A recap at the end of 2022. Storage Systems [Paper Notes] The Google File System (GFS) The predecessor of Colossus and archetype of HDFS.devinz1993.medium.com [Paper Notes] Bigtable: A Distributed Storage System for Structured Data A classical distributed NoSQL data system design.devinz1993.medium.com [Paper Notes] Dynamo: Amazon’s Highly Available Key-value Store Eventual consistency in practice.devinz1993.medium.com

《西方现代思想讲义》by 刘擎 刘擎西方现代思想讲义 图书刘擎西方现代思想讲义 介绍、书评、论坛及推荐book.douban.com “海洋里的鱼最熟悉自己，但只有海洋学家，才真正明白鱼的生活。” 思想观念驱动实践行为，进而塑造社会现实。 “现代”，既意味着当下或此刻，也寓意着跳脱过往的“循环历史观”。 古今之变的表现： - 个人的价值取向变得重要。 - 人们观念中的自然秩序被理性打破了。 - 现代人建立起了新的秩序。 古今之变的两个观念转变： - “天人合一”向“人类中心主义”转向。 - “集体主义”向“个人主义”转向（并非中西差异）。 韦伯 - 深刻反思了理性化的局限性。 - 世界的祛魅: 人对自然的认识中的神秘性被打破了，从迷信到宗教。 - 诸神之争：科学理性打破了传统的价值规范，却无法建立起新的价值标准。 - 价值理性关注目的，工具理性关注手段。现代社会中，工具理性大行其道，压倒了价值理性。 - 现代的铁笼：现代性所带来的“非个人化”，既是禁锢也是庇护。 - 我们最需要警惕的悲观潜藏在盲目乐观当中；拥有清醒的认识才能获得真正的坚强。

《财富自由之路》by 李笑来 财富自由之路 图书财富自由之路 介绍、书评、论坛及推荐book.douban.com I recently read a book entitled The Road to Financial Freedom. It was a best-seller back in 2017, when the pandemic was yet to happen, when deglobalization didn’t catch much attention, and when geopolitical conflicts between the superpowers had not heated up. …

Facts and tricks about matrices. Matrix as a linear mapping: - A row corresponds to an output. - A column corresponds to an input. Matrix multiplication: - A matrix times a column vector is the vertical stacking of inner products between the rows of the matrix and the column vector. - A…

What I hope I had known when I was younger. Be Self-aware My first suggestion is not to tussle with yourself. …

《博弈与社会》by 张维迎 博弈与社会-张维迎-微信读书 weread.qq.com This is a book talking about game theory and its applications in analyzing social problems. It is an excellent read for Chinese readers who are new to game theory and interested in this subject. Earlier this year, another book entitled The Evolution of Cooperation sparked my interest in…

A pioneer work of the recent 3D reconstruction breakthroughs. Traditional view synthesis approaches: - Interpolation techniques work for reconstruction from dense samples. - Mesh-based representations that require template meshes and are not suitable for gradient-based optimization. - Volumetric representations are well-suitable for gradient-based optimization but is not scalable to high resolutions due to…

Integrating online POMDP and MPC. This paper¹ is a good complement to the MPDM paper² summarized in the previous article. [Paper Notes] MPDM: Multipolicy Decision-Making in Dynamic, Uncertain Environments for Autonomous… POMDP formulation for interaction-aware planning.devinz1993.medium.com Three components of the motion planner: - A belief tracker estimates the belief distribution of the current state for each obstacle vehicle. - A POMDP estimator predicts an optimal trajectory for each…

POMDP formulation for interaction-aware planning. Background: - Hand-tuned FSMs and trajectory optimization fail to model interactions between multiple agents and cannot well manage discrete uncertainty. Proposal: - Use policies to encode high-level closed-loop behaviors (e.g. lane-nominal, lane-change, parking), which translate into predicted motions under sampling-based rollouts. - Current policies of obstacle vehicles…