The No Title^® Tech Blog

Deep Reinforcement Learning is a somewhat new field within Machine Learning or Artificial Intelligence (you may pick your favorite term between these two, even if they’re not strictly the same), which combines Deep Learning and Reinforcement Learning and is based on the general idea that an agent can learn by observing its actions and their consequences. No, it is not a return to John B. Watson and B. F. Skinner’s behavioral psychology. We are talking, instead, about a set of pretty advanced machine learning algorithms that, when properly mastered, allow computers to achieve remarkable results in some complex tasks. That’s what this book is about, so let’s dive in…

Optimize Images has a new version just released on PyPI! Besides the usual clean and polish, this release includes two new features that may be of interest for you, especially if you are using this utility on servers.

If you’re a developer or a systems administrator, sooner or later you will meet that HUUUGE, GIANT, ENORMOUS file. A file that weights several gigabytes of more or less cryptic system or application logging messages, with no rotation scheme in place. Since log files are usually built by appending the most recent information to the end, probably you just need to check out the last 100 or 1000 lines, in order to find out why an application has crashed or failed to operate properly some seconds or a minute ago. Turns out that reading such huge files may not be as simple as editing them in Notepad. Probably, an application like that won’t even be able to the file. So, what else can you do?

Those among you who have already learned some Python or may even have used it in some projects will certainly have heard the expression “Pythonic Code”, which conveys a general and somewhat wide meaning of “clean code and good software development practices in the context of Python”. With Effective Python, the author presents you with nothing less than 90 practical examples on how to adopt a pythonic developer mindset and how to write better Python code.

Optimize Images has just been updated to version 1.3.6, a minor but still important release that fixes a few bugs and improves its overall stability. Thank you for using Optimize Images and/or contributing with feature suggestions, bug reports, or pull requests!

After about 20 months of hard work, the Haiku team has finally released, a few days ago, the second beta version of Haiku, the BeOS-inspired open-source operating system that aims to offer a fast, simple to use, and powerful alternative for personal computing. This time, I am particularly happy, even a bit proud myself, because I have also been contributing with Portuguese translations for the user interface, and this is the first beta which includes those translations. So, let’s celebrate!