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Note: This is a post I wrote on Reddit + additional stuff.
Recommendations
Links or Websites
Every year I bookmark many websites, tutorials and articles on mostly programming, math, technology and computer science. I go through them all in the end of the year and curate the best, unique and interesting stuff to make a list for myself (and discard the others). I hope some will benefit you, ignite your interests further in computer science or find something interesting to read and learn. Enough talk, let’s get to the meat!
- Paperdigest, tracks and analyzes all new papers uploaded to Arxiv and published on selected conferences, and then generates a one sentence summary for each paper to capture the paper highlight.
- r/cogsci reading list, the cognitive science subreddit’s reading list is an amazing resources with a lot of books, papers and articles if you’re into cognitive science.
- Gwern’s Blog/Website, about psychology, statistics, and technology; Gwern writes about darknet markets & Bitcoin, blinded self-experiments & Quantified Self analyses, dual n-back & spaced repetition, and modafinil.
- Superkeuh’s Blog, A web log about sci-fi, technology.
- endtoendAI, high quality information on different aspects of Artificial Intelligence, including Machine Learning, Reinforcement Learning, and Computer Vision.
- list of classic CS books on different topics by samort7.
- Arrival’s scientific and philosophical themes by DrTenmaz on Reddit.
- Is the Universe Euclidean or Non-Euclidean?, a paper titled “Is the spacetime metric Euclidean rather than Lorentzian?”, by Rafael D. Sorkin.
- Terms of Service, Didn’t Read, summarizes ToS of stuff, very useful as I always accept most of those, I mean, really? you have got time to read that?
- Ask Historian’s Master Book List, wanna read something old? then this post is gold!
- LessWrong is a place to 1) develop and train rationality, and 2) apply one’s rationality to real-world problems.
- Neural Ambigrams, generate ambigrams using neural nets.
- DeepIndex, Keeping track of what AI can do and where it is being applied
- Project Lovelace, Project Lovelace is a bunch of free scientific programming problems.
- Farmer and Farmer Review Eassay’s on technology and the arts, exploring the relationship between humans and technology.
- A huge list of Mathematical Fiction by Alex Kasman.
- Zip Bomb, an article by David Fifield that shows how to construct a non-recursive zip bomb that achieves a high compression ratio by overlapping files inside the zip container.
- How to pick a random number from 1-10, uniformly An excellent blog post on how to write a random number generator to pick a number uniformly, duh.
- Words and Buttons Online — a growing collection of interactive tutorials, guides and quizzes about things generally considered boring. Maths, algorithms, performance, and programming languages.
- Jane Street Puzzle Archieve, lot’s of programming challenges at Jane Street.
- Melting Asphalt, Essays about philosophy, human behavior, and occasionally software. Amazing content!
- Unravelling the JPEG, a great interactive post on the JPEG format by parametric press.
- Yehar’s Blog, the very unique, interesting website of Olli Niemitalo who had also written about/had an idea about GANs waaay before it was published.
- Nikoli is the first puzzle magazine in Japan. It has some great unique puzzles.
- Building Blocks for Theoretical Computer Science by Margaret M. Fleck
- Toy Wiki, a collection of math notes.
- Write yourself a Git!, implement git on your own using python.
- Resources for Students & Scholars by Frédo Durand, I read these reguarly.
- What Lecture Notes Should Everyone Read?, self explanatory.
- The Rendering of the Rise of the Tomb Raider, an excellent post on the rendering capabilities of the Crystal Engine used in the video game developed by Crystal Dynamics. The website has other interesting posts as well.
Code
My GitHub contributions have been abysmal as I’m spending more time coding locally, reading theory, solving problems using pen and paper.
Do I regret it? No, absolutely not. I love pen and paper and I think strong, rigorous learning is possible only when you pen your undertandings down.
Write a lot, read a lot and don’t look at screens a lot. It’s healthy and wise. I plan to upload a lot of notes, articles and solutions this year, stay tuned!
Mobile Apps
I believe investing money on quality apps will increase (it works!) your productivity. After the closing of my favorite todo app, Swipes, I frantically searched for another till I finalized on Things 3.
Things 3, $10-50 (Apple only) is quite possibly the best todo app I have used. Period. It’s simple and works very well for me.
Anki, Free is a fantastic flashcard based spaced repetition app. I wanted to write more but I think Michael A. Nielsen fantastic article about it does justice to Anki’s prowess more than my writing would.
Waterminder, $10, Streaks, $10, Sleep Cycle, Free or $10, Blocky Time, $2 are all apps for reminding to drink water, forming habits, tracking your sleep and day respectively. I like to quantify myself. It’s not necessary or required but for me it’s worth as I look at my past and correct my mistakes, bad habits so that my future is better. For more check these subreddits: r/BedBros, r/Hydrohommies, r/QuantifiedSelf, r/productivity.
Lastly, Apple Music, Notes for music and note taking are personal choices but you can go with anything and be okay and YouTube is well, uhhm, hmmm, YouTube. Where else can you get videos of golden retriever puppies?
Movies
All the movies I watched are here at Letterboxd. You could read my reviews at Letterboxd or just watch the ones I must write about.
Searching – is about [classified]. Atomic Blonde – realistic fight sequences tuned to the beats of energetic 1980s tracks. Avengers, Infinity War: Endgame, before watching this I suggest you to watch the other Marvel movies, chronologically. Sicario: drugs and Mexico and CIA and FBI and Politcs and Cinematography and Dennis Villenue, what more could you ask for? Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse: not bad, kid. Teen Titan’s Go to the Movies: wow, how are babies made? The Wandering Earth [Chinese]: the vfx and sci-fi setting makes the weak acting and plot fade away. Spiderman Far From Home: was it good because I watched it after Avenger’s Infinity War: Endgame?
These were probably my must watchers with Chernobyl [HBO] mini series being the best fictionalized documentary I have seen.
Anime
Attack on Titans S3 Part1+Part2, Dr Stone and Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure S1 were the best of these.
Books
It saddens me that I had time to read only 3 books this year. I have made a promise to read more in 2020.
I’m going to write just one review here for Logicomix as I felt it was worth reading. Please look here on GoodReads for reviews of the other two books.
Logicomix by Apostolos K. Doxiadis, Christos H. Papadimitriou:
This book isn’t about mathematics, it isn’t about Bertrand Russell, it isn’t about truth, about logic, about philosophy, about the madness that slowly seeps into a logician, not about failures of marriage it isn’t about religion, it isn’t about metaphysics, no — it’s not about War, not about Nazism, not about capitalism, not about love, life or sorrow, it’s not about ideas, it’s not about nature nor it’s about the real world, it’s not about anything logical at all.
It’s a head fake — a subtle, hidden but beautiful message conveyed mesmerizingly through the 300 pages of striking, gorgeous comic art.
It’s about loving mathematics. Why do we humans love something so fake, so strange, so weird?
Mathematics is a narcissist Queen that makes many who fall in love with her mad and question everything real. Every mathematician in the story of Logicomix is emotional for mathematics. The spirit, the passion to please mathematics is the glory of a genius but a laugh of the fool.
If you don’t get this in the first time reading, read it again and again and again till you realize that you’re missing something very crucial.
Feelings.
Feelings for mathematics.
Conclusion
Raising a glass or two for 2020!
Ankit
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