i’m secretly a lawyer Recently, YouTube blocked one of the videos I uploaded from playing in “247 countries”. That’s like all of them. Thanks YouTube. they got them in alphabetical order too So here’s what I sent back. I believe that my video’s use of “Die Antwoord-Daddy” constitutes fair use for the following reasons:> 1. Purpose of the use: This video is non-commercial (the event was free, and this video is freely viewable), and it is transformative: it provides new, novel dance choreography created entirely by UC Berkeley students.> 2. The amount of the portion used: This video of a dance performance only uses a small section of the original work — the part that the students created choreography for.> 3. Effect on the market of the copyrighted work: The market of the copyrighted work will not be negatively affected — there is loud clapping from the audience, so nobody would listen to the audio by itself. In fact, it is more likely that viewers will then go out and purchase the song so that they can listen to it by themselves.> In short, this is a recording of a free dance performance featuring student-created choreography, intended only for educational purposes of teaching newer generations of dancers about how to dance to music like “Die Antwoord-Daddy.” Because it is a transformative use of the song, and for all the reasons stated above, I believe this constitutes fair use. ...

Capacity: How far can you push yourself? I can’t believe that the semester is already half over. I just looked at the calendar: if you count spring break, dead week, and finals week, this semester is 17 weeks, and week 8 just wrapped up. That’s crazy! The panic there is because I don’t know if I’ve done as much as I wanted to in this first half. And this reminds me of a conversation I had earlier today with a friend, which went something like this: ...

Just spend more time, duh This seems so obvious, but one thing I’ve realized again and again is how much time spent correlates with skill. How this usually presents itself is when I observe someone who’s incredibly good at some activity that I care about in which I’m far less skilled. For example, my friend Reese is really good at cycling. Top of his game. But that’s because he trains for hours each week and has been doing that since he was a small child. ...

Spoiler: it’s a steaming pile of 💩 As has been expressed countless times already, the “Muslim ban” executive order likely makes our country less safe, not more safe. Only 3 of the more than 856,000 immigrants from the banned countries have been involved in attacks, while “a vast majority of the perpetrators of terrorist attacks came from countries not listed in the ban.” The ban plays into ISIS’ narrative that the U.S. is at war with Islam, while also seriously upending the lives of hundreds of permanent residents returning to the U.S. and those with valid visas. ...

A really late New Year’s resolutions post 1. Spend quality time with my close friends An important factor in making friendships work is being located physically close to each other. Currently, most of the people who I care about are no more than a 15 minute walk away. But in just a couple months, I’ll be leaving the institution that has kept us together for all these years. And while I hope to continue to maintain these ties post-graduation, living in different cities will make it really really difficult. So I’m going to really cherish this last semester, and of course we’re gonna have an epic, unforgettable spring break road trip. ...

Running is hard when there are people in your way Last weekend a couple friends and I played in Journey to the End of the Night (San Francisco edition) for the first time. For those who aren’t familiar with it, Journey is a city-wide game of virus tag, in which you try to visit as many checkpoints as possible without getting tagged. (If you get tagged, you become a chaser.) Here’s what went down. ...

Featuring: Computer Vision! Deep Learning! In April 2014, my friends and I attended Big Hack, a Cal vs. Stanford hackathon. We were wide-eyed freshmen back then, and we threw around the term “machine learning” as if we were Yann LeCun himself. Naturally, we decided to build something that was completely out of our league: an app that would recognize individual chess pieces in a picture of a chessboard, and then tell you who was winning and what the best move was. ...