HOW TO COME TO AUSTRALIA (WA) AS A STUDENT

Unfortunately, you can not come as a student to study most trade occupations as they are offered as apprenticeships and heavily subsidised for locals. Only if you want to be a Light vehicle mechanic.

A brief thread on Jovan Hutton Pulitzer, the crazy con man who is now claiming to have hacked into the Georgia voting machines in Fulton County. 90s kids and tech aficionados might remember Jovan as the inventor of the CueCat, the dumbest gadget of all time.

Also, for anyone who wants to claim that Jovan Hutton Pulitzer (not his given name, but one he changed legally after the CueCat debacle) invented QR Codes: he did not. Like that other right-wing crazy man who claimed to have invented email, Jovan didn’t invent QR Codes.

He did invent the CueCat, a product that somehow raised $185 million dollars for a tethered barcode scanner for magazines and newspapers, so you could get ads from your ads. As I said, the dumbest product of all time. Good backup barcode scanners after they were hacked, however

Oh, that’s another thing. When CueCat was a thing, its systems were hacked. I guess that’s what makes Jovan a security expert. His bankrupt company from 20 years ago was hacked and widely mocked. He’s a genius.

In recent years, Jovan pivoted to being a treasure hunter who was featured on and widely mocked on Curse of Oak Island, because the man is insane.

Again, at such a key moment in UK and at such high political levels, evidence of deep misunderstanding of EU: The PM is under pressure in some quarters to delay #Brexit vote to allow her first to “improve” deal in Brussels BUT EU is determined not to budge at this stage

2) All EU leaders watching tomorrow’s vote. Of course they want to avoid a no deal #Brexit BUT they feel the deal - so painfully negotiated between EU and UK - is too fresh to re-open. Clarifications, yes but fundamental renegotiations, no.

3) The EU’s international reputation as a tough deal-maker is at stake here too. If Brussels now suddenly “gives in” to U.K. on EU red lines (eg backstop) then that would weaken the EU’s reputation in future trade negotiations with other non EU countries

4) Also on backstop the EU is unlikely to cave in to favour a relationship with a leaving member state (UK) against the explicit wishes and ignoring the deep concerns of a continuing member: Ireland.

5) Both the EU and the PM signed up to a guarantee to protect the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. If either the U.K. or EU can leave the backstop unilaterally then this clearly is no longer a guarantee.

#Thread
An interesting story of Kamala Devi hazarika for all Sanatanis...🙏

A Xtian missionary was sent to Assam for the promotion of religion. His name was Cruz. He came across to one the boys from an influential family in Assam to teach him English.
@noconversion

Cont 👇

The p@stor slowly began to study the house and he learned that the boy's grandmother was the most influential person in the house. So he thought 'Corrupting the grandmother's mind can make the whole family Xtian as well as the whole village.

Cont 👇

The p@stor began to tell Grandma the stories of how J€$u$ cured leprosy of lepers, how He gave sight to the blind, etc..But after listening to him, the strong Sanatani grandmother said. A stone turned into a living woman (Ahalya) for our Rama when he touched the stone.

Cont 👇

She spoke of Rama setu where stones floated in sea just by writing his name on the stones and that they are still floating today.
The p@stor continued his efforts but all his tricks went in vain.

Cont 👇

One day he had brought a cake from the church and he thought of offering it to grandmother but he was doubtful that she would eat it. But contrary to his expectation, she took the cake and ate it.

Cont 👇

1/ Throughout my startup career, I’ve seen many founders have an aversion to sales. This is a mistake that can kill your startup.

2/ Sales is often viewed as either a saving grace or proof that the product isn’t good enough (because it should sell itself). Neither are ever true. Some common mistakes that result in...

3/ Mistake 1: Hire a sales rep before reaching product/market fit to get your initial batch of customers. This is a mistake because founders need to work through their MVP with early adopters to truly understand what it is they’re selling.

4/ Mistake 2: Reach product/market fit, need to scale, and rely entirely on self-serve. For enterprise products that require big commitments and internal shifts, almost no product is self-explanatory enough to sell itself.

5/ Mistake 3: Make a first sales hire who isn’t scrappy enough to help mold the sales process from scratch. Some salespeople are amazing at their jobs, but not cut out to establish the processes that others end up following. This skillset is what @rdedatta calls a “sales ninja”.

Important paper from Google on large batch optimization. They do impressively careful experiments measuring # iterations needed to achieve target validation error at various batch sizes. The main "surprise" is the lack of surprises. [thread]

https://t.co/7QIx5CFdfJ

The paper is a good example of lots of elements of good experimental design. They validate their metric by showing lots of variants give consistent results. They tune hyperparamters separately for each condition, check that optimum isn't at the endpoints, and measure sensitivity.

They have separate experiments where the hold fixed # iterations and # epochs, which (as they explain) measure very different things. They avoid confounds, such as batch norm's artificial dependence between batch size and regularization strength.

When the experiments are done carefully enough, the results are remarkably consistent between different datasets and architectures. Qualitatively, MNIST behaves just like ImageNet.

Importantly, they don't find any evidence for a "sharp/flat optima" effect whereby better optimization leads to worse final results. They have a good discussion of experimental artifacts/confounds in past papers where such effects were reported.