Ramblings | Alex C-G

Open Source Android Apps I Use

Published Oct 4, 2024 by Alex C-G

I use a bunch of open source Android apps as my daily drivers. Since they quite often come up in conversation, I’m making a list here. Note that I didn’t want to manually dig out the URL for every single app, so I relied a...

Notes to Self: Working with Plywood

Published May 5, 2024 by Alex C-G

I’ve been working with plywood at xHain a lot recently, so thought I’d gather my thoughts here. I’m an absolute beginner, but have got a lot of help and assistance from the other folks at the space who have a better idea of what they’re...

Using Linux on Android as a Daily Driver

Published Aug 11, 2023 by Alex C-G

Note This post isn’t yet finished. Stuff is missing (most links) and I haven’t yet gone into the meat of the Linux setup. However, I’d rather share a work in progress than have this in my drafts and never finish it. So, here it is...

Grok the Linux shell, grok Jina

Published Sep 23, 2021 by Alex C-G

I’ve been working with Jina Flows and Executors a lot recently. I’ve really been enjoying it, and now I’m starting to really grok why. Coding in Jina is very much like using a bash shell. (Or zsh. Or korn. Or take your pick) Using the...

Image Encoders Part Trois: In which CLIP discovers the transitive property

Published Sep 22, 2021 by Alex C-G

Looking back on my last post about image encoders, I realize I should’ve based my judgement on more than one test. So I’m going to throw a bunch of images at CLIP that are not memes, but that include subjects that are memes. For example,...

Image Encoders Part Deux: Let's ramp things up

Published Sep 21, 2021 by Alex C-G

Let’s get back to how well those image encoders cope with memes. We previously saw that when we were comparing very similar (in terms of pixel value) memes, BigTransfer came out on top. But what if we’re searching variants, like Buff Doge vs Cheems? As...

Analytics on alexcg.net

Published Sep 20, 2021 by Alex C-G

Just a heads up that I’ve installed Plausible Analytics on my site. It’s an open-source package and all running self-hosted on my cloud server. Since many of you have an adblocker installed (or uMatrix if you’re paranoid sensible) it likely won’t affect you at all...

Building a search engine for meme captions

Published Sep 19, 2021 by Alex C-G

Yesterday I gave a workshop on building an AI-powered meme search engine using Jina to about 200 folks from Google Student Developer Clubs around India. I’ll drop the video here once it’s up, but in the meantime here’s the Python notebook that explains everything you...

Image Encoders: BigTransfer vs CLIP

Published Sep 18, 2021 by Alex C-G

I’ve been mucking around with building a meme search engine using Jina. To do so I’m testing a couple of different image encoders. Big Transfer encoder from Google CLIP image encoder In essence, these use a neural network to turn an image file into vector...

An AI-powered search engine in just one line of (stupidly dangerous) Python

Published Jul 21, 2021 by Alex C-G

If you like this post, be sure to check out my other lifehack: Save a fortune on pedicures (by chopping off your feet with a breadknife) Hey everybody! Welcome to another episode of let’s misuse technology in new and stupid ways! Today we’re going to...

Build a Jina neural search with Streamlit

Published Apr 25, 2021 by Alex C-G

New Posts on Medium

Published Jul 31, 2020 by Alex C-G

Just a quick heads-up that the best place to view recent posts is on Medium. Some recent ones: GPT-3 is the future. But what can NLP do in the present? What is Neural Search, and Why Should I Care? What I Learned about Open Source...

Open Source Explained with 1980's Cartoons

Published Jun 29, 2020 by Alex C-G

Note: This turned into a post on Hackernoon. I suggest you read that instead of my half-formed thoughts below! Introduction So, I’ve got an idea in my head (well, where else would it be?) about comparing open source to magic. That still needs a while...

Almost a Slashfic: Kirk and Spock drinking beer

Published Jun 4, 2020 by Alex C-G

Script_buddy has done it again. Kirk and Spock drinking beer and having awkward conversations about airports. You can cut the sexual tension with a knife. It’s a perfect slashfic. I’m still not quite sure how much of this output is from the Star Trek stuff...

Deep Learning with Star Trek: Part 1

Published Jun 3, 2020 by Alex C-G

I’ve been thinking lately, that sooner or later it’ll be possible to create TV episodes with deep learning. Just look at the tech we already have: GPT-3 - text generation that is getting on for human-level quality Deepfake - mapping one actor’s face onto footage...

Avenging Trek Wars

Published Jun 3, 2020 by Alex C-G

Script buddy has now absorbed most of Star Trek TNG, DS9, and the movies! It’s also done it’s first crossover, which I certainly wasn’t expecting. Love that it’s got the Borg, Romulans, AND Thor. Stoik sounds like kind of a Vulcan name and it’s hilarious...

Writing Shakespeare with an RNN

Published May 29, 2020 by Alex C-G

I’ve just been noodling around with some RNN (recurrent neural network) tutorials for NLP to create scripts for plays or TV shows, both for my own interest and a project idea I have in mind. After 100 epochs or so, I can feed it the...

Stuff I Use: May 2020 Edition

Published May 27, 2020 by Alex C-G

I’m always on the lookout for tools to make my life easier, especially if I can do that in a vim-like manner on the command line. Here are a few of the things I’m using as of today System Operating system Manjaro Linux Desktop shell...

Hofstadter's Law

Published May 26, 2020 by Alex C-G

Hofstadter’s Law is just one of life’s laws that (along with Murphy’s Law) I always bear in mind both in programming and in the rest of my life: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law. It always...