Reinforcement learning involves a reward signal (e.g. a score in a game) which I don’t think is present here.

Diffusion models, as you’ve also mentioned, seem a better metaphor. These try to generate a structured image (e.g. matching a prompt) from noise. Perhaps your visual cortex is just trying to make sense of random sensory input while your eyes are closed.

It’s also interesting to think about dreaming in terms of the more general set of representation learning techniques. As I understand it you’re trying to process the day’s experiences and reflect on past memories - sifting through and deciding what to retain and what to forget - essentially mental filing.

You may be interested in Deep dream. This is a program that runs an e.g. convolutional neural network in reverse. Instead of adjusting it’s belief about whether an image should be classified as a dog or not it adjusts a given input image so that it looks more and more like a dog. The results are pretty psychedelic!

This is basically lucid dreaming.

If you make notes of what you remember of your dreams when you first wake up then after a few days you’ll become conscious while dreaming. Then you can basically decide what to dream.

It’s kind of fun flying around but I stopped doing it as I didn’t find it particularly restful.

This reminds me of the book “Only you can save mankind” by Terry Pratchett. The aliens surrender once they realise the player is apparently immortal!

When you use the KDE Desktop Environment it will also show notifications from your phone and sync media controls (e.g. stop playback when you get a phone call). It’s great!

The yellow Lupulin powder is hidden inside the cones. You can only really see it when you peel the layers back.

You picked them with bare hands?! I wear gloves as the little hairs on the leaves and bines scratch my skin to shreds.

I can see why the “you’re spending too long on twitter” stuff seems a bit creepy but something like this would really help me remember what I was doing to prepare timesheets/ invoices! I currently have to wade through chat logs/ git/ file modification dates to try and figure it out which is a pain.

This looks great - thanks a lot!

Can you really isolate a single cell without a laboratory?! What sort of equipment? This sounds more involved than just innoculating some wort with a spoonful of yeast sediment…

I tried to look at yeast under a 40x-640x microscope but just saw a brown blur! I presumed you would need expensive stains/ growth media to experiment properly.

Could you elaborate on what you mean by “1-cell” steps?

I didn’t realise yeasts have “killing features” either… I thought the whole idea with fermentation was to create the right conditions for your favoured micro-organism to out compete the rest!

Brilliant. This looks great. Thanks for taking the time for a thorough write up!

Great idea! We’re overrun with Lemon Balm!

How did you extract the flavour? Did you add it to the boil or make a vodka tincture or something?

In fact I’d really be up for trying this out if you’d care to share your recipe?

It looks like a Windows XP activation key!

Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat by Samin Nosrat does this. It begins by introducing the eponymous 4 elements at length then provides a decision tree to help you work through the recipes at the back according to the gaps in your experience.

It’s not specifically focused on Indian food but does contrast flavour profiles from different countries. For British Indian Restaurant Curry I’d recommend Dan Toombs “The Curry Guy”. It’s not written like a textbook but I’ve learned loads of tricks from it (e.g. base curry sauce/ freezing fried paneer for later, yoghurt marinades etc).

You can still leverage knowledge from a foundation model in a smaller fine-tuned one.

So the model might have learned general OOP principles from Java but it then drops redundant parameters about specific conventions like AbstractFactoryBuilders when it specialises on a language like Python which has no notion of Interfaces.

Likewise real world knowledge might help distinguish between accounting and database transactions when writing a banking application but you don’t necessarily need your coding assistant to have memorised all the world cup winners since 1966.

These models are unwieldy so I think it makes a lot of sense to try and find ones that are tuned efficiently.

It might just be that they dried up in the hot weather. If so they’ll uncurl now it’s rained.

You might also want to check for ants breeding black fly on the underside. They suck the moisture from the leaves causing them to curl over. You can usually just scrape them off with a wet finger.