Alan Fortuny Sicart

 In the following post, we will briefly cover the different optimizers to understand what fastai uses to achieve such a good performance in a very small numbers of epochs.  From Vanilla SGD to RAdam During stochastic gradient descent , we will update our weights considering the learning rate and the gradient with respect our weights and the loss function as follows: new_weight = weight - lr * weight.grad We know from our visualizations of the the loss function, that there are many local minima, at it is possible for our optimization algorithm to end in one of those. To avoid that we can use momentum , which simply ensures that the direction of the gradient considers the direction of previous iterations. weight.avg = beta * weight.avg + (1-beta) * weight .grad new_weight = weight - lr * weight.avg It is common to use fairly high momentum, or a beta of around 0.9. Note that fit_one_cycle in fastai will change the amount of momentum. The next improvement we can use is to adjust the learn

  It is not all about money Alan , some activists keep telling me, when I try to explain why we are being overloaded of renewable energy projects in our natural environment... or how changing the economic system will allow us to stop doing activism as a firefighter and start becoming part of the hollistic transition we all claim but struggle to define. If uneconomic growth is   the reason why we have a civilization crisis, and money is the medium by which we organize our economic activity, we need to explain the monetary conditions for a steady state economy, or how money works in a economy that does not grow. This monetary system should be define in a way that does not need permanent economic growth, priting money to back up debt payment, costly inflation or unfair risk sharing to thrive. This post is about the changes in our monetary system that are required to reach a steady state economy , or the maximum wellbeing for sufficient people the maximum amount of large but finite time. C

I am summarising here one of the most beautiful and useful books on economics, ecology and philosophy that I have ever read. I have written about this book before, but given the importance of the principles it mentions for the work I am currently doing, it is more than worth taking another deep look into this treasure: https://sacred-economics.com/ I can only hope that every single economics, business and political science programme has this book as a reference, because people will benefit massively from it. Whether you are in activism, policy, research, industry, teaching or just curious, this book will challenge your view of economics, money and civilisation. Motivation Those who want to create a healthier, fairer and simply put more beautiful world have a hard time. Our system seems to make it much easier to exploit and monetise every single service than to protect the commons. Propaganda has managed to turn us into consumers rather than citizens by blaming us for the same addic