How do we remember characters?

I have a question of cognitive science: how do we hold in our minds the combination of characteristics that make up a particular object or character? How do we then keep that specific combination in mind and consistent over the span of a narrative? Consistency is a hard one. Characters may be separated by several … Continue reading How do we remember characters? →

Brief Thoughts on Fairness, Equality & Hierarchy

Apes have them. Birds have them (maybe). Let’s build a hierarchy. Or should we flatten it to build a parking lot?

MongoDB with Docker – Quick Refresh

Quick refresh on one way to manage a Mongo database for access by Python programs. Set a directory to store the database. Let's call this /mnt/mongodata. Then run a docker container with the most recent version of MongoDB: docker run --name mongoserver -p 27017:27017 -v /mnt/mongodata:/data/db mongo. Just for completeness: the "--name" flag allows us … Continue reading MongoDB with Docker – Quick Refresh →

Amateur Dev-Ops: Setting Up an Ubuntu Server

Or let me write down what I did to setup a new server so when the whole thing goes up in flames I can do it again.

Reflections on “Meaning”

Existential “meaning” is partly the telling of a story featuring ourselves that is available and consistent with our higher-level representations of the world. It is not, generally, rational; it is more a narrative correlated with a feeling of “selfness” and “correctness”.

Reflections on Rising Nationalism

Toxic sentiment in society doesn’t arise from a vacuum. History shows that it tends to follow a perceived threat to a way of live, a reaction to change. You cannot remove the toxicity without addressing the underlying issues. But what are these?

Getting All the Books

This is a short post explaining how to obtain over 50,000 text books for your natural language processing projects. The source of these books is the excellent Project Gutenberg. Project Gutenberg offers the ability to use sync the collection of books. To obtain the collection you can set up a private mirror as explained here. … Continue reading Getting All the Books →

Taming the Docker Blob

Or understanding how to best use Docker. Docker is a great way to build services with modular and changeable components without borking your server / computer. I like to think of Docker containers as a system version of Python's virtual environment - you can build a stack of services and applications through a Docker file, … Continue reading Taming the Docker Blob →

Sampling vs Prediction

Some things have recently been bugging me when applying deep learning models to natural language generation. This post contains my random thoughts on two of these: sampling and prediction. By writing this post, I hope to try to tease these apart in my head to help improve my natural language models. Sampling Sampling is the … Continue reading Sampling vs Prediction →

QuickPost – Discovering SSH Devices on Home Network

As the home router uses DHCP, the IP addresses of the devices on the network often change. To find devices on the network that have ssh open on port 22 you can use: where [Base IP Address] is often 192.168.1.0 for most routers and 10.0.1.0 for Apple routers.