Recent readings

ML Architecture and papers

Scaling Monosemanticity: Extracting Interpretable Features from Claude 3 Sonnet Really important article, seemingly a breakthough in peering inside LLMs. A nice adjunct to this article is the less dense An Intuitive Explanation of Sparse Autoencoders for Mechanistic Interpretability of LLMs. My big worry about this is …

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“Hundreds of Beavers” is 5-stars for the right audience

Hundreds of Beavers” restored my faith in the comedic art of cinema.

It's a silent b&w movie that combines a few live-action actors with Terry Gilliam-style animation to tell the story of Our Hero learning to survive and become a competent-enough trapper to win the hand of The Fur-Trader's …

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New YOLO, Tensor Math Diagramming Language

  • There’s a new version of YOLO: https://github.com/THU-MIG/yolov10

  • I’ve studied this proposal for hours and I still can’t figure out if it would be a help or a hindrance. It’s a diagramming language for tensor math, which is a good idea, but I …

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Some recent readings

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Conformer: An interesting ML architecture that I'm abandoning

BirdCLEF is a bird-call recognition contest that runs yearly on Kaggle. (CLEF stands for Cross Language Education and Function.)

Last year, I participated in BirdCLEF because the domain was native Hawaiian birds, so even though I didn't know much of anything about audio ML, I had a leg up in …

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About Larry

Larry O'Brien sold his first program at age 16 and has been an influential voice in the software engineering community since 1989. He edited Computer Language, AI Expert, Software Development, and Game Developer magazines, founded the Jolt Programming Awards, and wrote the "Codewatch" columnist for SD Times from 2001-2015. Three …

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Sly Flourish's "Luck Replacing Inspiration" in D&D is +3 to players

We used Sly Flourish's Replacing 5E Luck With Inspiration in our last 2 sessions and everyone loved it after a few reminders to "you miss, but turn your luck die" (everyone has a D6 in front of them with 6 indicating 0 luck).

But this mechanic, unlike inspiration, happens a …

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Thoughts on Hawkins’ “A Thousand Brains”

Jeffrey Hawkins is the CEO of Numenta, a company that has been pursuing machine intelligence since the early 2000s. Prior to that he was the founder of Palm Pilot, the most successful Personal Digital Assistant, the sale of which presumably has funded Numenta this part quarter-century.

Hawkins’ approach is iconoclastic …

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Breakfast in Liliha

The other day we were eating breakfast at the counter of the wonderful Liliha Bakery in Oahu and were chatting with a local guy who told us he was 84. Really nice conversation until the pancakes were almost gone when he said "Not to get into politics but..." pregnant pause …

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