collections
Here I’m keeping track of articles / news / links that I find interesting.
Seeing around corners
This is a fantastic article on the power, purpose, and purview of modeling in the social sciences (and minimal models more generally). I really liked the line “The rise and refinement of artificial societies [i.e. minimal models] is not going to be a magic mirror, but it promises some hope of seeing, however dimly, around the next corner.”
Letter to an aspiring intellectual
“Your gaze is drawn, a flirtation begins, you learn more, you find some interlocutors, and, sometimes before you know it, your topic is before you and your intellectual course is set. There’s no algorithm for this: It’ll happen or it won’t.”
De profundis
Oscar Wilde’s ‘love’ letter to Bosie douglas when incarerated.
Letter by Boltzmann
A surprisingly personal and entertaining read
Web of stories
A collection of interesting life stories
Attention networks
A nice blog on the different types of NN
Attention: the math
Nice blog on the math behind attentional neural networks (surprisingly hard to find; most blogs give just graphical demonstrations).
Oscar Wilde Versus Nietzche
Interesting comparisons of the two philosophers
PyTorch-Trasformers
Tutorial on how to use hugging-face with your own dataset
Vehicle routing problems
Intro on how to use the googoogle or-tools from vehicle routiong problems
Python word segmentation
Uses dynamic programming. There is also a Space O(1) method that uses upper triangular matrices.
Causal inference for time series data
The war on excellence
“Needless to say, the spectacle of an individual moving against his or her expert community away from carrots and towards sticks is generally viewed as a cause for alarm independently of whether that individual is a malfunctioning fool or a genius about to invalidate community groupthink.”
The soul of man under socialism
Early essay on the benefits of socialism for an artistic / individual point of view.