Modified: January 23, 2022
carve the world at the joints
This page is from my personal notes, and has not been specifically reviewed for public consumption. It might be incomplete, wrong, outdated, or stupid. Caveat lector.Links to this note
my values
It's a useful exercise to occasionally reflect on what I value. stab 1: Generally pro tech, creating new things, non-zero-sum contributions…
macrostate
A macrostate in statistical mechanics is a collection of base-level states; equivalently, a subset of [ phase space ]. It's what you see…
representation
In modern ML, representation learning is the art of trying to find useful abstractions, embodied as encoding networks. We can learn…
style guide
Note naming The general goal is to minimize the use of aliasing in links. In case where these guidelines suggest an unnatural or uncommon…
capabilities research
In the discourse around [ AI safety ] you sometimes see the claim that research on AI capabilities is harmful to the extent that it outpaces…
my relationship with tech
I've identified as a 'tech' person, but I now feel uncomfortable in many tech circles. What is tech and what does it mean to be a tech…
the best things have many stories
I used to think that there was a 'best' way to motivate an area. For example, in VI, the ELBO is derived from the KL divergence between a…
fundamentals are useless for adults
There's often a lot of space between learning [ fundamental ]s and being able to do a thing. Understanding Turing machines didn't…
there are no paradoxes, just bad models
If two statements that both seem true conflict with each other, then it seems like you have a paradox. But the world itself is just as it is…
love is value alignment
What does it mean to love someone? Of course this question has as many answers as there are people, and probably more. But here's one view…
the discourse is wrong
In order for a group of people, like an academic field, or a political elite, to meaningfully converse about a complex topic, they have to…
legibility in software
(related: [ growing up means becoming wrong ], ask for evidence , [ Seeing Like A State ]) Related to some interactions with NameRedacted…