tech - rolisz's blog

rolisz's blog

tech

A collection of 42 posts

Telegram notifications from Jupyter Notebooks

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: 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

Making a loudness monitor for online meetings

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

Facilitating Code Retreat in Oradea

Facilitating Code Retreat in Oradea

After 8 years [https://rolisz.ro/2014/11/17/global-day-of-code-retreat-2014/], 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

Opening Jupyter Notebooks in the right browser from WSL

Opening Jupyter Notebooks in the right browser from WSL

I mentioned last year [https://rolisz.ro/2020/06/14/operating-system-journey/] 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.

Working across multiple machines

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

How to ML - Monitoring

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

How to ML - Deploying

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

How to ML - Models

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

How to ML - Data

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

How to ML - Metrics

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

What is ML? part 3

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

What is ML? part 2

machine learning

What is ML? part 2

Yesterday [https://rolisz.ro/2020/12/21/what-is-ml/] 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 [https://photos.

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 [https://techcrunch.com/2020/12/03/ais-next-act-genius-chips-programmable-silicon-and-the-future-of-computing/] , Forbes [https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/07/09/elon-musk-tesla-will-have-level-5-self-driving-cars-this-year/] , Business

Machine Learning stories: Misunderstood suggestions

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

Tailscale

I want to share about an awesome piece of technology that I started using recently: Tailscale [https://tailscale.com/]. 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

Backing up 4: The Raspberry Pi

Backing up 4: The Raspberry Pi

More than a year ago [https://rolisz.ro/2019/03/16/backing-up-3-syncthing/] 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

Playing Codenames in Rust with word vectors

Playing Codenames in Rust with word vectors

In a previous post [https://rolisz.ro/2020/06/10/playing-codenames-with-rust/] 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

Getting rid of vmmem

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 [https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180717-00/?p=99265] that it's a virtual process that represents the total system usage by VMs. Alright, so

Showing current Kubernetes cluster in Powershell prompt

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

Giving code presentations

Giving code presentations

I sometimes give talks at the local tech hub [https://oradeatechhub.ro/] 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

My operating system journey

My operating system journey

Getting started with Linux Ten years ago [https://rolisz.ro/2010/10/23/dicotomia-mea/] I was writing how I'm a big fan of Windows (and Android). I would regularly get into friendly debates with Cătălin [https://laseratrest.com/], who was a staunch supporter of Linux. I kept dipping my toes

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

Bridging networks with a Synology NAS

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 [https://rolisz.ro/2017/03/02/backing-up-2-the-nas/] is. In this room, I had only one Ethernet outlet, [https://rolisz.ro/2017/