ml_basics

The untimely death of David MacKay was a tragic loss for the scientific community. It's astonishing that he wrote the textbook on information theory for the ML community as well as his contributions to rational discussion about energy policy.

He had a direct personal impact on my life since my introduction to ML came from video recordings of his lectures on ML and information theory. I am grateful to have learned from such an excellent teacher. Like a Feynman of our times.

Read about half of the article wondering when it was going to explain why carplay is addictive

January 2026 when i started using opus 4.5 and understood that it could do actual useful work beyond coding small snippets

maybe we will look back and also think that the current slate of IPOs were reasonable valuations?

this will change as inference demand increases (which is happening right now faster than many people expected)

During my time at university studying pure mathematics I had an interesting experience of doing a challenging sheet of combinatorics problems during a vacation. Every day I attempted one question and got stuck on it. Then the next morning I woke up knowing the solution. It was a recurring thing: this happened every day for about 2 weeks until I had solved all the problems.

For me this a big eye opener about the importance of sleep and relaxed thinking to solve challenging problems.

how much of the cloud revenue is from Anthropic revenue sharing?

They are referring to a thing called "speculative decoding" I think.

This is from 11th September

The graph at the beginning showing the cost of sequencing over time falling faster than Moore's law stops in 2015. Would love to see how things have progressed since then. Casually googling i only saw plots up to 2021 but looks to me like progress is now slower than Moore's law since ~2015. Maybe things will change when Nanopore gets more reliable

It's a europeanism. In both French and German (and probably other EU languages) the word for "subsidy" is something like "subvention" so native speakers of these language often reach for an unnatural word in English.

Btw other examples include "actually" which is used to mean "currently", and "eventually" which is used to mean "maybe".

Personally I'm torn whether to consider this incorrect use of the language as it is quite widespread. Maybe it would be better to consider this as the emergence of a new dialect.

And American tech companies have been substantially more successful that European tech companies so maybe it does actually make sense to have stock options as part of compensation rather than employer bonuses?