I’ve noticed that some prompts produce answers that are not obviously wrong, but still feel a little too smooth. The model lands somewhere plausible, gives a tidy paragraph or two, and moves on. If the question is simple, that’s often fine. But for anything with hidden assumptions, tradeoffs, or location-specific details, I’ve started to suspect …
I usually only wear my Polar GPS watch during my training sessions. I like the simplicity of it, but of course I worry about its accuracy in measuring my heart rate. The watch is good for reporting relative effort between sessions, but now that I’d like to do some heart rate zone based training, is …
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I have a few thousand notes, a pile of blog posts and tweets, a huge amount of sent emails, and various other data, written by me. In order to get more value out of this dataset, I built a prototype of a personal search engine usgin NLP. I set up a system that automatically connects …
Many interesting problems can be presented declaratively using predicate logic. Real life examples are scheduling, logistics, and software and electric circuit verification. That is, the problems are hard and logic provides a way to solve them declaratively. Logic solvers take as input the problem declaration and spit out the solution to the problem. Examples of …
After a visit to a bicycle shop I realised that I need to increase my budget. It makes sense to buy the more expensive bike, as it’s more fun, nicer to ride, and I totally need the fancy features, right? With this premise I was happy to find Olof Hoverfält‘s post about data-supported decision making. …
Stan is a platform for probabilistic programming. To demonstrate its features I did data analysis of wind energy capacity factor in Finland. Wind energy is feasible in Finland, and we have quite high seasonal variance, so modeling wind data makes an interesting case. This case study presents a Bayesian data analysis process starting from data, …
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Lab test false positive rates may feel counter-intuitive. Let’s take a closer look at the state-of-the-art Covid-19 real time PCR test. In Interpreting a covid-19 test result Watson & al., The BJM, May 2020 say that the sensitivity of the test is between 71–98%, and specificity around 95%. The English statistics authority estimates that in …
I built a serverless (progressive) web app ppkk.fi using Elm. Elm is a functional language that compiles to JavaScript so you can make web apps and components to use on web sites. Elm is not an extension to JavaScript or something. Indeed, Elm is a stand-alone programming language with its own compiler and standard libraries. …
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What is intelligence, in the context of machine learning and AI? A classic from 1979, Hofstadter’s GEB, gives eight essential abilities for intelligence: to respond to situations very flexibly to take advantage of fortuitous circumstances to make sense out of ambiguous or contradictory messages to recognize the relative importance of different elements of a situation …
By co-incidence I read two views on zoning. This resonated with me because I haven’t thought about zoning being optional, that is, that there could exist Western cities without proper zoning. First, about San Francisco: Imagine you’re searching for an apartment in San Francisco – arguably the most harrowing American city in which to do …