Blog
Do text embeddings perfectly encode text? (redirects to thegradient.pub)
Approachable post about my research into inverting representations from text embedders and language models.
A Brief Survey of Text Retrieval in 2022
A high-level overview of the field of Text Retrieval as it stands in 2022
The Three Types of Contrastive Learning
A taxonomy for thinking about research papers that say they use contrastive learning.
The Weird and Wonderful World of AI Art (redirects to jxmo.notion.site)
How a collection of Twitter people, Discord chats, and Colab notebooks is changing the art world.
Demystifying Noise Contrastive Estimation
Explanation of the Noise Contrastive Estimation algorithm and clarification of terminology. Also covers InfoNCE, a popular technique in contrastive learning.
Introduction to variational autoencoders
A primer on variational autoencoders (VAEs) culminating in a PyTorch implementation of a VAE with discrete latents.
What are adversarial examples in NLP? (redirects to towardsdatascience.com)
Opinionated introduction to adversarial examples within the context of natural language.
Does Model Size Matter? A Comparison of BERT and DistilBERT (redirects to wandb.ai)
Comparison of two transformer-based NLP models, one big, one small.
Tracking HuggingFace Transformer Model-Training with Weights & Biases (redirects to wandb.ai)
Demonstration of the integration between two open-source packages, HuggingFace Transformers and Weights & Biases, and how to use them together to train NLP models.
How many minds do split-brain patients have?
Are split-brain experiments strong evidence that humans have multiple consciousnesses? Essay about Nagel, Parfit, and theories of consciousness.
Why the connectionist reply to The Chinese Room is not successful
Can artificial neural networks create semantics from syntax? Essay about connectionism, the Chinese Room, and artificial neural networks.
The Square-Sum Problem
A fun number theory problem: Given all of the integers from 1 to N, can you arrange all elements such that each adjacent pair sums to a square number?
The Paradox of Set Notation
A juvenile rant about set theory terminology.
Sorting with Color
A visualization of sorting algorithms, sorting randomized colors by hue. It's since been adapted into several top posts on Reddit.
Mapping the D.C. Metro
An interactive illustration of distortions in the Washington, D.C. metro map.
The Best Time to Post on Instagram
Quantitative analysis showing how to get the most likes on a popular social network.
Recreating the Star Wars Opening Crawl
Using CSS and single-point perspective to render the iconic Star Wars opening text crawl in the browser. (Warning: after some changes to CSS syntax in the past few years, it doesn't really work anymore.)
Traveling Salesman Art
Discussion of NP-hard problems, a cool color-based stippling method, and generating art by solving the Traveling Salesman problem.
Largest World Cities Over Time
Animation showing the world's largest cities through the ages.
Animation with K-D Trees
Implementation of K-D trees in Javascript and an animation showing the effect of log(n) nearest-neighbor search on performance.
Expected Salaries of NBA Players
A new metric for quantatitatively estimating the perfect salary for each NBA player. Who's overpaid, and who's due for a bigger contract?