That's a fair question. My goal with the site was to make as much material available for free as possible, and the core linear Kalman filter content is indeed freely accessible.
The book goes further into topics like tuning, practical design considerations, common pitfalls, and additional examples. But there are definitely many good free resources out there, including the one you linked.
Huge +1 for Roger Labbe's book/jupyter notebooks. They really helped me grok Kalman filters but also the more general problem and the various approaches that approximate the general problem from different directions.
There are not many good resources on Kalman filters. In fact, I have found a single one that I'd consider good. This is someone who has spent a lot of time to newly understand Kalman filters.
>no mention of Dvorak or Colemak? Let's have that eternal discussion again!
I prefer Workman. Used to use Dvorak. Did not see much point to Colemak or its Mod DH variant by the time I was open to switching again, Workman set out to solve those issues in its original design. To anyone coming from Qwerty these days (Workman only came out in 2010), I would just recommend skipping over Dvorak and Colemak. You can find even more esoteric layouts, but Workman is in a bit of a goldilocks zone where it's available in some OSes/keyboards by default and isn't impossible to find keycaps for (often the "colevrak" kits cover it).
>Swap Caps and Ctrl
I never liked binding caps to Ctrl or Esc, but I do bind it to Compose in my OS these days. What I'd instead recommend is getting an ergonomic keyboard with a thumb cluster, like the Pinky4 or Iris, and putting your modifiers there. My Ctrl, Alt, and Super keys are all thumb keys now and even the leftmost of them is offset a similar amount to where Alt is on a traditional keyboard, so all very comfortable to press. I also have backspace, space, and enter on thumb keys.
>use Emacs or vi keybindings,
Strongly agreed, this is huge. Vi especially as you can avoid most chords, a bit like Sticky Keys in Windows, except not awful and not something you activated by accident. I spent considerable time with Spacemacs as well as evil-mode in my own config at one point. Back to (neo)vim now, but all great choices, all better than using nano or a CUA binds editor.
I don't bother with a dedicated capslock key. I set it up so hitting left and right shift at the same time is caps lock. Also have an arrow layer under my right hand with home/end and pgup/pgdown within easy reach. Could never get used to vi cursor navigation.
I use Colemak DH for many years and Dvorak before that and I am of an opinion that alternative layouts are way overrated. I even somewhat regret inventing so much time in learning them. QWERTY is just fine!
The matter I want to preach about tho are split ortolinear keyboards. I believe absolutely every typist should use them. Conventional keyboards are just bad from ergonomics perspective and eventually it’d have a toll on your wrists health. And many of these keyboards stores key mappings directly on the chip so no need to mess with weird mapping software.
Having said that, my split keyboard is one of the best investments I did in my life.
I have opposite opinion, that using an alternative layout on a standard keyboard is a greater improvement that a split keyboard. Coming from someone who uses colemak on a split column staggered aka as ergo as it gets. When I have to use my laptop keyboard its not so much worse.
I could never see the need to rebind Ctrl to Caps Lock (and I do use Emacs). Whenever it's time to press Ctrl, I curl my pinky and press that key with my pinky's distal joint. I did, however, swap Fn and the Global key on my Mac.
I think that's reason enough to rebind Ctrl to Caps Lock. I used to do the same, but why go to the trouble when I can remap Caps Lock once and be done with it?
I think this is mostly about existing legislature, not about technology.
In any other context than when your paycheck depends on it, you would probably not be following orders from a random manager. If your paycheck depended on following the instructions of an AI robot, the world might start to look pretty scary real soon.
AI actually has to follow all rules, even the bad rules. Like when autonomous car drives super carefully.
Imagine mcdonald management would enforce dog related rules. No more filthy muppets! If dog harasses customers, AI would call cops, and sue for restraining order! If dog defecates in middle of restaurant, everything would get desinfected, not just smeared with towels!
No tooling, just manual use. When doing these comparisons I gather and format all the data they need to figure out the problem, and paste the same thing into all models so it's a pretty even eval.
I doubt Kimi would do well with most harnesses, its outputs are pretty chaotic in terms of formatting but the inteligence is definitely there.
I understand that in a research lab or in academia, this is common practice. But in the more menial coding industry that most of us are probably in, how do you find time for this? Do people read papers in their spare time and discuss over lunch, or are there enlightened managers who support this during working hours?
Good question. Most people read the paper on their own time, and we meet over lunch. The meetings themselves are just an hour, so it's not a massive time block. I've found that the people who show up are the ones who are genuinely curious and would be reading this stuff anyway (and sometimes just need a commitment/accountability to do it). Having a group gives them a reason to do it on a schedule.
We usually start with quick overall impressions, then go around with a few prompts: "what's something new you learned?", "what didn't you like?", and "what didn't you fully understand?" (every paper has something, whether it's the evaluation methodology or some algorithm detail). That last question tends to drive most of the discussion because people chime in and build on each other's answers. Sometimes you get lucky with domain expertise in the room. For example, when we read "What Every Programmer Should Know About Memory"[1], one of the attendees was a former Intel engineer who spent their career in memory systems. They answered questions the rest of us wouldn't have even known to ask.
That implies that you have a fixed time for lunch and also chat during lunch. I may be the minority but I prefer to eat when I'm hungry and focus on the food instead of chatting. And there is also allergies, as a celiac, I have big troubles eating together with others - they may accidently contaminate my food
I’m actually curious here, not trying to question your experience but does other people’s food regularly contaminate your food when you eat at the same table as them?
I’ve lived with a celiac sufferer before and I’ve never heard of something that extreme, but everyone’s different.
The degree of sensitivity of allergies varies widely. For example there are people who only have a problem after consuming a large scoop of peanut butter but there are also those who will end up in the hospital from trace amounts that you'd have difficulty spotting with the naked eye.
I dated a woman with celiac sprue (which I guess was extreme.. her mother had to have a bowel resection due to celiac related issues) and she had sudden anaphylaxis at a restaurant that required the use of an epi-pen and an ambulance.
The reaction was caused by the micro-brewery that had opened next door and all the wheat dust in the ventilation system.
It sounds like you could get very high ROI from chilling out a little bit. If one social lunch per month is an unfathomable hardship then you're probably leaving a lot of other opportunities on the table. Do you have OCD or social anxiety or something?
I'm not sure what you mean by menial coding but all my employers have supported this in the past. This was a variety of companies, big tech, startups, etc. I think its more likely your employer is the outlier.
All the companies I've worked at implicitly assume that you're supposed to use your working hours for more than just coding, including learning what you need for the task at hand, although if you're looking at very beginner material that might raise some suspicion.
In the case I mentioned above, the company wanted me to build a search engine before elastic search existed, and before there was full-text search in popular dbs like Postgres or MySQL. The CTO/founder gave me his credit card and told me to buy whatever books I needed. I bought about 5 different relevant books. Work days were about 10-12hrs, they still wanted me to read/research on my own time
In 35 years in the industry, reading and studying during work hours were always supported. Frankly, most places would let us play video games during work hours as long as we met our deadlines.
I've had mandated gaming on Friday after lunch. But this was in the gaming industry so it's "market research"!
We also often played board games. My favourite was playing secret Hitler with my team that one time. That was fun! (I managed to become "untouchable" while also being Hitler. That's a memorable moment!)
Interestingly, the person at Microsoft states in a reply that even most of them have to pick this up in their spare time. Judging from other replies, it seems that there are quite some differences in how companies approach this.
What I meant with "menial coding" is those jobs where people have to submit TPS reports on how much hours they spend for each customer. Reading a paper such as this one [1] is typically not directly necessary for being a good frontend developer, but it might stimulate someone to develop into a more fruitful employee in the long run. Managers would have to explain to their customer why time is being spent on that, and that requires some vision and creativity, which is not always a given.
The groups I ran were scheduled during lunch. Technical management would look the other way if we ran over time or if people spent a certain amount of their work day reading the material.
Even if you have enlightened technical management, it's helpful if you don't force them to spend political capital justifying groups like this. Getting our enlightened CTO to spend a few hundred dollars on books was easy when we were a startup. Once we got acquired, making that argument to unreceptive higher-ups wasn't worth it for anybody.
In my experience it is a lot like finding time to work on "strategy". There's never really explicit time given, you have to make it in the day, and its often the most valuable time spent.
This is a very good question. I also struggle to find a good solution to process various signals (papers, tecniques, etc.) with my co-workers while maintaining proper work-life balance. Either you have to be a full time geek, or be left behind..
I sneak thirty minutes in here and there for it regardless of my manager. If you work, say, 40-45 hours a week, you’re probably doing 20 hours of true focused productivity. It’s easier to borrow here and there from the other half of the time to flip through a paper or two.
If it happens in the office and on the calendar then I can't imagine it being an issue? (vs. an extended jolly at the pub every lunch through the afternoon for unofficial 'reading group'!) Would take quite a micromanaging and anti-L&D employer/manager.
Speaking as a SWE manager who explicitly “mandates” (not actually mandatory but I strongly encourage following your passions and interests in an academic kind of way!) we do exist, I assume I’m not the only one :)
My team almost always can find an hour between tasks organically so I’ve never really had to push
I'm a SWE manager as well. I always tell my team that learning is part of the job, and so it can happen on the job. To be honest, it worked out pretty well. and I lead by example, I'll read something interesting during work and share it with the team.
No, there is one award each year, and this year it is shared equally between two people: Charles Bennett and Gilles Brassard. This happens more often, and it has even been shared between three people (in 2002, 2007 and 2018).
This article made me enthusiastic to dive into Bayesian statistics (again). A quick search led me to Think Bayes [1], which also introduces the concepts using Python, and seems to have a little more depth.
See for example: https://rlabbe.github.io/Kalman-and-Bayesian-Filters-in-Pyth...
Is there something in this particular resource that makes it worth buying?
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