rolisz's blog

git

Using custom SSH keys with Git

As a freelancer, I work for many clients, who have their source code in many different places, often self hosted. I generally create new SSH keys for each separate platform. Unfortunately, Git doesn't provide an option for what keys to use, you have to configure this in the ~/.ssh/config

programming

Per folder custom titles for Jupyter notebooks

I work on many different projects and I use some ActivityWatch for automatic time tracking. AW has a feature where you can use regexes to match window titles to assign them automatically to different projects. But, unfortunately, Jupyter Notebook have a "{filename} - Jupyter Notebook" title in the browser, so

programming

Setting up systemd services

I often need to set up a VM with a server to run some ML models. While I could package things in Docker and deploy them like that, whenever possible, I like to do things more directly, using systemd services. To create a systemd service, create a file called /etc/

programming

Telegram notifications from Jupyter Notebooks

When running long running code in Jupyter, I want to get notified when it finished so that I can get back to it. There is an extension to do that with browser notifications, but there are times when I leave the computer while waiting for an ML training to finish.

til

TIL: Recreating tmux socket

I use tmux as a multiplexer and for running some long-running commands on servers. Today I encountered a weird issue: when trying to attach to an existing tmux session (or when trying to do anything with tmux), I would get the following error: can't create socket: Permission denied A quick

interview

Interview about deep fakes

Yesterday my friend Marius Corici called me and asked me if I wanted to be interviewed (again) by ProTV, this time about deep fakes. This time it was a Zoom interview, and they asked me not to blur my background (ugh). And I had my second 15 seconds of fame

programming

Making a loudness monitor for online meetings

As I work from home 90% of the time, I run into a small issue during meetings: I sometimes speak too loudly. Before my daughter Gloria arrived, this was something that annoyed my wife and others in the house, but now, when Gloria is sleeping, this is not just an

learning

Learning in public: Transcribing podcasts with Whisper

My next project where I learn in public is about doing transcripts with Whisper. Whisper is a quite good automatic speech recognition model that is open source and can run on your own computers, provided you have a GPU. I prefer reading to listening, so I wanted to transcribe my

travel

Where's rolisz?

The last couple of months have been quite busy for me. Consultant life is starting to pick up the pace (at least some aspects of it), especially the traveling part. It started in March: Make IT in Oradea, a startup incubator where I'm involved as a mentor, had its first

hiking

Roland tries new things: Horse riding

My two brothers in law are fans of horse riding and last week they invited the rest of the family to join them for a day of horse riding. They encouraged us with fun tales of how of them fell off/was thrown off a horse. Having not done anything

programming

On the usefulness of a little bit of programming

While I am a professional software developer (or machine learning consultant, to be more exact) and I have started learning programming more than 10 years ago, I went to college to study it, I spend a lot of my free time learning more about this domain (because I love it)

gdcr

Facilitating Code Retreat in Oradea

After 8 years, I finally went again to a Code Retreat, but this time as a facilitator, not as a participant. As far as I know, it was the first time it was done in Oradea, so kudos to the Oradea Tech Hub team for organizing it. My co-facilitator was

personal

To changes

During the last 1 year I've had a lot of changes in my life. I became an independent machine learning consultant. Other people consider me an entrepreneur. I'm still in disbelief about that label, but it's becoming true, especially since I launched my first side-project (or is still a side

learning

Learning in Public: Exploring the BT iPay API

Dan Luu and Jamie Brandon have argued quite successfully that increasing your productivity and velocity as a developer can lead to good return on investment. So I've been thinking about doing the same and I was inspired by Michael Lynch to record myself while coding and then to analyze the

personal

The right time for every habit

I've written many times about various goals and plans I've had over the last couple of years. I blogged publicly about it because I had heard that precommitment helps with realizing goals. But, considering that many of the goals on those lists didn't get touched at all, even though I

tech

Opening Jupyter Notebooks in the right browser from WSL

I mentioned last year that I've slowly moved back to using Windows more and more. In the mean time, my transition is almost completely done. This year I've pretty much booted into ArchLinux to update it, about once a month and that's it. I am otherwise very happy with WSL1

personal

Half a year as an indie consultant

It's hard to believe it's been more than half an year since I started my own company and became an independent machine learning consultant. It's been a very interesting ride. There have been plenty of moments where the predominant feeling was "what now?". How am I going to find more

blog

Happy 11th Birthday!

My blog has circled the Sun for another year. You got 37 more posts in the meantime. The Obsidian post was very popular, as was the Rust Codenames series. Vmmem issues are finding a solution on my blog as well.  The second half of last year was slower than the

tech

Working across multiple machines

Until this year, I usually had a laptop from my employer, on which I did work stuff and I had a personal desktop and laptop. The two personal devices got far too little usage coding wise, so I didn't really have a need to make sure I have access to

productivity

Productivity Tips: Time Blocks

As I've started my freelance machine learning consulting business this year, I found I need better ways to organize my time. When I was employed as a software engineer, there was a task board I would choose what to work on. The tasks would be mostly decided at the beginning

machine learning

Learning to machine learn

tl;dr: I'm launching an introductory course about machine learning in Romanian. It's aimed not just at developers, but at a more general audience. De ceva timp mă bate gândul să trec la următorul nivel de creare de conținut. Scriu pe blog de 10 ani și îmi place asta. Unele

learning

Design patterns in real life

In programming there are so called design patterns, which are basically commonly repeated pieces of code that occur often enough that people thought it would be helpful to give them a name so that’s it’s easier to talk about them. One example is the iterator pattern, which is

machine learning

How to ML - Monitoring

As much as machine learning developers like to think that once they've got a good enough model, the job is done, it's not quite so. The first couple of weeks after deployment are critical. Is the model really as good as offline tests said they are? Maybe something is different

machine learning

GPT-3 and AGI

One of the most impressive/controversial papers from 2020 was GPT-3 from OpenAI. It's nothing particularly new, it's mostly a bigger version of GPT-2, which came out in 2019. It's a much bigger version, being by far the largest machine learning model at the time it was release, with 175

machine learning

How to ML - Deploying

So the ML engineer presented the model to the business stakeholders and they agreed that it performed well enough on the key metrics in testing that it's time to deploy it to production. So now we have to make sure the models run reliably in production. We have to answer

machine learning

How to ML - Models

So we finally got our data and we can get to machine learning. Without the data, there is no machine learning, there is at best human learning, where somebody tries to write an algorithm by hand to do the task at hand. This is the part that most people who

blog

2020 in Review

2020 might have been a bad year outside, but it was a good year for my blog. I wrote 62 posts, almost as many as in the previous 3 years combined (63). Part of it was due to more time because of Covid, part of it was because of the

phone

World's best phone case

Yesterday I enjoyed the Australian Șuncuiuș Christmas weather while doing another Via Ferrata trail. It was much harder than the one I did last year. But as I finished the vertical ascent that is seen in the top picture, my phone slipped from my pocket, and fell about 15m. I

machine learning

How to ML - Data

So we've decided what metrics we want to track for our machine learning project. Because ML needs data, we need to get it. In some cases we get lucky and we already have it. Maybe we want to predict the failure of pieces of equipment in a factory. There are

machine learning

How to ML - Metrics

We saw that machine learning algorithms process large amounts of data to find patterns. But how exactly do they do that? The first step in a machine learning project is establishing metrics. What exactly do we want to do and how do we know we're doing it well? Are we

machine learning

What is ML? part 3

Yesterday we saw that machine learning is behind some successful products and it does have the potential to bring many more changes to our life. So what is it? Well, the textbook definition is that it's the building of algorithms that can perform tasks they were not explicitly programmed to

machine learning

What is ML? part 2

Yesterday I wrote how AI made big promises in the past but it failed to deliver, but that now it's different. What's changed? Well, now we have several products that work well with machine learning. My favorite example is Google Photos, Synology Moments and PhotoPrism. They are all photo management

machine learning

What is ML?

Machine learning is everywhere these days. Mostly in newspapers, but it's seeping into many real life, actual use cases. But what is it actually? If you read only articles on TechCrunch, Forbes, Business Insider or even MIT Technology Review, you'd think it's something that brings Model T800 to life soon,

machine learning

Machine Learning stories: Misunderstood suggestions

A couple of years ago I was working on a calendar application, on the machine learning team, to make it smarter. We had many great ideas, one of them being that once you indicated you wanted to meet with a group of people, the app would automatically suggest you a

consulting

My next steps

In November I quit my job as the tech lead of the machine learning team at Archive360. Starting December 1st I am looking to provide my services as a machine learning consultant.

networking

Tailscale

I want to share about an awesome piece of technology that I started using recently: Tailscale. It's a sort of VPN, meaning it sets up a private network for you, but only between your devices, without a central server. It does so without you having to open any ports on

shortcut

Multiple cursors

Multiple cursors are a feature that has been around for several years. I have heard of it first from SublimeText fans, but I always thought I don't need it. At the time, I was a huge Vim fan and I thought I could get away with crafting fancy regular expressions,

backup

Backing up 4: The Raspberry Pi

More than a year ago I described how I used Syncthing to backup folders from my NAS to an external harddrive attached to my parents PC. This was supposed to be my offline backup. Unfortunately, it didn't prove to be a very reliable solution. The PC ran Windows, I had

programming

Playing Codenames in Rust with word vectors

In a previous post I implemented the game of Codenames in Rust, allowing a human player to interact with the computer playing randomly. Now let's implement a smarter computer agent, using word vectors. Word vectors (or word embeddings) are a way of converting words into a high dimensional vector of

reviews

Tenet

After many delays, the movie Tenet has finally come to the cinema. It's amazing. I loved every single bit of it. Almost 2.5 hours of pure awesomeness. #christopernolan4president This is what a good movie is supposed to be like. Go on, go see it. The rest of the post

trips

Visiting Romania: The Black Sea

Fun fact about me: until this year, I've never been to the Black Sea for touristy, sun bathing and relaxing purposes. I've been there 3 times before: the first time in an April, for a Math Olympiad, when it was cold, the second time in a February, for a Physics

hiking

Visiting Romania: Șuior

I have to admit that I haven't seen too much of my home country. I've set foot in at most half of the counties and I've actually visited and done touristy things in even fewer of them. I've visited more countries than that as a tourist. But after a recent

boardgames

Boardgames Party: Azul

Last weekend I played a fun game called Azul, which has won many awards, among which the famed Spiel des Jahres in 2018. The name comes from "azulejos", Portuguese tiles made by the Moors. A portugese king fell in love with them and tasks the players with making the most

docker

Getting rid of vmmem

A while ago I noticed in Task Manager that there is a process called Vmmem running and it's using about 5-15% CPU constantly. A quick duckduckgoing revealed that it's a virtual process that represents the total system usage by VMs. Alright, so it's not a malware. But I was not

productivity

Note taking with Obsidian

After starting to use spaced repetition more actively and being more consistent with my journaling, now I've tackled improving my note taking skills. Over the last couple of months, I've read about various note-taking methods, different approaches and diverse goals for them and they helped me change my perspective on

reviews

Battlestar Galactica

I finally did it: I watched one of the best TV shows made in the last 20 years (at least according to a list made by the New York Times). For some reason, I didn't like the concept back when it aired, but I decided to give it a shot

kubernetes

Showing current Kubernetes cluster in Powershell prompt

After nearly clearing the wrong Kubernetes cluster, I decided to add the name of the currently active cluster to my Powershell prompt. There are plenty of plugins to do this in Bash/Zsh/fish, but not as many for Powershell. It's not hard to do, but the syntax and tools

camping

Going camping

I have never been camping in my life. I slept once in a tent in my aunt's backyard, with my cousins, but that doesn't count. This year I've decided it's about time to fill that gap in my life and actually sleep in a tent in the forest. I actually

tech

Giving code presentations

I sometimes give talks at the local tech hub in the city where I live. It's not a big community, but I enjoy giving talks and they often provide a necessary deadline and motivation to finish some projects. Last week I gave a talk about Rust. Given that there are

blog

An update on 100 Days to Offload

It's been almost two months since I have started the #100DaysToOffload challenge. During this time I have managed to write 25 blog posts, which is more than I wrote last year in total. But in June I found myself posting less and less often. What's going on? Part of the

reviews

Pixel 3a

I've been a long-time fan of Google-made/branded phones. Back in 2014, I got a Nexus 5. Then I moved on to a 5X. Then I explored the other side, having an iPhone 6S for a year. I was not impressed by iOS, so then I switched back to Android,

blog

How Much Does It Cost To Run This Blog?

The current meme/trend/fad blog post topic in my blogroll is about how much it costs to run a personal blog. So here are my costs per month: Service Monthly Costs Domain name 1€ VPS hosting 5.95$ DigitalOcean backup 1.19$ Total ~7.31€ Initially, I bought the

tech

My operating system journey

Getting started with Linux Ten years ago I was writing how I'm a big fan of Windows (and Android). I would regularly get into friendly debates with Cătălin, who was a staunch supporter of Linux. I kept dipping my toes into Linux, but for a long time, I got burned.

programming

Playing Codenames with Rust

I love playing board games. I love machine learning. I love Rust. So why not combine them and do something really fun? So I ran a word vector analogy query and I got back: machine learning + board games - Rust = Codenames So let's implement Codenames in Rust. It's a simple

boardgames

Boardgames Party: Codenames

Lockdown is over, time to play some games that work well in larger groups, such as Codenames, which is a very fun game to play, but it requires language skills. On the box it says it can be played by 4-8 players, but I think you can easily have more

blog

Happy decennial anniversary!

Well, this has happened too: ten years of blogging. I feel like it's only yesterday that I wrote the 5 year anniversary post. Some things have changed in the meantime, some haven't. I still enjoy writing, but my goals about my blog have changed. 10 years ago I don't think

personal

New desk setup

Last week we were at my in-laws for a couple of days. We got back home late on Thursday. As I went upstairs, I took my backpack containing my work laptop to drop it off in my home office. I didn't bother turning on the light in the office, because

boardgames

Quarantine boardgames: Pandemic

The pandemic is "over" in Romania (or at least, the most severe lockdown is over), so it means we won the game of Pandemic :) Pandemic is a game were there are four diseases ravaging through the world. The players must cooperate to prevent outbreaks and to find cures for the

personal

Yard work

Spot camouflaged Roland in the above picture I've spent two Saturdays in the past month doing yard work at my grandparents house. They are still alive, but they are staying at an aunt right now, so nobody has been taking care of their house since fall. Me and my dad

tech

DuckDuckGo

Some of my more astute readers might have noticed the "word" "DuckDuckGo" appearing several times on my blog this year, both as a noun and as a verb. Contrary to how the name sounds, it's not a board game; it's a search engine. It's an alternative to Google. DuckDuckGo promises

personal

Four months of Bullet Journaling

I'm using diary and journal as synonyms. Some people say they are the same, others say there are differences between them. I started keeping a journal when I was in elementary school. I don't remember what made me start keeping a journal. It was probably the fact that my dad

personal

About time

Time, or at least our perception of it, is a very interesting thing. It's not only in Einstein's relativity theory that time is relative. I believe most humans feel that days go by slowly, while years fly by. As you toil away at work every day, it seems that 5

networking

Bridging networks with a Synology NAS

Warning: potentially bad idea ahead For various reasons, I had to reorganize my working setup at home, including moving my home office to the room where my Synology NAS is. In this room, I had only one Ethernet outlet, but I needed two connections, one for the NAS and one

programming

An unexpected error in Rust

As I continue my journey to learn Rust, I occasionally run into various hardships and difficulties. Most of them are related to lifetimes and ownership, but they lead to a pleasant moment of enlightenment when I figure it out. But for the last couple of days, I struggled with a

boardgames

Quarantine boardgames: Itchy Feet

I haven't traveled abroad in one year. [1] I haven't travelled more than 80 km from home in two months. Considering that in the previous six years I have travelled more than 20000 kilometers every year, my feet are itching to travel again. I can't wait for airports to open

programming

Context Variables in Python

Recently I had to do some parallel processing of nested items in Python. I would read some objects from a 3rd party API, then for each object I would have to get it's child elements and do some processing on them as well. A very simplified sketch of this code

TV shows

Travelers

Travelers is a TV show from 2016. Netflix was promoting it at the time, but it didn't seem too interesting to me back then. Time travelers taking over the bodies of people in the present and trying to continue their lives? Sounds full of awkward and cringy situations, which I

blog

Adding search to a static Ghost blog

When I switched over to Ghost, my new theme didn't have a search function. Due to a combination of popular demand (read: one friend who asked about it) and me running across a plugin to enable searches for Ghost, I decided to do it today. It was actually surprisingly simple,

tech

Productivity Tips: Pomodoros

I sometimes have periods when I find it very hard to concentrate. When I was working in an office, this was made worse if there were many conversations going on around me. With the popularity of open offices, even if two people are talking 20 meters away, you can still

boardgames

Quarantine boardgames: Plague Inc.

It's time to see how a virus can spread all over the world and kill a lot of people. In Plague Inc., each players represent a different disease. You can be either a bacteria or a virus. Of course, in our last play-through, everyone was a (corona)virus. Every player

hiking

The beauty of Șuncuiuș - part 2

Six years ago I posted how beautiful are Șuncuiuș and Vadu Crișului. In the meantime, Șuncuiuș has grown to be all the more beautiful, because my wife is from there. I've done a lot more hikes in this area and seen a lot more of the great vistas around here.

tech

On text editors

Or why I switched away from Vim. Getting into Vim At my first internship, my mentor scolded me for using RubyMine to edit a Ruby on Rails project, claiming it was too enterprisey and that Real Programmers™️️ use Vim and live in the terminal, but the lesson stopped there. I

blog

Splitting up my blog

Considering that I plan to write one post every day for the next 97 days, this will mean a lot of spam for my readers. Most of my personal friends will be bored by my technical posts and most of the people who reached to my blog from Google/Hacker

devops

Connecting to Azure Python package repositories

Lately I've been using the Azure DevOps platform for code repositories, issue tracking, wikis, CI/CD and for artifact hosting. It's a quite nice platform, the various tools are very well integrated with each other and they have nice integration with VS Code for example. But I have one problem

blog

Why I Have a Blog

In response to a thread on Hacker News, Jan-Lukas Else posted a response to common objections people had to having a blog. Quite a few people picked up the discussion and wrote their own blog posts about why they have a blog, including Kev Quirk, who then started the 100

tech

Moving away from GMail

tl;dr: I like PurelyMail and I will slowly switch all my online accounts to use it. I've been using it for almost three months and I didn't have any issues (except with some Hotmail/Outlook addresses). I have a GMail account since 2006 (that's the date of the first

boardgames

Quarantine boardgames: Travelin'

Since Romania instituted a general lockdown this week, I haven't really left the house. Not that I normally leave the house too much, nor that I can really leave the house even if I wanted to, because I managed to sprain my ankle, inside the house. But after so many

personal

Reflections during COVID19 times

I was checking up on Twitter and I read a thread about simulations showing that any loosening of the isolation and quarantine measures will inevitably lead to overwhelming of the hospital system and deaths on the order of millions across the world. Despite the fact that I have been working

boardgames

Boardgames Party: Hanabi

This time I'm going to present a Hanabi, a cooperative card game. It's super small, can easily be taken on trips to be played between 2-4 players. Each player is a fireworks maker in China, who have messed up the fireworks, right before the show is supposed to start. The

rust

Web crawler in Rust

I have heard many good things about Rust for several years now. A couple of months ago, I finally decided to start learning Rust. I skimmed through the Book and did the exercises from rustlings. While they helped me get started, I learn best by doing some projects. So I

TV shows

Lost in Space

As I have mentioned previously, I like sci-fi. At least I used to. I'm not sure if my tastes have changed or if they don't make them like they used to. But Lost in Space is a sci-fi family show that I really enjoy, together with my wife. It's actually

personal

Interview about working from home

This morning my friend David Achim, who's responsible for the Oradea Tech Hub, called me and asked me if I wanted to be interviewed about what's it like to work from home. Three hours later a reporter from ProTV was in my home (after I cleaned up and organized my

boardgames

Boardgames Miniparty: 7 Wonders Duel

Last night, my wife and I wanted to play a boardgame by ourselves. Looking through my collection, we decided to give 7 Wonders Duel a try. The original 7 Wonders game is played between 3 and 7 players. The Duel version is made for two player game, with several nice

blog

Blogs are best served static

Or there and back again. Earlier this month I moved to Ghost. I did that because I wanted to have a nice editor, I wanted to be able to write easily from anywhere and I wanted to get spend less time in the terminal. But I knew moving to a

blog

Moving from Acrylamid to Ghost

When I decided to move to Ghost at the beginning of the month, I realized that I needed to act quickly, because I've kept postponing this for years, so either I do it during the winter holidays, or it gets put off for who knows how long. So I set

reviews

Books of 2019

So, I have good news and bad news about my book reading habit in 2019. The good news is that I've read more Christian books than other kinds of books. The bad news is that I've read the least books ever in 2019: six. The interesting fact is that I

blog

Moving to Ghost

After about 5 years of blogging using a static site engine, I decided to move back to a normal blogging platform. I guess there really is nothing new under the sun and everything just keeps moving in cycles. Sure, this time the platform is node.js based, not PHP, but

boardgames

Boardgames Party: Rival Restaurants

Rival Restaurants is a game I ordered on Kickstarter. When ordering from KS, it's always a bit of a gamble, but my wife loves cooking, so I figured she will like it. Last night we played it with some friends and it was a blast. In Rival Restaurants, each player

review

2019 in Review

This year something happened that has not happened in a long time: no posts at all during for two months (June and July) :( Most months I also managed to post only once, so because of this I wrote only 19 posts in 2019, 3 fewer than in 2018. Life has

memory

Cracking the human memory

I’ve never had a par­tic­u­lar­ly good memory, despite what others might claim. While many times others are astonished that I remember something, often I am just able to find a pattern or a logical reasoning behind something and then I can deduce it when needed.

reviews

The Rise of Skywalker

The grand finale for the Star Wars trilogy of trilogies is here. Or not so grand, because I went to see it in Oradea on the second day after it was released, and the cinema had at least a third of the seats empty. I didn’t enjoy TLJ and

boardgames

Boardgames Party: Tokaido

I've bought Tokaido about two years ago. I've opened it about a year ago, but I was quickly overruled by the others, who probably wanted to play a game they knew (cough Dixit cough). But today, we did a spon­ta­neous board game night in our house and I

git

Git tutorial - part 3

I wrote my last Git tutorial 6 years ago, but I guess it took me quite some time to learn some new Git tricks. At work we have a mi­croser­vices ar­chi­tec­ture, with each service in a different repo. I work with around 6 of them

hiking

The iron path

After a half year break, the little band of hikers from our church  decided to do some via ferrata routes, in the Vadu Crișului and Șuncuiuș  area. I’ve wanted to go on Via Ferrata hikes for a long time. I first heard  of them when I moved to Switzer­

conference

John Lennox in Cluj

This week, Edictum Dei invited another one of my favorite Christian authors, John Lennox to give a pre­sen­ta­tion in Cluj. Unlike last year, for the N.T. Wright conference, I found out about it soon after it was announced and I im­me­di­ate­ly reserved

TV shows

Better than Us

Добрый день. Меня зовут Роланд! It just happens that in the last month I’ve discovered two mas­ter­pieces of Russian art: one is the Red Army Choir, the other one is Better than Us, a TV show about a family living in 2029, which somehow becomes the owner

reviews

Ad Astra

Another space movie came out, so of course I went to the cinema to see it, just like I did with Gravity and In­ter­stel­lar. It was a very spon­ta­neous decision, seeing an article about it at 7 PM, watching a trailer at 7:10 and

house

Digging myself a hole

As I mentioned in my previous post, con­struc­tion has started on my house two months ago. Things are going pretty well, despite being behind the first estimated schedule. But that is something that everyone told me to expect, that initial estimates are wrong. That is possibly the only

job

Breaking Radio Silence

I don't think many people noticed, but I haven't written a new post in almost three months and my last post was not too meaty (a campaign poster and a call to action). Was ist los mit Roland? The biggest thing that happened was that con­struc­tion on my

personal

Vot 26 Mai

This post is about the eu­ropar­la­men­tary vote and a referendum in Romania Și votez Da la ambele întrebări de la referendum, din motive similare cu ce expune Adrian Papahagi.