Hey Dandelion, how's it going?
I'm doing pretty well, and yourself?
Pretty good,
do you mind if I ask you 67 questions?
Go for it Siraj
Cool, how did you get into work today?
Woke up, spent about a half an hour enjoying company with the people I live with
and then drove
Favorite part of the Tensorflow stack?
Well, I would have to say Tensorboard
since that's the piece that I work on
Favorite thing about working at Google?
There are a lot of different things I like about working at Google
I think the thing that's most important to me
is that I feel that Google as an organization really cares about the impact that it has on the world
And so I've been in a lot of meetings were we've kind of been able to think about how to deploy some technology that could help people
and the conversation's always first like, how can we do something that's useful?
And then the question of how can we make money is like
Ah you know let's do something important first and we can always figure that out later
How would you describe your experience at Palantir?
I would say I learned a lot and grew a lot as a developer
If you could spend an evening with one famous person who would it be?
If I could spend an evening
Maybe Barack Obama
Do you play any sports?
No
Do you miss being a student?
I miss having such an abundance of people living close by to me who I knew and could socially interact with
But on the whole I really like being employed as a Software Engineer
What's your favorite band?
It's really difficult to choose a single favorite band
I would say my favorite music is like very danceable fusion tunes
And it's sort of organized by genre rather than by band
Is there a programming language you really don't like?
I've never been too fond of Java
It seems like it really has a lot of boilerplate
And I often have a love/hate relationship with JavaScript
And that I wish it had static typing and a couple other nice things
Maybe more consistent semantics
Programming language of choice for machine learning?
It would have to be Python
since that's the lingua franca of machine learning
and of course the Tensorflow frontend is written in Python
Favorite professor?
I had a professor named Larry McEnerney
at the University of Chicago
and he was the head of the writing department
and my conversations with him really shaped the way that I think
How are you liking the Bay Area?
I love living in the Bay
It's beautiful, it has a lot of fun weird people
It's got a lot of great dancing
It's got a lot of great hiking
Why do you choose to work on AI?
I think that it's going to be really
It has the potential to really impact a lot of people
and it offers the opportunity to help create societies in which people are freer
and which there's more abundance
and I'd like to be a part of that
What's the most beautiful thing in the world?
It's difficult to choose single most beautiful things
but as a pattern, I find it really fascinating how the world seems to self-organize
into these complex ecosystems and fractals and so forth
So maybe the tendency of the world towards emerging self-organization
is the thing I find most beautiful
Last thing you made with your hands?
I have this floating lightbulb
Sort of a piece of art, it has an electromagnet in the base
that suspends a lightbulb above it
and my friend Chaz and I took it apart and we redid the design
So we switched it from a really polished modern look into sort of a grungy industrial look
and that was a fun project with my hands
Favorite food?
Ramen
Do you miss your hometown?
No, I prefer the Bay Area
What website do you waste time on?
Facebook
If you get an all-expenses paid trip to one city, where do you go?
Probably Istanbul
But if I could time travel I would want to go back to Rome at the peak of the Roman Empire
Would you visit Mars?
It depends on the terms and conditions and transit time and who else is there and what's going on
What is one thing you can't live without?
Connection to other humans
What was it like presenting at the Tensorflow Dev Summit?
It was pretty fun, I really liked the content
and I was really happy to get to share knowledge about Tensorboard with the Tensorflow community
What text editor do you use?
I've been switching between Sublime Text and Atom
I was kind of excited about the fact that Atom is open-source
but I find that Sublime has better performance
So I haven't quite stabilized on one or the other
What open-source library do you really like?
Tensorflow
What's one of your favorite movies?
I really like V for Vendetta, The Network, Kenneth Branagh's rendition of Hamlet
I saw Vicky Christina Barcelona and I thought it was great
What inspires you to focus on Deep Learning specifically?
The whims of fate
What was the first program you ever made?
In 8th grade I made a little program for calculating prime numbers
What is one book you really like?
There's so many books
If I had to choose one then I want to choose something quite good
There's a book called Poor Charlie's Almanac
and it's written by Charlie Munger, who's Warren Buffet's investment partner
and it's sort of a collection of aphorisms describing how he approaches living life
and I found that to be really interesting
and I love Gödel, Escher, Bach
It's one of my favorite books that I've only read half of
and if I were to say books that I've only read the introduction of I'd say
Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy
What's the bravest thing you've ever done?
I don't know
If you were a Greek god who would it be?
Athena
What is one piece of advice you'd give yourself 10 years ago?
Oh wait, maybe I would choose Mercury or Hermes
One piece of advice that I would give myself 10 years ago
Focus less on the intellect and remember that not all truth is arrive at through thinking
What is a topic in machine learning you'd like to explore more?
I think there's a huge potential for using machine learning for creating tools for augmenting human creativity
For example, I'd like to get to a point where you can doodle a cartoon and storyboard it
and then have machine learning transform it into a finished cartoon with voice acting
and animation and consistent design
and I think that's a point that we might reach in the next few years
Do you think we'll solve intelligence in your lifetime?
I have no idea
If you ran the world what is one law you'd enact?
I think if I ran the world, I would try to set up better systems of government
like maybe having better voting systems
So that we don't get the situation where people are all voting for the candidate they least dislike
because they think that that candidate has the best shot of winning the election
Who is one person that you looked up to when you were in college?
Warren Buffet
What were you like as a kid in grade school?
I liked to read books and I would kind of hang out by myself and also play video games
What's something that excites you about the future?
I'm excited by the idea that we can learn to have a society that's kind of more nurturing to people
and focus less on competition and winning
and more on expressing oneself and supporting and connecting with other humans
If you were to start from scratch today what is one weird resource you would use to learn machine learning?
I really like Chris Olah's blog
which is colah.github.io
and that would be a starting point for me
What is one major unsolved research problem you'd love to tackle?
There's a lot of different things here
like transfer learning, unsupervised learning
I'm not sure, I'm not really a researcher
but, probably learning to develop model architectures
or learning to come up with the right machine learning model
What's more interesting, generative models or discriminative models?
Generative
If you could be a superhero, who would it be?
Maybe Ironman, although I would think that the superhero with the best powers is Doctor Manhattan
What's your spirit animal?
A lion
Favorite computer scientist?
Jeff Dean
If you had a time machine, when would you visit?
It depends if I'm visiting to check it out or visiting to stay
If I were visiting to check it out, Rome at the height of empire
assuming that I were fluent in Latin
Visiting to stay, I think maybe living in a hunter-gatherer society would be quite nice
Do you actually use Google+?
No
Android or iPhone?
I have an iPhone
What would surprise people about life at Google?
I was really surprised by the scope and raw power of Google infrastructure
and I was pleasantly satisfied by how light and friendly people are
Favorite Linux distro?
I don't have one
Have you ever been in love?
Yes
Have you built an app with machine learning that you use in your day-to-day life?
Nope
Alright Dan, that's it for my 67 questions
Cool. Alright, have a good one!
See you Siraj!