…appears in Vasily “vas3k” Zubarev’s Machine Learning for Everyone, which begins with:
Machine Learning is like sex in high school. Everyone is talking about it, a few know what to do, and only your teacher is doing it.
Category: Reading Material
The current “best bang for your buck” deal on AI ebooks is the 3-book version of Humble Bundle’s Machine Learning and AI 2023 book bundle, which is available for a mere one US dollar for the next 16 days.
I already own one of the three (Artificial Intelligence with Python, Second Edition), but I’m not going to complain about getting two new-to-me books at 50 cents each!
The books are:
- Artificial Intelligence with Python, Second Edition, by Alberto Artasanchez and Prateek Joshi. This book is a great introduction to artificial intelligence via TensorfFow and Python, and great companion for the other two books in this one-dollar set.
- Machine Learning with PyTorch and Scikit-Learn, by Sebastian Raschka, Yuxi (Hayden) Liu, and Vahid Mirjalili. PyTorch offers both neural networks and tensors, Scikit-Learn provides a collection of machine learning algorithms, and this book walks you through both.
- Transformers for Natural Language Processing, Second Edition, by Denis Rothman. The “T” in ChatGPT is “transformer,” and this book covers them extensively. I’m looking forward to the exercise where you use Hugging Face to pretrain a RoBERTa model from scratch.
Are you looking for an economical way to become an AI development expert? Spend a buck on these three books, get any computer made in the past dozen years with plenty of RAM (SODIMMS for old computers are pretty cheap these days), and do the exercises in the books. We’re early enough into the new AI age that if you do all these, you’ll be ahead of most aspiring AI developers out there.
From now until midnight Eastern time (UTC-4) on July 31st, Manning’s books and videos on software development and technology are selling at greatly reduced prices:
- ebooks: $22.99 instead of $39.99
- print books: $29.99 instead of $49.99
- videos: $19.99 instead of $29.99
Check the out at Manning.com.
(I’m not affiliated with Manning in any way, other than I own some Manning books and get their announcement emails, which is how I found out about this.)
If your curiosity about artificial intelligence goes beyond bookmarking those incessant “10 ChatGPT prompts you need to know” posts that are all over LinkedIn, you should set aside some time to read Douglas’ Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid and watch his new interview.
Gödel, Escher, Bach
I might never have read it, if not for Dr. David Alex Lamb’s software engineering course at Queen’s University, whose curriculum included reading a book from a predetermined list and writing a report on it. I’ll admit that I first rolled my eyes at having to write a book report, but then noticed that one of the books had both “Escher” and “Bach” in the title. I had no idea who “Gödel” was, but I figured they were in good company, so I signed up to write the report on the book I would later come to know as “GEB.”
I’ll write more about why I think the book is important later. In the meantime, you should just know that it:
- Helped me get a better understanding of a lot of underlying principles of mathematics and its not-too-distant relative, computer science, especially the concepts of loops and recursion
- Advanced my thinking about how art, science, math, and music are intertwined, and inspired one of my favorite sayings: “Music is math you can feel”
- Gave me my favorite explanations of regular expressions and the halting problem
- Taught me that even the deepest, densest subject matter can be explained with whimsy
- Provided me with my first serious introduction to ideas in cognitive science and artificial intelligence
Yes, this is one of those books that many people buy, read a chapter or two, and then put on their bookshelf, never to touch it again. Do not make that mistake. This book will reward your patience and perseverance by either exposing you to some great ideas, or validate some concepts that you may have already internalized.
At the very least, if you want to understand “classical” AI — that is AI based on symbol manipulation instead of the connectionist, “algebra, calculus, and stats in a trench coat” model of modern AI — you should Gödel, Escher, Bach.
A new Hofstadter interview!
Posted a mere three days ago at the time of writing, the video above is a conversation between Douglas Hofstadter and Amy Jo Kim. It’s worth watching, not only for Hofstadter’s stories about how GEB came to be, but also for his take on current-era large language models and other generative AI as well as the fact that he’s being interviewed by game designer Amy Jo Kim. Among other things, Kim was a systems designer on the team that made the game Rock Band and worked on the in-game social systems for The Sims.
Watch the video — I’ll write more about it later.
There’s a Humble Bundle deal going on for the next nine days at the time of writing: the Popular Programming Languages book bundle, featuring books by O’Reilly. There’s a “15 books for $25” version of the deal and a “10 books for $18” version.
If you’re still iffy about parting with that much money, you might be interested in the $1 deal, which gets you these five books:
- Scala Cookbook, 2nd Edition
- Learning PHP, MySQL, and JavaScript, 6th Edition
- Modernizing Enterprise Java
- Cloud Native Go
- Robust Python
Once again, the deal is here, and it’s good for the next nine days at the time of writing.
The latest interesting book bundle from Humble Bundle is the Cybersecurity and Forensics Bundle, which gets you 19 cybersecurity and cyberforensics books by CRC Press for a mere $25 — that’s just $1.32 per book!
As I write this, you have 17 days before this deal disappears. If you need books on cybersecurity and forensics, get these now!
Click here to go to Humble Bundle’s Cybersecurity and Forensics bundle page.
Categories
Made in Tampa
Made in Tampa is a site all about the unexpected, thriving tech and startup scene here in “The Other Bay Area, on The Other West Coast.” It’s been growing for the past decade, and that growth has only accelerated in the post-COVID, highly-networked, increasingly work-from-anywhere world, and Made in Tampa is here to cover it.
Their latest installment is about an accordion-playing techie whom you might know, but you should make sure to check out their other pieces, including:
- The Tampa Tech Revolution Through a Journalist’s Eyes, which is about one of my primary local tech news go-to people: Lauren Coffey of Tampa Bay Business Journal and Tampa Bay Inno.
- New for Tech Leaders: The Tampa Bay CTO Guild — Jason Allen and Marianne Kirkland’s informal but important gathering where Tampa Bay’s tech leaders can share ideas and insights, and figure things out as a group.
- Tampa Start-up Ushers in a New Era of Food Safety through Blockchain. This one’s features Gabe Higgins of BlockSpaces, and the various applications of blockchains.
- The Secure Shield. How Digital Hands Protects Companies from Cyber Attacks: About managed security service provider Digital Hands.
- SpotMyPhotos: Pioneering the Next Generation of Event Photography. Microsoft and Google have featured this company’s tech, which allows professional photographers to share photos with those photographed anytime using “cloud-spotting” software.
Keep an eye on not just Tampa Bay, but also Made in Tampa!
My thanks to Amanda Kern for the wonderful interview and write-up, and to Jason Allen for setting this up!