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…

This month I read two books while on the road, before returning home. The third ‘book’ is more of a printed pamphlet, but it was interesting nonetheless. Kafka’s Travels: Exoticism, Colonialism, and the Traffic of Writing (John Zilcosky, 2003) While planning a trip to Prague, it makes sense to reach for a book about their famous writer, Franz Kafka. I really liked…

I had a metric ton of Arxiv links built up in the draft for this post, which I’ve tried to trim down to the papers which I hope can stick around as mental bookmarks for me. Accountability in an Algorithmic Society: Relationality, Responsibility, and Robustness in Machine… In 1996, Accountability in a Computerized Society [95] issued a clarion call concerning the erosion of accountability…arxiv.org

I’m staying close to the UN Green Line, by a ‘Berlin #2’ Kebab House. On the first day, I walked around the corner and saw a bare concrete structure with a roadway going down into the ground. OMG, The Crossing, I think, snapping to scenes from Counterpart and The City…

Due to the length and complexity of Tombstone, it was my main book for May. Also a coworker lent me a book on fungi, so I read it before leaving on my trip. After watching Who Killed Malcolm X? on Netflix, I did some background reading and ordered Finding W…

Autism’s First Child — The story of the first child diagnosed with autism: Donald Triplett from Forest, Mississippi. There are thoughtful tangents into early 20th century eugenics, race and autism diagnoses today, and so on. The podcast’s creators wrote a 2010 Atlantic article about Triplett and a 2016 book (In A Different Key: The…

Time for another hyper-exciting sweep of ML papers : A very preliminary analysis of DALL-E 2 The DALL-E 2 system generates original synthetic images corresponding to an input text as caption. We report here on…arxiv.org This is a less strictly formatted paper, but the authors have access to DALL-E 2 and are posting on arxiv, so let’s go. Just as CLIP / DALL-E floored image generation people one year ago, DALL-E 2 is a clear winner…

This is a relatively exciting week in the ML industry. …

I’m back on the road for a bit, hopefully with enough reading to keep me busy but not weighed down. I’ve been making progress on Tombstone, the history of the Great Chinese Famine. That will be in my post next month. …