After hours experimenting with macOS VM I found that I can install .ipa files on an iPad from a Windows machine (e.g., AnyTrans).
2020-12-31
2020-10-21
What can be quantified can also be automated
If the productivity of certain types of works can be quantified, it can also be optimized and thus automated.
Instead of performance evaluation, such measures are better used for identifying repetitive tasks potential for automation.
To achieve human-level intelligence, we probably need an AI framework very different from existing rule-based (e.g., Minsky) and data-driven (e.g., current ML) approaches.
2020-04-15
Electric power flow
After installing Tesla solar panel and power-wall last month, I have been watching the daily power flows among the grid, solar, home, and battery with intrigue.
With weather forecast, I can imagine programming the electric system to optimize the schedules of home appliance usage (e.g., laundry when the sun is bright) and charging from the grid (e.g., backup for an incoming power outage).
2020-04-04
Virtual machines
When I was a grad student at Stanford I thought the idea of virtual machines was entirely crazy. And then came cloud computing.
This CACM article nicely summarized the background story.
2018-12-11
Lytro
The light field camera is a beautiful technology, but consumers find it no more useful than 360 imaging.
2018-08-26
Git research source
Below is a summary of my suggestions of using git to manage research source, based on numerous discussions I have had with my collaborators across multiple projects at multiple institutions.
Always revision control your code. There are multiple options, but at this moment of writing, git beats alternatives such as svn and perforce.
Use github for public repos and bitbucket for private repos.
Start with existing code if feasible. If the code is already under git, use submodule as a component or fork/branch as an extension. Otherwise, convert the code into git, and preserve revision history whenever possible (e.g. github/bitbucket can help you convert svn repos into git repos).
Use multiple branches for different versions of the code, such as stable branch for release or a personal branch for experiments.
Use multiple remotes across organizations and time-frames.
For example, during your internship with a company, use an internal corporate github repo, and sync it with an external bitbucket (private) repo at the end of your internship so that you can continue the project at your school. When you are ready to publish your code, mirror it to a public github repo.
Keep multiple remotes under the same repo for easy management.
For paper drafts, you can create an overleaf git branch for more WYSIWYG-style editing while retaining all the benefits of branching and revision control.
Keep one (or at most a few) sentence(s) at one line, to avoid false alarms from spell checkers (broken sentences) and excessive (line-based) diff by git.
Note that Latex treats line breaks as spaces.
Chongyang Ma (@ Snap Research) has recommendations for industry research code practice.
2017-08-28
git obliterate
At the end of trying out BFG to purge a large compiled file from a repo, the following message was displayed:
😀
—
You can rewrite history in Git – don’t let Trump do it for real!
Trump’s administration has lied consistently, to make people give up on ever
being told the truth. Don’t give up: https://github.com/bkeepers/stop-trump
—
So with git, one no longer needs to be a rhetor to change the past.
2017-06-02
I wonder how many people truly find the user experience compelling or merely stay put because all their friends are there.