#016 | Games are Addictive because...

Hi, I’m Ryan! You are receiving this because you have signed up to my weekly newsletter for Natural Language Processing (#NLP365), Entrepreneurship, and Life Design content!

…they are fun, not easy.

Hey friends,

In the book Atomic Habits, it talks about the 2-minute rule, whereby any new habits that you want to form should take no longer than 2 minutes to complete at the initial stage. Although I don’t personally follow the 2-minute rule, I do follow a similar principle of 1 > 0 (by Gary V) — 1 rep of something is better than no rep.

Both principles encourage consistency through ease of completing actions, which it’s great!

Another complementary method towards consistency is to have fun! 🎉 People play games consistently (addicted) not because they are easy but because they are fun and challenging!

Make things fun to do and consistency will come automatically. Having reflected on my past habits and behaviours, I concluded that my consistency in different projects comes mostly from the fact that I make fun a NON-NEGOTIABLE factor. Of course, there are days where I don’t feel like it and that’s when the principle of 1 > 0 comes in but for most, having fun is the strongest mental weapon you can have, not only in achieving consistency but achieving consistency over a long period of time without the risk of burning out!

HAVE FUN guys!! ❤️

This week I finished reading:

  1. How to Not Die Alone (19th Apr - 21st Apr 2021)

  2. Thinking in Systems (22nd Apr - 24th Apr 2021)

  3. The 5 Elements of Effective Thinking (25th Apr 2021)

Total: 35 / 26 books | 3 / 26 level 4 notes | 2 / 12 actions

❓Question of the Week

If you can do anything you want, what would that be? Can you make that thing into a full-time pursuit?

Share your thoughts by replying to this email. I would love to hear from you! 👻 👻 👻

🐦 Tweet of the Week

💡 Quote of the Week

Once they dig deeply, they discover something that challenges prevailing conventions and offers endless opportunities for knowledge and application — Mastery

🔥 Recommendation(s) of the Week

This month, Zeroton’s monthly habits challenge is to READ CONSISTENTLY. We want people to build the habits of reading! Here’s how our group is doing so far:

Zeroton’s mission is to encourage and enable people to take more actions. As of 23rd April, as a group, we have read a total of 9165 MINUTES!! 

835 minutes left till we hit our monthly group target of 10000 reading minutes!!

If you are interested in joining this challenge with us (it’s never too late), please join Zeroton’s Slack Channel here.

🔦 AI Research - Knowledge-Aware Applications

Natural Language Understanding

Knowledge graph can enhance language representation with structured facts. This could help with event categorisation, inter-slot relations in spoken language understanding, and knowledge-awared language models. K-BERT is an example of knowledge graph infused into BERT contextual encoder.

Question Answering

Answering questions using facts from knowledge graphs. There are two levels of this application:

  1. Single-fact - deals with simple factoid QA, where we answer a simple question using a single knowledge graph fact. The difficulty here is that fusing KG and QA together introduces model complexity

  2. Multi-hop reasoning - a more complex problem that requires multi-hop common sense reasoning. Structured knowledge can provide informative observations and act as relational inductive biases. This lead to combining symbolic and semantic space for multi-hop reasoning

Recommender Systems

Recommender systems frequently face the problem of sparsity and cold start problem. By integrating knowledge graph as external information, recommendation systems can perform common sense reasoning.

🎥 This Week on YouTube

That’s it for this week! I hope you find something useful from this newsletter. More to come next Sunday! Have a good week ahead! 🎮

More of me on YouTubeTwitterLinkedIn, and Instagram.