Ben Freundorfer

Essays

I mainly write about machine learning, interaction design and tech. Follow me on twitter or get email updates when I post new content.

Exponential Growth

Exponential growth is fast. That’s why everybody gets so excited about things that increase exponentially. But exponential functions have some weird properties that make them difficult to spot and to predict. This post will shed light on these peculiar functions.

Prototyping By Email

Some features of web software can be prototyped by sending an email to a person who does the work manually.

How To Learn Machine Learning

This is a short guide for people who want to get started with machine learning and feel a bit lost. It describes which courses and books give a lot of value, which tools to install and where to get real world data to try out what you have learned.

Getting Five-Year Plans To Daily Tasks

This is a quick note on a system that seems to work for me. The goal is to align what I do in the short term with where I want to be in the long term and keep track of my progress. Maybe this post helps people who aren’t happy with their current system. Rough 5-year goals Yearly OKRs/goals Quarterly […]

GPS – Measuring the Distance to a Satellite

GPS is one of the things that are conceptually easy to explain and different aspects of GPS are more or less interesting. Unfortunately many explanations focus on the trivial trilateration: How to get your position when you know the distance to three known points. But (besides the relativistic effects experienced by the satellites) I think there is […]

Productivity Hack: The To-Go List

If you’re like me, you have a lot on your plate while at the same time spending a considerable amount of time on the go. It’s especially the little idle times that add up. The short travels to and from a meeting or to and from the office or when you’re waiting for someone to show […]

Jekyll on App Engine with beautiful URLs

For my project Waterglass I host a static Jekyll blog on Google App Engine. And of course I want beautiful URLs like /blog/8-cat-pics-that-made-me-smile – but that’s not as automatic on App Engine as on other servers. So here is how you do it. Jekyll can build your blog having nice URLs. It does this by throwing […]

How to create an animated GIF from a video file

This is a note-to-future-self-how-to-do-things… Creating a good looking gif-animation from a video via the command line is fairly easy once you know how to do it… You need ffmpeg and the convert tool from ImageMagick. Let’s say you have a video file named video.mp4, then this creates a bunch of single frame PNGs with a […]

Balanced Journalism

I think we’re suffering from a wave of cheap, soundbite-driven, research-avoiding journalism hiding behind being “balanced”. Balance is a great tool to make a story more neutral. You not only give a voice to the critic, but also to the criticized. Both have the chance to make an argument and the audience can decide for […]

David Allen’s Google Tech Talk

I’m a Getting Things Done (GTD) fan and from time I like to expose myself to GTD-material again. I had a great time watching David Allen’s talk he gave at Google and so – whether you’ve never heard of GTD or bought all the books and seminars – I suggest you watch it. Things I […]

The Craziest Business Model Ever

From time to time I run into a discussion with people outside the tech-sphere, who don’t see why Google or Facebook (“companies that don’t produce anything real”) are valuable companies. They see how more traditional models like newspapers could work, but Google? One thing I found effective to turn their view of the world upside […]

Astronauts should wear Earth Flags

I always found it peculiar that astronauts had flags of their home countries on their suits. As if in space this would matter at all or even make any sense. They go to space. They may or may not orbit the earth but in any case don’t spend a lot of their time over any […]

That song with “na na na” in the chorus

Yesterday I suddenly had a melody in my head that won’t go away and I needed to find out which song it was from. But I could only remember the refrain went a bit like “ne na na na na…” and the song must be from the 80s or 90s. So I did what every […]

Why we should teach 4D geometry at school

This is a four dimensional cube (projected into 3D-space, then rendered into 2D) rotating in the fourth dimension. Isn’t this absolutely fascinating? I think teaching kids 4D-stuff could completely change how they work with data and information. I’ll explain in a minute. But first a very very quick intro. A tesseract or hypercube is an […]

The Perfect Hot Chocolate

Hot chocolate for most people is the cosiest drink on this planet and it certainly is one of the best drinks to warm you up after being outside in rough weather. But there are hot chocolates (read: “hastily warmed milk with some cocoa thrown in”) and there is hot chocolate (beyond words) Just in time […]

How to Write Concise Emails – Lessons from Journalism

I have only made this [letter] longer, because I have not had the opportunity to make it shorter. Blaise Pascal We all know we should keep our emails short. But still I receive (and at times also send) those bulky essays of emails. After all that’s what we learned at school: Every text needs introduction, […]

Stewart Brand: How Buildings Learn – Flow

Back in 1997 Stewart Brand – initiator and publisher of the Whole Earth Catalog – turned his book How Buildings Learn into a television series. Not surprisingly the book greatly inspired interaction designers and had its impact on human centered design in computing. (Apparently and sadly the impact on architecture wasn’t that big everywhere) So […]

Don’t Answer My Question

A few weeks ago I researched scanners for the office. I’m going to share some thoughts I had when I experienced fast and friendly customer support – that still missed my point and in the end wasn’t that valuable to me. As their website wasn’t too clear whether one particular scanner could send a scanned […]