Reinflection experiments in Spanish and Arabic — Early this year, I uploaded a seq2seq model to generate gender counterfactuals in Spanish (el profesor viejo <-> la profesora vieja). Since then, I debugged some issues, made a general-purpose library, and created an initial seq2seq model for Arabic. The goal is to see if passing data through process creates…

Is it September already? 🍂 Mastering the Grain Markets: How Profits Are Really Made (Elaine Kub; 2012 edition) A post on Hacker News pushed me to impulse-buy this book. It turns out this isn’t the most recent edition, and you can find PDFs online. Early in the Ukraine conflict, $WEAT and commodity market trades drew snark from progressive farm Twitter: I live…

OSM follows the King’s English: sports are played on a pitch, centre is spelled fancy, and streets can be a motorway, trunk road, primary / secondary / tertiary, residential, or some specialized options. One which did not connect with me as an American was living street, represented with highway=living_street.

Good podcasts abound. I’m having trouble with the Google Podcasts UI interrupting streams recently, and the single-page architecture makes it difficult to reload something, so maybe I should be using a different app? 80,000 Hours Podcast The signature Effective Altruism podcast, produced by a YC-backed non-profit and named after the goal of a…

After including some weirder astronomy pre-prints in ML Arxiv Hauls (a black hole Dyson sphere in #8 and a quiet/loud aliens power law in #9), I thought I should pool them into one post. …

New Yorker captions, bias bounties, and more: Adan: Adaptive Nesterov Momentum Algorithm for Faster Optimizing Deep Models Adaptive gradient algorithms borrow the moving average idea of heavy ball acceleration to estimate accurate first- and…arxiv.org Researchers describe an optimizer which works better than the popular Adam and AdamW methods. An Algorithmic Framework for Bias Bounties We propose and analyze an algorithmic framework for “bias bounties”: events in which external participants are invited…arxiv.org

The Explainable AI and Ethics space covers a wide range of topics — I always try to mention you can find philosophy, history of technology, mathematical methods, etc. Before attending an AI ethics event, I decided to do a deep dive into ‘Algorithmic Recourse’ — finding the change needed for…

For background: DEF CON is a long-running cybersecurity conference held in Las Vegas. Recently it takes place the same week as Black Hat, another Vegas-based security conference, but DEF CON remains known for an independent / hacker vibe. Famously they only accept cash at the door for the event badge…

These have become useful to me as a mental bookmarking exercise and as a summary for interesting papers. A Dyson Sphere around a black hole The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) has been conducted for nearly 60 years. A Dyson Sphere, a spherical…arxiv.org This paper is a year old, but I think resurfaced in a weird Twitter or podcast deep dive. Previous work had considered whether Dyson spheres could be built around a supermassive black…