how-to-build-your-own-neural-network-from-scratch-in-python-68998a08e4f6

Neural Networks are made of 5 things: input, hidden layers, output, weights and biases (w + b), and activation function. We update w+b according to the loss, or badness, of the model.

Succinct.

I’ve been asked to summarize an article every day in under 200 characters or less, every day, for the next two months. I’ll be posting the article and summary in coming posts.

The Art of the Ediit

A big problem with this process has been submitting quality content, consistently. Editing is important. Also, I haven’t done it.

I think editing isn’t so much an art as just doing it. Reading stuff a bunch of times is boring, but you need it to get a deep perspective on a topic.

This is the last daily blog post for now. I still plan to write everyday but will now only publish on Sundays.

Looking forward to next Sunday.

Christof

This afternoon I talked with a friend of mine who is a teacher. My friend told me about a student of his named Christof. Christof doesn’t normally participate in class, but this week he’s been noticeably active and leading some of the class discussions in a positive way.

Christof also wrestles. This Friday afternoon, my friend was in the teacher’s lounge and saw a fellow teacher had on a wrestling hoodie. He asked the teacher if he knew Christof and he said he was Christof’s direct coach. My friend went on to say how Christof has had an amazing week in class and wanted to complement the coach. The coach informed my friend that Christof had a terrible few weeks in wrestling having low stanima and “quitting too early in matches”. However, this week, he conditioned particularly hard, won his match, and won the whole tournament.

Let’s go Christof!

This story struck me as an important reminder of high school athletics. I spent a disportitante amount of my time in meaningless, time intensive, energy consuming sports and regretted it for the majority of my college career. The TL:DR is that the don’t provide the right ratio of output leverage for time/energy input. However, Christof’s story reminds me of just how important they are and how they can translate to success.

In particular I think they’re in stark contrast to treating high school like a “day job” as Paul Graham recommends (http://www.paulgraham.com/hs.html) . I think startups can teach the things sports get across, but its tough. and I’m not sure where the rub is.

Finish Strong

Since winter break I’ve been reflecting on how this winter is my last quarter at Northwestern. That’s shocking on a lot of levels but the thing that scares me is how little I feel I’ve tapped into the resources available.

This is half blog post, half public promise, but I want to make acommitment to finish my time strong. I want to make and complete a NU bucket list.

Currently that list includes: Going to the Dearborn observatory, explore the steam tunnels, and finding as many interesting events as I can

Bivot (Blog Pivot)

I don’t love the content I’ve been producing on this blog so I’m going to pivot. Beginning this Sunday I will change the posting frequency to once a week and a minimum of three pages double spaced in terms of length.

I’m doing this for many reasons. One is that I haven’t been able to flush out the ideas I really like. Two is that I’ve started doing this instead of journaling and it’s become a weird hybrid of the two. Three one of the goals of this was to force me to be a better writer, and I can’t do that unless I edit my content.

Lastly, there might be another pivot in the near future. I might move to biweekly or twice every week depending on how this goes.

Mindfulness and Metaphors

I’ve been practicing mindfulness on the headspace app for over a year now. Beyond advising people to try it, I’ve been hesitant to discuss my practice as I’ve felt under-qualified.

However, now that I’m at day 366 I think I can offer some perspective. My own take, is that mindfulness is best viewed as something like a stretching routine for the brain.

Like stretching, mindfulness is used for “injury prevention”, recovery from use, and to allow greater range of movement. This greater range of movement is I think the most interesting and subjective part of the analogy.

A large problem in academic and type A communities is not being able to “turn off” your analytical abilities. Mindfulness, in my opinion, gives you a “switch to flip” and allows you the choice of use.

Daniel Gross And PKPIs

I stumbled on Daniel Gross’ blog last night. I enjoyed it and two things stood out to me in particular.

One was his technical acumen. I found two pretty spot on analogies using backpropogation and gdb and I was very impressed. I don’t think I really have a right to be impressed with gdb because I’m not a C “guy” but I am a deep learning “guy” and the backpropogation metaphor rang true in the context.

Additionally his topic of PKPIs was something I’ve been trying to mimic for a long time. What gets measured gets managed and it’s important to mange yourself. Some of it was a little bit extreme but there’s a lot of value to the notion of monitoring yourself. I think it would be valuable for a longer post that I’ve been alluding too.

Checkpoint 1

I’ve been doing this blog in stealth mode for a week now and I think I’ve had two major takeaways.

The first is that it is hard to produce at a high level. It’s hard to gather good ideas, it’s hard to find the time to write blurbs about those ideas, and it’s even harder to edit those blurbs.

The second is that habitualizing this blog isn’t good for the above. Making it a habit makes me want to just write a quick blurb on a topic that I haven’t really gone into detail about.

I’m not sure how to rectify these. My goal for the remainder of the week is to write posts of a longer, better form.