random technical thoughts. – salman faris

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Is Costco fuel cheaper overall given the membership premium?

mathematical modelling

personal finance

pricing

car talk

Today, let’s talk about petrol prices. It is well known that there’s no petrol cheaper than Costco’s with several pence in difference, sometimes up to 5p. The problem is…

How to ask Amex for a retention offer?

personal finance

amex

I’ve scoured the internet (read: reddit) for this one. I found a lot of people sharing what was offered to them as their retention offer but close to none of people sharing…

Naivety and desperation in mathematical modelling can somewhat push you far

IB

high school math

mathematical modelling

When I was 19, I had to complete the notorious Math HL internal assessment (IA) for the International Baccalaureate (IB) diploma. The assessment is basically an open-ended…

Part II: pooling makes convolutional neural net rotation invariant

machine learning

deep learning

computer vision

In part I, I’ve shown that the convolutional operator is not rotation invariant and argued that if a convolutional neural network is to be made rotation invariant, then the…

TIL: latte art and light/dark roasts

TIL

coffee

When I said I’m gonna write about my random technical thoughts, I never said it has to be software or mathematical. Brewing coffee is pretty technical I reckon.

Convolutional neural networks are not rotation invariant… since when?

machine learning

deep learning

computer vision

“Why is a convolutional neural network not rotation invariant?”.

Searching for my favorite song in a deep playlist

combinatorics

spotify

mathematical modelling

TLDR; Keep your playlists small. There’s a 50% chance of finding your favourite song in less than or equal to 4 steps in a playlist of length 9. With each additional song in…

Quickest intro to random forest

machine learning

ensembling

As its name suggests, ensembling is quite literally ensembling several machine learning models to create a meta-model that (in theory) is better than any of the individual…

A benchmark for testing quantum computers with Clifford+T hardware

algorithms

quantum computing

zx calculus

benchmarking

python

We provide a quantum algorithm that can be used to benchmark quantum computers with Clifford+T hardware and provide a proof of the algorithm using ZX-calculus.

A mathematical take on when to take a loan such as ASB Financing

quant

investment

strategies

personal finance

We look at formalizing the parity between investing with a disposable capital versus with a financed leveraged capital in ASB.

How to do `aws s3 ls s3://bucket/` using boto3 in python?

cloud development

aws

python

Today, we look at how can we perform the following terminal command in python.

Clash Series: Checking Number is Prime

clash of code

algorithms

python

This is the first of hopefully many more posts on Clash of Code tricks I learn along the way. I call this the Clash Series and in today’s series, we look at how to write an…

Preparing Image Dataset for Neural Networks in PyTorch

machine learning

computer vision

pytorch

data preprocessing

Preparing and handling data is a core step of any machine learning pipeline. Today, we will look at handling data when the data is an image (or image-like) in PyTorch.

The Coding Kata

software engineering

clean coding

A coding kata is an exercise to sharpen your programming skills and muscle memory via repetition. I learnt this concept when I was reading The Clean Coder (highly…

Plotly.py main theme in Plotly.js

javascript

plotly

python

web dev

If you’re like me who is used to using Plotly.py (i.e. Plotly Python) and then suddenly decided to use Plotly.js directly, you might immediately realize that there are some…

Unit Testing with pytest

python

testing

software engineering

Why do we do unit testing and how to do unit testing in python using pytest.

Relational Databases in Python (part I)

data science

python

sql

sqlalchemy

databases

data handling

We usually hear the word databases being thrown around especially when talking about data-related things. So what is it, and what is the more precise term relational databases…

Making pastel-colored boxes using tcolorbox in LaTeX

latex

writing

One of the many questions I get when people see my \LaTeX-ed math notes is how do you create these nice pastel-colored boxes?

Root-hunting algorithm: Newton’s method

numerical analysis

algorithms

Problem: Given a real-valued function f(x) in one real variable, what are the values x_0 \in \mathbb{R} such that f(x_0) = 0?

Blogging again

general

I’ve been an active blogger since 2011 up until 2016 (although most of the earlier contents are now hidden due to cringiness) where I talked about various things – life…