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Gigasquid's Radar 2015

It’s that time of the year again for radars. Since I made one last year, I decided to continue the tradition and make one this year.

Languages

No changes from last year for Clojure and Pixie.

  • Adopt: Clojure - It is fantastic language.
  • Trial: Pixie - The language continues to grow and improve and has a great community - and it is a LISP.
  • Assess: Elixir - Another great functional language leveraging the Erlang VM. It has a lot of energy in the community.
  • Hold: Java - There are plenty of other great alternatives out there on the JVM.

Cute Animals

Alpacas have moved up from trial last year, and Llamas to hold. Alpacas are clearly more fluffy.

Artificial Intelligence

I haven’t been too into robots this year, so the category has been changed to AI.

  • Adopt: Weka - A collection of machine learning algorithms and explorers. I was very impressed with it when I tried it on a speech acts classifier project.
  • Trial: Word Vectors - A way to encode words and leverage training so that you can see the relation between them. For example, a dog is closer to the word wolf than cat.
  • Assess: Tensor Flow - I have only scratched the surface with this, but it is an exciting open source computational pipeline for machine learning (and other things). The tutorials are pretty amazing in quality alone.
  • Hold: Logical Inference - This is pretty bold, but I base it on Professor Geoff Hinton’s Deep Learning talk (at 33:00) where he explains that thought vectors, (made from word vectors), will be able to perform natural reasoning with only linear algebra. The grand dream of old fashioned strong AI, will then be realized in a completely different way.

Tasty Food

  • Adopt: Stilton Cheese - The king of cheeses.
  • Trial: Cocoa Nibs - I have to admit I am getting into crunching on some nibs in the afternoon. Best of all, no sugar!
  • Assess: Cold Sake - I was firmly in the warm sake camp, until I tried some very nice cold sakes. However, in the winter, warm is so nice …
  • Hold: Fruit Cake - Traditions are important, but sometimes you need to let it go.

Special Thanks

The radar this year was generated by a cool github project that uses Clojure and Quill to generate the image based off of a json config file. So go out there and make a radar of your own.

Happy Holidays!

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