Is this a game, or is it real?

40 Years of Programming I wanted to write a little history of how/why I learned to code and articulate my love of computing and engineering that my children could read.

DISCLAIMER: This article reflects my personal experiences as a patient within the Ontario healthcare system and my expertise as a computer scientist and doctoral engineering student.

rlsecd: A Streaming RL Security Daemon In my Security-Gym post I described the environment I built to generate realistic cybersecurity log streams for RL experiments.

Security-Gym: A Streaming RL Benchmark from Real Attack Data Over the past several months I've been running streaming RL experiments on real attack data extracted from a Cowrie SSH honeypot.

Validating Streaming Deep RL on Attack Traffic I'm continuing to focus on RL prediction steps 1/2 of the Alberta Plan.

Testing Real-World Data on IDBD and Autostep My strategy for learning the foundations and contributing to the Alberta Plan for AI Research is to begin at Step 1 and work my way through the plan, learning and reading the associated literature as I go.

30x Speedup with vmap: Why JAX is Built for RL Research I continue to be impressed with the JAX library as I learn how to use it.

Thirty Years Later: My Non-Traditional Path to a Doctor of Engineering in AI Research is rarely a straight line.

Replicating the Foundations: Sutton 1992 and the Alberta Plan As I officially begin my D.Eng, I've been eager to start producing something.

I am Keith Lawson, a lifelong IT professional and technical enthusiast.

This is my first annual review.

"If a person gave away your body to some passerby, you'd be furious.

I've completed the University of Alberta Reinforcement Learning Specialization which involved reading most of the Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction.

I'm a month into my initial Reinforcement Learning Roadmap and a couple things have changed.

My journey into understanding machine learning began with a 12 week learning syllabus that chatGPT prepared for me.

I heard the term "Full-Breadth Developers" on a episode of Changelog this morning.

This is a summary of my first 8 weeks following my 12 week deep learning path generated by ChatGPT.

This issue caused me way more time than I would like to admit so I'm writing this blog posting in hopes it will help someone else and save them some time.

Research truly is a winding path.

In thinking about creating and maintaining this blog I had a few requirements to keep it simple, learn a few things along the way and hopefully work on my goal of coding more this year.

This post originated from comments John Carmack made on Lex Fridman's podcast (41:04) about motivators for software developers "Everything we're doing really should flow from user value".

This post is adapted from a paper I wrote for a masters course in early 2024.

Taking a page from Will Larson's blog and his year in review postings I decided to start tracking my own goals.