For half a year (and more), I’ve been thinking about building a computer to learn and train ML models on, as well as to host my web applications on. Over this past half month, I finally bit the bullet, opting for a Ryzen 3700X paired with an Nvidia 1080 Ti. The full parts list can be found here. I chose to install NixOS, a declarative operating system, and this post outlines the full software-side process, including several hurdles I came across.

In light of the recent changes of UC Berkeley’s grading scheme to P/NP, it’s quite interesting to examine the problem of grading through a Game Theoretic perspective. Lots of students have proposed that the change to an online format encourages cheating, and that the curves for this semester will change drastically as a result. In this essay, I hope to explore this claim and test its validity.

Today’s Fact: Foot On Water

Andi came up with an insane question: How wide does a human foot have to be for a human to stand on water? Of course, he came up with something insane, reproduced here.

Today’s Fact: Linear Discriminant Analysis

Linear Discriminant Analysis, or LDA for short, is an ML model used in classification. Specifically, for a model of d features and n training points, it assumes that the d features are all distributed Normally (Gaussian), with the same variance. More formally, taken from my professor’s cs189 notes, we get:

Today’s Fact: Temperature, Defined Statistically

TODO