It’s all a blur, Icamtuf

But then, it’s not wrong to scratch your head. Blurring amounts to averaging the underlying pixel values. If you average two numbers, there’s no way of knowing if you’ve started with 1 + 5 or 3 + 3. In both cases, the arithmetic mean is the same and the original information appears to be lost. So, is the advice wrong?

Well, yes and no! There are ways to achieve non-reversible blurring using deterministic algorithms. That said, in some cases, blur filters can preserve far more information than would appear to the naked eye — and do so in a pretty unexpected way.

A programmer’s loss of identity - Dave Gauer ratfactor

If the problem is that we’ve painted our development environments into a corner that requires tons of boilerplate, then that is the problem. We should have been chopping the cruft away and replacing it with deterministic abstractions like we’ve always done. That’s what that Larry Wall quote about good programmers being lazy was about. It did not mean that we would be okay with pulling a damn slot machine lever a couple times to generate the boilerplate.

Hard problems in social media archiving, Alex Chan

One of my favourite parts of any archive is the everyday. Often, something isn’t written down because it seems “obvious” at the time – but decades later, that knowledge has vanished. Social media is evolving quickly, and now is the time to capture these experiences. Future generations, looking back once the landscape settles, will want to understand the path that led there.

Intro to PyTorch. Easy to follow, visual introduction. (via HN)

You might be wondering, not all data is numbers. Sometimes we have words, images, or even 3D mesh data. If that’s the case, we need a step in between. We need to find a way to map our input data to numbers. With proprietary data types, this can be a challenging step that a Data Scientist would have to solve.

The Five Levels: from Spicy Autocomplete to the Dark Factory, Dan Shapiro

Level Zero is your parents’ Volvo, maybe with an automatic transmission. Whether it’s vi or Visual Studio, not a character hits the disk without your approval. You might use AI as a search engine on steroids or occasionally hit tab to accept a suggestion, but the code is unmistakably yours. This is manual labor in a deflationary world.