Bigger on the Inside

I’ve been silent on this blog for a while. I’ve been reducing my time on the internet to “touch grass” more as the young-uns put it. I guess I’ll return to more active contributions on open source software and writing on this blog when the LLM hype thing dies down a little more. This post is more of a overflow piece. I was about to reply to Christine Lee’s post on Bsky but as usual I am too verbose, so I’ve transmigrated the content here, and expanded upon it. [Read More]

I just awokened from a really visceral dream of a time in primary school. Just need to write it down somewhere. When I was a kid in school, I hated showing my working. I recall one maths test that I did where I had scored a 100%, and the teacher marking my exam deducted 10 marks for not showing my working*Later when I was in high school I similarly had marks deducted from my physics exam for consistently not handing in my homework. [Read More]

I’ve been thinking a bit about reputation lately. This was spurned by a few events/incidents in my life: A startup founder I am consulting with threw a temper tantrum due to inconsistent results due to a combination of UI complications and machine learning algorithms. They claimed that “…We need to fix this in the next 24 hrs because our reputation is on the line here. If you aren’t able to fix it then I’ll need to make alternate arrangements asap” My GopherConAU co-organizer stressing out over the website design of Go Go Go Gogo, and stressing over pixel perfection of the sponsorship prospectus because she wants “the [prospective sponsors and attendees] to think we are professionals - our reputation is all we have” A work meeting with an external client about something got somewhat derailed for about 10 minutes because the one person from the other party recognized me as the author of Gorgonia and we (me and said other person) proceeded to talk about super-deep technical details of why their company ended up writing their own library. [Read More]

Two coincident things happened at work today. Both things coincidentally were solved by me using emacs to provide a visual depiction of date ranges. First, as part of a larger project, I wrote a bit of code to break up a date range into multiple intervals. A key issue of debate is whether it would be better to split up the full date range into a bunch of smaller intervals with gaps in between or to have gapless intervals. [Read More]

Today was truly an intense day for me despite having minimal physical activities. I started my work day at 9 a.m.-ish having a bunch of discussions comparing random forests and gradient boosted machines and how we can get one process to converge onto the results of another process with similar-enough internal structures. This was then followed by another meeting discussing the inner workings of transformers and encoding tabular data into transformers. [Read More]

I had fun at GopherConSG! It’s my third time at GopherConSG and after a few years of absence (thanks to COVID-19), it was sure good to see some old familiar faces like Valentine, Sau Sheong, Dave and Bill. This blog post is a retrospective on my GopherConSG 2023 talk: Man Bites Dog. My GopherConSG talk was way too long. I had to trim down my talk from 1 hour 45 mins to 30 mins, and I feel like I missed a lot of the Go content. [Read More]

The English language needs a new modal verb denoting an epistemic modality - specifically one that expresses a modality of probability. I propose the word “ween” (/we꞉i꞉n/ way-in). The preterite form is “weend” (/we꞉i꞉nd/ way-ind), though I am uncertain as to when one would use the preterite form. As an example of expressing a modality of probability, here’s an example sentence: “Touching live wires ween kill you”, which means “There is a probability that you will be killed if you touch live wires”. [Read More]

Dear Editor, I am grateful to have been asked to provide some reflection on the eve of the 15th anniversary since the last publication by this journal, of a report written entirely by human minds. As one grows older, one finds more things to reflect upon. Perhaps then we should reflect on the most incredible journey that humanity has taken so far. As I write this, the budding field of scientific hermeneutics is now at its most explosive growth stage yet. [Read More]

TL;DR - I wrote annotation-mode, which is a emacs minor mode for annotating text documents for machine learning purposes. Recently at work I had to annotate some text documents for a piece of NLP work. The annotation involves marking regions of the text with a category, as well as a rectangle which represents the region. At first I thought to build a webapp to do the annotation. The webapp would load a text file would be drawn onto a canvas object. [Read More]

Earlier in my afternoon nap, I think I made the most interesting connection. It may well be wrong - my explanation is certifiably sloppy and unrigorous. It definitely needs a lot of refinement. Yes, this will be very bullshitty if you know anything about neuroscience or psychology. It also relies on some very unproved hypotheses of how brains work. I am mainly putting this brain dump down for myself anyway. But if you are a pop-sci author who wants to run with it, feel free to do so. [Read More]