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…

Autism’s First Child, Finding Quantum Quest, Maintenance Phase — 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 : — 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. Google/DeepMind has a massive pre-trained visual model called Flamingo, Anthropic… — This is a relatively exciting week in the ML industry. Google/DeepMind has a massive pre-trained visual model called Flamingo, Anthropic raised over a half-billion dollars in their Series B, and a lot of cool papers came out of ICLR workshops (I’m particularly interested in this paper about generating puzzles to…

I’m back on the road for a bit, hopefully with enough reading to keep me busy but not weighed down. Prions, Yugoslavia, and immigration. — 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. …

Oh crud, this is too many papers; I should probably rethink this strategy of pasting an Arxiv link here instead of reading or saving it in… — Oh crud, this is too many papers; I should probably rethink this strategy of pasting an Arxiv link here instead of reading or saving it in a tab. I decided to make a daily routine to finally get ahead on filtering and summarizing. A Conversational Paradigm for Program Synthesis Program synthesis strives to generate a computer program as a solution to a given problem specification. We propose a…arxiv.org

I’m a full-stack software engineer who’s been writing Python since One Laptop per Child around 13 years ago. I see that there are plenty of… — I’m a full-stack software engineer who’s been writing Python since One Laptop per Child around 13 years ago. I see that there are plenty of deep learning libraries in Python: PyTorch, TensorFlow, Keras, JAX. But when I peek inside example training notebooks and their objects, I can’t figure out what’s…

Stories from the Pacific and Mongolia. Delayed this a bit to see if I would finish a Yugoslavia book, but I’m only halfway. At the end I… — Stories from the Pacific and Mongolia. Delayed this a bit to see if I would finish a Yugoslavia book, but I’m only halfway. At the end I had updates to previous reads and added a mini-review for A Chemical Hunger. Voyagers: The Settlement of the Pacific (Nicholas Thomas, 2021)

I am going to keep doing these, because there are so many mini-worlds out there in podcasts, and on Twitter I hardly ever see anyone talk… — I am going to keep doing these, because there are so many mini-worlds out there in podcasts, and on Twitter I hardly ever see anyone talk about these. I follow way too much politics and tech on Twitter. One pro-tip: if you can’t see a playback speed control on a…