I love the look of LaTeX but hate the experience of writing in LaTeX, at least compared to Markdown. Luckily, Pandoc can convert Markdown files to PDFs using a LaTeX engine as the renderer, and includes a custom Markdown specification that can fill almost all my LaTeX needs.

First, let’s talk about where Pandoc Markdown falls short:

• No custom LaTeX style guides (although citation style files are supported)
• No Section Numbering There is, thanks to naruhodo on Hacker News for the correction
• Referencing labels doesn’t work well (Supposedly the pandoc-crossref filter fixes this but I couldn’t get it to work)
• Don’t even bother with complex page layouts or precise figure placements

This might be a deal breaker for some, but for others who are writing lots of documents (such as students), this may not be. Now for the benefits:

An ever-expanding list of concepts in the field of AI to give myself and others an easy reference. Each item in the list contains a short, rudimentary definition I’ve written, as well as a link to a resource that can explain it better.

Ablation Study: Removing some parts of a machine learning model to measure impact on performance

Advantage Function: The difference between a Q-value for a state-action pair and a value for the state. Useful to determine how good an action is relative to its state.

There is a great tool known as pandoc that can convert documents from one filetype to another. For example, you can convert a Microsoft Word document to a PDF, without even needing to own a copy of Microsoft Word! However, we care about Pandoc’s ability to convert a Markdown document to a slideshow presentation using LaTeX Beamer as a rendering engine.

There is a great writeup about this basic feature here.

TL;DR: With Pandoc installed and markdown file Demo.md, executing pandoc -t beamer Demo.md -o Demo.pdf will generate a slideshow as a pdf, with each section heading as the title of a new slide.

Here’s the problem with advertising AI-based technology that doesn’t exist:

You cannot promise anything about your product.

We’ve all seen AI advertised to the masses that doesn’t work as advertised, just look at any voice-to-text system. When I got my Apple Watch, I hoped to use it to respond to messages without getting distracted by my phone. I quickly realized that wasn’t a viable solution: I had to repeat my message multiple times per text in order to get the correct dictation.

Introduction

In this essay we will give a brief history of crytocurrency leading up to Bitcoin, give an overview of the Bitcoin protocol by summarizing key sections of the whitepaper, and briefly discuss Bitcoin’s use of cryptographical proof and computational security instead of trusted third parties within the protocol.