Posts

For about 20 years, I’ve been obsessed with the idea of getting the best score for a machine learning dataset. It started in postgrad when we would talk about learning algorithms and the problems and datasets we were all using to demonstrate that one algorithm was “better” than another. A good friend in our research group always pointed out Włodzisław Duch’s work. Back in the early 2000s, he had a website that listed a suite of the standard ML datasets and the algorithms + configs that achieved the best scores (as reported in published papers), and most importatnyl, the scores they achieved. ...

I don’t watch a ton of TV anymore. And I’m not a consumer of youtube. Never really liked it. Nevertheless, I like to watch one, and only one, hour of a tv series (or a contiguous block of a movie) as part of each nights wind-down routine. I’m a huge consumer of podcasts. I’ve been consuming podcasts of movie reviews for a long time. Mostly movies I watched a long time ago. Often movies I won’t see and just want to get a vibe for the plot and quality. ...

Andrej Karpathy has a wonderful tweet on what he calls learned “cognitive strategies” but I think more generally is referred to as “meta cognition”. The piece I like is: …The models discover, in the process of trying to solve many diverse math/code/etc. problems, strategies that resemble the internal monologue of humans, which are very hard (/impossible) to directly program into the models. I call these “cognitive strategies” - things like approaching a problem from different angles, trying out different ideas, finding analogies, backtracking, re-examining, etc. Weird as it sounds, it’s plausible that LLMs can discover better ways of thinking, of solving problems, of connecting ideas across disciplines, and do so in a way we will find surprising, puzzling, but creative and brilliant in retrospect… ...

I’ve written a ton of tutorials and books to help developers learn machine learning algorithms over the years. It’s not my area any longer, but if asked, my suggestion for a programmer (that learns via programming) is to code machine learning algorithms from scratch. Is this you? It is me. It’s how I learn best. Here, I really mean that we learn best by: reading about thing writing code for the thing running the thing it doesn’t work (it never works first go) iterate until the implementation works (and you really-actually-deeply learn the thing) This is how we programmers learned a ton of algorithms and data structures in our CS or SWE degree, or whatever. ...

Machine learning models have an IID assumption. That is data on which they are trained must be representative of data on which they will make predictions on later. The big question is AI is: Are generative models capable of generating data out of distribution? Naively, we I think no. But their data distribution is so vast that it’s hard to see at first. For example, an image generation model can interpolate within the space of all most images on the net. ...

In the last two episodes of “the cognitive revolution” podcast, the host (Nathan Labenz) has mentioned AI’s developing an intuition for the physics of a domain. Specifically: Material Progress: Developing AI’s Scientific Intuition, with Orbital Materials’ Jonathan & Tim Emergency Pod: Reinforcement Learning Works! Reflecting on Chinese Models DeepSeek-R1 and Kimi k1.5 By “physics”, he means the actual rules that limit physical domains, but we can generalize and say any domain. ...

I just read a new post by Edmar Ferreira titled: Selfish Software It’s his take on what we previously called “chat-driven programming”, but perhaps broader. I thought it was user-focused, but his description too is engineer focused, but more personal. His journey. Selfish software refers to writing code for yourself without any external customers in mind. I like the name, I guess. Perhaps the process of creating software this way we can call “chat-driven programming” and the artifacts that are a result we can call “selfish software”, or what I have previously been calling “disposable software”. ...

I’ve read Jeff Vanermeers Ambergris trilogy of books maybe a dozen times. I will probably keep reading it annually for years to come. But why? Why has it captured me? I first read the books on paper, one-by-one. City of Saints and Madmen Shriek: An Afterword Finch Later, I got the compendium of all three books. Ambergris Here’s the cool cover: It’s edited down slightly and easier to handle. To sit-with. ...

This is a nostalgia piece. I worked at a pizza shop in high-school. I used the money to buy my first PC in 1996. I was 15, in year 9, I was obsessed with Quake (quake 1) and the PC was a Intel 133mhz. We had “family” PCs before this, but this one was mine alone. Purchased with money I earned through hard labor. I also purchased a dial-up 33.6 modem and used me brand new PC to get on the internet with an ISP named Alphalink. ...

I love scenes in stories of the main character “breaking through”. Doing something so extreme they break tear through the fabric of reality. Dislocate. One I love is in Alan Moore’s graphic novel “From Hell”. The main character, the killer, experiences moments of “temporal dislocation” while he is killing. While reading, these are shocking moments. As a reader, you don’t know what is going on as we go from Victorian era England to modern cityscapes for seemingly no reason. We piece together, that he’s dislocating, probably because of the occult stuff he’s doing coupled with extreme acts of violence. ...