it's perf season at google, which is often a big source of stress for lots of us, especially when going for promo.

a few months ago i had an epiphany (of sorts) that got rid of pretty much all my perf anxiety.

a thread in case it helps others (google or not):
1/🧵 a few months ago i was brainstorming with my manager on how i could get to the next level in my ladder.
we came up with lots of ideas, but they all required changing my research direction and/or starting to manage people.
i'd be fine w/ either, but i felt weird about it...
2/🧵

Last year we showed that deep RL can successfully control stratospheric balloons in the real world
go.nature.com/3dtvrPr

Today we're announcing a β-release of the BLE, a high-fidelity simulator of this complex real-world decision making problem.
bit.ly/3y1i2aK

1/🎈 This sim is based on the one we used in our Nature paper published last year: go.nature.com/3dtvrPr
A faithful simulator was key to our success and proved to be a generally interesting RL problem.
Over the past year we have worked hard to make it accessible to everyone.
2/🎈

📢📢Dopamine now also runs on #JAX !!📢📢

Happy to announce that our #RL library, dopamine, now also has JAX implementations of all our agents, including a new agent: QR-DQN!
github.com/google/dopamine
1/X The JAX philosophy goes very well with that of Dopamine: flexibility for research without sacrificing simplicity.
I've been using it for a while now and I've found its modularity quite appealing in terms of simplifying some of the more difficult aspects of the agents.
2/X