Tuesday Letter #14 - Vagabonding, CS and some History
Hey, Happy Tuesday!
To all the new subscribers this week, welcome, and thanks for your attention. I hope this doesn't disappoint.
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As always, I hope you enjoy this week's "Tuesday Letter" :)
📜 Quote of the week
“Good people keep walking whatever happens,” taught the Buddha. “They do not speak vain words and are the same in good fortune and bad...
🖥️ Computer Science Discoveries
🗝️ The Joy of Cryptography is an open-source textbook by Mike Rouslek. This looks like a very interesting book. I have been meaning to explore cryptography for a while now. The only thing stopping me is the fact that there is always something more relatable to learn. This is not the best approach in life. I'm happy I've stumbled upon this book. I will be exploring it a bit by bit. Will let you know about any additional thought/notes that arise from reading this book. Here are a few topics this book covers:
- What is Cryptography?
- The Basics of Provable Security
- Secret Sharing
- Basing Cryptography on Intractable Computations
- Pseudorandom Generators
- Message Authentication Codes
- Hash Functions
- and more. Much, much, more.
⚙️ Another free textbook. This one is on Machine Learning. Machine Learning from Scratch covers the building blocks of the most common methods in machine learning. This set of methods is like a toolbox for machine learning engineers. Interestingly, this online book was written with Jupyter Book, which I mentioned in a previous newsletter. Here are some of the topics from the book:
- Ordinary Linear Regression
- Linear Regression Extensions
- Discriminative Classifiers (Logistic Regression)
- Generative Classifiers (Naive Bayes)
- Decision Trees
- Tree Ensemble Methods
- Neural Networks
👑 Other honorable mentions:
- Kubernetes 101 - Simple and approachable guide to Kubernetes
- Git guide: Zero to Rebase is a guide that aims to make you more comfortable with git without having to read a whole book. I will do this by giving you more of an “inside tour” of the inner workings of git. If you are curious and want to become more comfortable with git, this guide aims to satisfy your curiosity more than “traditional” git guides.
- WebRTC for the Curious is another free book created by WebRTC implementers to share their hard-earned knowledge with the world. This book is all about protocols and APIs, and will not be talking about any software in particular. We attempt to summarize RFCs and get all undocumented knowledge into one place. This book is not a tutorial, and will not contain much code. WebRTC is a great technology, but it is difficult to use. This book is vendor agnostic, and we have tried to remove any conflicts of interest.
📜 History
💊 Apparently, Hitler was a drug addict. I stumbled upon this article "The Very Drugged Nazis" where the author shares his research on Hitler addictions problem. His personal doctor Dr. Theodor Morell was famous in Berlin "for his dexterity with injections". "Morell’s success lay in not questioning or touching Hitler too much. Instead, he simply provided short-term stimulants with his apparently painless injections. On some occasions, he was injecting Hitler several times a day". "Morell’s notebooks provided Ohler with a terrifying list of eighty-nine remedies, of which seventeen were psychoactive, consciousness-changing drugs. Day after day, Morell noted “injection as always,” without specifying its contents."
😁️ Person of the Week
Vlad helps companies to fix their broken Docker workflows and developers to level-up their Docker skills. I found Vlad a while back, due to his Django content. His Docker content will be very useful now, too.
🐔 Tweet of the week
https://twitter.com/jhooks/status/1270486083222921217
I think I want to try starting a book club. Do you think this is a good idea? How would you approach this?