Things that I think should be noted and filed in an orderly fashion but I have no time for. This will change incessantly; I would advise against linking to it.
Currently reading
- Rackauckas’s sciml course
- pyro SVI
- Särkkä and Solin’s SDE course
- Jaan on translating between variational terminology in physics and ML
- Jaan on VAE
- pamamakouros on normalizing flows
- Eric Jang on normalizing flows
- Sander on typicality
- Sander on waveform audio
- yuge shi’s ELBO gradient post is excellent
- Francis Bach, the many faces of integration by parts.
- Efficiently sampling functions from Gaussian process posteriors
Triage
Fake Martial Arts, A Disorientation
However, even fighters who enjoy making fun of fake martial arts in the “not useful for MMA” sense are still quick to admit that all martial arts are largely fake […]. Ramsey Dewey in particular enjoys demonstrating the fallacy of trying to fight off multiple opponents, or a single opponent with a knife, as opposed to employing wiser (but not useful for MMA!) strategies like diplomacy, going armed, making better life choices, and running the fuck away.…
I have been wondering if there are intellectual equivalents of fake martial arts. The highly ritualized and hierarchical culture of the legal courtroom is one example of how epistemic battles are rendered civilized, and in some ways less real. Yet one can’t deny that legal systems are having a genuine and ongoing encounter with reality, from top to bottom. They are embedded in reality. Their fakenesses serve realities on other levels.
keen is an ML-assisted content discovery system. Some kind of googler side project?
“Meta” (a.k.a. transfer?) learning in pytorch
Taiwan’s digital minister sounds interesting
Anne Applebaum, Performative Authoritarianism.
silicon valley wildfire spotting.
COVID psychological first aid course.
plutoview is collaborative web-surfing
China requires malware for people doing business there.
The Gumbel trick is ingenious for sampling from things that look like categorical distributions and simplices.
https://macropolo.org/digital-projects/the-global-ai-talent-tracker/
https://thesiswhisperer.com/2020/05/13/stop-letting-the-ghosts-of-old-academia-haunt-you/
Distributed data structures are tedious. See this post on CDRTs.
mildly interesting ideas for better social networks although not ideas as to how they would attract custom.
I would like to have a link on the difficulties of coordinating on justice via mob rule, public shaming and petitions, wherein we look at the coordination problems here, and separate the problem of identifying injustice/inefficiency/existential threat, and the problem of calibrating a political response. Sideline in altruistic punishment and feedback loops. TBD.
Clearview’s Controversial Facial Recognition AI Automates Mass Surveillance.
calndr.link creates calendar links.
I built calndr.link after I had multiple clients request the exact same thing — a simple and easy way to generate calendar links, for adding to their website or in email newsletters.
There’s a few existing providers out there, but they’re extremely pricey for what they do — take some basic data (title/date/etc) and reformat it into a url for a calendar provider (be it google or apple).
Jan Turowski on Schrebergärten.
Meaningnesss, on wonder (highbrow Insane Clown Posse).
Australian fintech. Australian share trading
A collection of links advocating learning a new language.
Instant site publishing from a folder of files: Netlify drop.
Danny Dorling, Slowdown:The End of the Great Acceleration—and Why It’s Good for the Planet, the Economy, and Our Lives..
Philip Moriarty, Will Fermi and Dirac save us? Probably not.
A paper recently appeared on the arXiv with the ever-so-intriguing title of “Attacking Covid-19 with the Ising-model and the Fermi-Dirac Distribution Function”. […]I’m a big fan of the Ising model — not least because we have extensively used a variant to simulate pattern formation in nanoparticle assemblies for many* years […] Having now read the paper, it’s a little, um, underwhelming, given the rather overstated premise of the title. That’s not to say that it’s not worth reading as an example of how modelling and simulation strategies from condensed matter physics can be translated to social and epidemiological settings.
rufus is a boot drive maker which is free and open source and maintained and thus possibly less suspect than some competitors.
Terry Tao’s course in Modern real-variable harmonic analysis.
I keep meaning to bookmark entertaining contrarian Cory Clark.
Another free/libre Microsoft Office clone: FreeOffice. Looks less bloated than OpenOffice maybe?
Parsing text tags into Boolean feature vectors for tensorflow
I would like to read the Kernelized Stein Discrepancy tutorial.
China launches national blockchain.
Experiment power calculator tells you how many data points you need to have and thus whether it is likely you can (dis)prove the thing with the budget you have.
bitcoin during financial crisis.
This guide to pruning multihead attention NN should probably go somewhere useful if i actually end up doing NLP like all the recruiters seem to want.
Vlad Alex (Merzmensch) 12 Colab Notebooks that matter StyleGAN, GPT-2, StyleTransfer, DeOldify, Magenta etc to try out.
Escape pod is an auditory science fiction magazine. (Which means podcast.)
Glitter nail polish for laptop security.
I should lobby citation styles for URL support to prevent the entire project being quaintly mired in woodpulp. Here is where to do it.
SDEs and optimisation and learning
Francis Bach calls the continuous approximation to a discrete time optimization a gradient flow. Which of the other uses I know is this the same as?
Statistical Inference via Convex Optimization .
Conjugate functions illustrated.
Francis Bach on the use of geometric sums and a different take by Julyan Arbel.
Tutorial to approximating differentiable control problems. An extension of this is universal differential equations.
Ai for images fun pack
https://deepdreamgenerator.com/
https://www.artbreeder.com/start
Ai for music fun pack
https://djtechtools.com/2020/07/14/best-ai-platforms-to-help-you-make-music/
https://www.patreon.com/loudlystudio
Open AI Jukebox is the latest hot generative music thing that I should be across. I would take a rather different approach to them to solve this problem, but they are the current benchmark.
Illustrations
