Vermeer at the Rijksmuseum

A colleague at work asked me for some tips on learning German and her situation and goals were fairly common so I thought I'd write up some notes here. For the specific scenario under consideration, and to ground what follows: my colleague's mother tongue is not English, but she wants to learn German since she now lives there. She's interested in...

My niece reached out to me a few days back asking about tips for studying at school. She was specifically interested in any ideas I had about how to excel in her maths studies. I wrote up my thoughts for her and it occurred to me yesterday that there might be some benefit from putting these notes online as well. Without further ado, therefore…...

I love blogging and I've benefitted a lot from what it's done for me ever since I started my first Geocities page in the mid 1990s. I maintain a technical blog at mlops.systems and a somewhat less technical blog at alexstrick.com/blog, though hope at some point to merge these together. In the past I would have been content with ensuring that my...

I read 75 books this year (over 22,000 pages), and a few days still remain. Looking back over the full list, I'm both surprised at how many were only of middling reward. I think the key is to take one's sweet time on the true gems and speed through the should-have-been-a-blog-post dross. Out of the gems, the following stand out: Sabine...

A common criticism of deep learning models is that they are 'black boxes'. You put data in one end as your inputs, the argument goes, and you get some predictions or results out the other end, but you have no idea why the model gave your those predictions. This has something to do with how neural networks work: you often have many layers that are...