4.4 million Americans filed for unemployment last week. That’s on top of the 22 million from the past 4 weeks. All the job gains for the last decade have been wiped out. Poof, gone in 5 weeks. The chart below is lagged by one week, so it’ll be much worse when a new chart is generated. States in the South and the MidWest States East of the Mississippi River are getting slammed. No wonder all those states WANT to reopen but we either bite the bullet now or deal with slow economic death, IMHO. ...

The Oil markets are a really dumpster fire these days. With the Russian and Saudi oil wars going on the result has been a flood of oil in the markets. Prices collapsed for the May 2020 contract to -$37.63 a barrel. That’s nuts. I’m starting to see prices being pushed down at gas stations too. Since Covid19 put a damper of travel, I think well see sub $10 a barrel oil coming. It’s easy to see from the continuous contract of Light Crude Oil that we’re definitely in a downward trend. ...

A few months ago I bought a Jetson Nano as a Christmas present for myself. I promptly got busy with work and life and forgot to set up until a month ago. I followed the instructions on how to flash the unit and got Ubuntu 18 up and running. That was the easy part, it was when I wanted to install Julia, TensorFlow, and Python where it got less easy. My goal was to use TensorFlow, Julia, and Python3 to build all kinds of GPU enabled projects. I plan on hacking this stuff together over time but I ended up spending one evening weeding through too many different tutorials and Stackoverflow threads than I care to count. Below is a short and easy set of steps that I used to install them. ...

I started playing bass guitar when I was in high school. The whole goal was to make our own music and get ‘chicks.’ I won’t lie, I was a horny teenager. Over the course of the years and through college, I played in heavy metal, punk, and improv music bands. I loved every minute of it. We recorded, played live gigs in New York City - even played at CBGB’s twice - and built up a small DIY following. I was lucky to have a great group of friends that ‘jam’ with and live these adventures. ...

I posted about AutoML-zero in my newsletter a few weeks ago. I found genetic programming and applying evolutionary search for machine learning to be really powerful. Here’s another article referencing AutoML-zero and briefly talks about how AI is evolving with these approaches. The program discovers algorithms using a loose approximation of evolution. It starts by creating a population of 100 candidate algorithms by randomly combining mathematical operations. It then tests them on a simple task, such as an image recognition problem where it has to decide whether a picture shows a cat or a truck. (via ScienceMag) ...

After 5 weeks of self isolation I’ve finally gotten a chance to think about a post Covid19 world. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that our lives, work, and society will change after this. The question is, will it be for better or worse? What follows is my stream of consciousness. Some things will be for the better. Companies that used to not support remote work will amend or change their policies. More workers will move to remote which will have the benefit of cutting commuting costs. A good side effect will be a reduction of greenhouse gases. Of course, this will affect car sales and consumption of fossil fuels but I don’t care. They had a good run, go green. ...

I hope that this blog post finds all of my readers happy and healthy. It feels really strange having to write that because of all the death that’s descending upon us. Covid19 is really hitting my state (New Jersey) really hard. If you’ve been reading my newsletter, you’d know that we’ve been self-isolating for several weeks. It’s downright scary. There are some small silver linings to all this, I’ve heard from many friends that I haven’t heard from over the years. We’ve been catching up via Zoom video calls. My kids have been doing virtual schooling and I started taking an online class in Go Language. As a family we’ve been working outside in the garden (as weather permits) and I’ve been baking up a storm. I’m also spending more time studying Karate and working on my Kata. ...

I don’t remember how I found it but I learned about the Indie web from this blog post. The Indie Web is a movement to reclaim your authorship and blog from the clutches of corporations. It’s not a move back to the ‘good ol’ days’ rather a way of putting your data back into your hands. In other words, don’t be the product. As a Data Scientist, I process lots of data every day. I use whatever we collect or is available from Kaggle datasets to build demos and POCs. I can get A LOT done by doing that. Imagine if you were a Facebook Data Scientist and was able to collect all the data that your users post everyday, for free. Wouldn’t you monetize it? Sure you get to use the platform for free because all your friends are on it but you end up buying more crap in the long run because some FB Data Scientist has optimized a model from your data and 1000’s of of other peoples. ...

The markets have been in a complete freefall over the past few weeks. The likely culprit is Trump’s mishandling of the Covid-19 (aka Coronavirus) response and overinflated prices. Who knows what is the real market contagion here but I think it’s time to make a shopping list. With free falls in some of my favorite holdings (MSFT and AAPL), I can’t but help think it might be time to add to these long term holdings and buy more stuff like ETF’s and Mutual Funds. This is not for speculation but for long term investing so my choices will be based on what I think will do well over the next 5 to 10 years. ...

I have had some time to continue on my Python Forex Trading Bot (code borrowed from here and tweaked by me) now that we’re all self isolating. This is purely for educational purposes because when I run this sucker, it loses money. Not so much anymore but it’s not profitable. The reason why I say ’educational purposes’ is that coding is not my first choice of career and I teach myself as I go along. Coding’s been very profitable in other parts of my life and I use it to get $hit done. ...