Side projects. Sometimes hacked. And sometimes with a hammer.

I promised to ramble/write about "Creativity, Inc." a couple posts back, so I'll do that here. "Creativity, Inc." is a book written by one of the cofounders of Pixar, Ed Catmull. Catmull dreamed of doing computer graphic animation -- the book chronicles how he made it reality. I enjoyed reading this book because it's really fascinating how the execs at Pixar love their company, so much to the point where they make their decisions for the benefit of their employees and because of how much they love their films. Pixar faced a lot of challenges over the years since their beginnings as a hardware company. One might call those challenges "failures". Things like how they almost ran out of money. Or when they were almost sold to another company because they were short of money. Or the time when someone typed "rm -rf /" and lost 90% of "Toy Story 2" (one guy saw Woody slowly disappearing, then called the systems team and told them t...

Here's a recap of my July goals in the previous post: Goal for July: 1. Finish "The Master Algorithm" and start "Superintelligence". 2. Start my own Android app side project. Or 2. 3. Finish "The Hobbit", start "Fellowship of the Ring". 4. Start a golang project. 5. Start a C project: simple shell. Reading goals: I just finished reading "The Master Algorithm". I will need to read it again since I was in a bit of a rush to finish it before it was due, but it was a really great book! It gives a pretty decent layman's overview of machine learning (starting with Naive Bayes, Markov chains, etc. to nearest-neighbor, SVM) while reading like a sci-fi book. It took me awhile to get started with the book (kind of like how it's taking me awhile to get started with learning about ML...) but once I got a few chapters in, I couldn't put the book down. Also, it gives a pretty good history of the development of ML over the last...