starting a early today (why not), and one of the sections of the book/lecture specifically calls out the advantages of starting your own blog which is rather strange for a book about deep learning. Anyway, that section of the book pushed me over the edge, so now here we are.

To give a quick introduction of myself: My name is Jerred Shepherd. I’m a software engineer working at Amazon Web Services. I work on problems regarding distributed systems and scalability which has been really fun. I love computers and programming, and I often spend my free time working on side projects as a hobby.

Recent posts from blogs that I like

iTerm2 and AI hype overload

iTerm2 is the most popular terminal emulator for macOS machines. I've used it for years and it has gotten out of my way. It's great software. Recently an update was released that among other things includes new AI integration: AI Add AI-powered natural language command generation. Enter a prompt in the composer and select Edit > Engage Artificial Intelligence. You will need to provide an OpenAI API key since GPT costs money to use. A …

via Xe Iaso's blog May 21, 2024

Copyleft licenses are not “restrictive”

One may observe an axis, or a “spectrum”, along which free and open source software licenses can be organized, where one end is “permissive” and the other end is “copyleft”. It is important to acknowledge, however, that though copyleft can be found at the opposite end of an axis with respect to permissive, it is not synonymous with the linguistic antonym of permissive – that is, copyleft licenses are not “restrictive” by comparison with permissive licenses. Aside: Free software is not synonymous with copyle…

via Drew DeVault's blog April 19, 2024

How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

In 2017, we looked at how web bloat affects users with slow connections. Even in the U.S., many users didn't have broadband speeds, making much of the web difficult to use. It's still the case that many users don't have broadband speeds, both inside and outside of the U.S. and that much of the modern web isn't usable for people with slow internet, but the exponential increase in bandwidth (Nielsen suggests this is 50% per year for high-end connections) has outpaced web bloat for typical sites, making this l…

via danluu.com March 16, 2024
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