25 Aug 2019
Mosh mobile shell is a game-changer. Mosh lets me keep my session even when my IP changes, which means when I change between wifi and 3G, my connection stays. It also instantly shows my input, underlining it until it reaches the server.
The client I use is Blink. I have been using it on my iPad for over three weeks trying to write code on a remote machine running tmux and vim.
Once in a blue moon, something gets tripped up, and I need to kill some phantom mosh sessions that are messing up tmux.
It’s worth noting that I’ve tried using two different VPS providers. Linode has servers in Tokyo, while DigitalOcean does not. Despite there being 100+ ms more latency with DigitalOcean, the experience is the same. DigitalOcean’s machines built my code faster at the same price point.
06 Aug 2019
I built this site solely from my iPad. That was undoubtedly the easy part.
Built using this Lanyon Jekyll Theme and deployed it on GitHub Pages.
01 Jun 2018
Originally an email to a friend in June 2018.
A friend asked me how I got started with machine learning the other day. I found the train and test nature of machine learning addictive, to say the least, and spent 2016 obsessed with the topic. Stealing any moment I could work on a Kaggle problem or read the latest posts that flooded Hacker News at the time. The response below is what I told my friend.
I started with the two courses mentioned in a Medium article. The Udacity course is overly simplistic. After that, I moved to Andrew Ng’s Coursera course – it’s rough, but I plowed through it.
After that, I went on to use this course by Jeremy Howard, which was the most practical. The right balance between theory (all the linear algebra) and implementation (using Keras).
Python Machine Learning was also a good book. When I have the willpower, I try to avoid screens before bed, so I was using this to supplement before bed. Happy to lend you this one if you’re interested.
I also enjoyed listening to Talking Machines during my year of ML. Partially Derivative was also okay, but too focused on politics.
Some of the Kaggle tutorials are helpful too! :)
I haven’t taken this one, but it’s on my radar: https://developers.google.com/machine-learning/crash-course/
If I could do it again, I would do the Udacity course, then take the google and/or fast.ai course and supplement it with a book and the Andrew Ng class.
The Google course on Android development was well done. However, it focuses directly on TF, while fast.ai uses Keras, which can use TF or Theano as a backend.
01 May 2018
Originally posted in May of 2018
Recently, a friend of mine started writing some blog posts, and a few of his first posts were centered around the reason for starting a blog.
When I was younger, I owned the top spot on Google for my name. I had a website at https://jacqueslalancette.com (it redirects here now), which never was home to much. For most of its existence, it just pointed to my Facebook and LinkedIn profile pages. When it had content, I would get snarky comments. While these comments would usually come from people that I had little respect for, it wasn’t enjoyable. So after a while, I just took everything down.
Since then, I was overtaken by #99, a French Canadian stock car driver with the same name. At the same time, I also stopped using most social media sites. I still use Facebook on occasion for messaging.
That said idea of a blog has always been intimidating. I have lived in Japan for my entire adult life, and my writing hasn’t improved since I received poor marks in school. When I write anything in prose, usually at work, my bosses tell to remove the details and turn it into PowerPoint slides. People love bullet points because using them helps people hide behind ambiguity.
On top of that, I was always concerned about the content being perfect enough, profound enough, insightful enough, consistent enough, etc. One day, I realized that it doesn’t matter. I have witnessed a program touching the hands of an end-user for the first time and know nothing is perfect on the first try, in fact usually it’s far from it. Listening to Seth Godin’s Akimbo podcast made me realize that eventually, something I write will resonate with someone and contribute something to them. If it helps one person, it’s enough.