flâneur

Curtis Chong

21 followers · 17 following · 1596 views

on the atlas — 46

highlights — 75

  • if a small region of the universe by chance reached a more stable vacuum, this "bubble" (also called "bounce")[3][4] would spread
    False vacuum
  • We want to learn a compressed representation 𝑍 Z such that a generator fed ( 𝑍 , 𝐿 ) (Z,L) can predict 𝑌 Y almost as well as a teacher model that sees the full 𝐶 C.
    LLMs can invent their own compression - Rajan Agarwal
  • In the very small sample set above, 8/10 attacks had windows of opportunity of less than a week. Setting a cooldown of 7 days would have prevented the vast majority of these attacks from reaching end users
    We should all be using dependency cooldowns
  • Since the light field goes (close) to zero at the surface, it has very little penetration into metal at all, meaning the vast majority of the light power is reflected
    optics - Why do metals have high optical reflectivity? - Physics Stack Exchange
  • The question is how to calculate log(LSE) without materializing the full logit table.
    Cut Cross Entropy from first principles - Omkaar Kamath
  • It was the confidence that things will be better, that they will have affordable housing, jobs, etc. this confidence in the future helped increase trust in government, fellow citizens, and facilitate the baby boom
    What was the late 1940s (post World War II) like? : r/AskHistorians
  • labels must be sparse. Typically closed evals are constructed by approximately retrieving candidate documents, and having humans select the top document from that.
    AI Search Insights | Exa
  • This typically means retrieving the initial set of documents through embeddings or term matching, and then reranking with a small (<1B params) reranker. Because of this, we'd expect in general to trust the ranking of raw search results less than that of a much larger LLM with both more knowledge and more tokens to spend reasoning about the document.
    AI Search Insights | Exa
  • most reasonable prompts work, for most grading tasks
    AI Search Insights | Exa
  • Verification gap: Even with a good prompt, there's a bit of a mismatch here. Fundamentally, the point of retrieval is to provide information that the LLM doesn't already know—if an LLM knew it, we wouldn't need RAG at all. It's a little odd then, to trust an LLM to grade results that it doesn't know the right answer to.
    AI Search Insights | Exa
  • An open eval simply is a list of queries, which can be run over any index.
    AI Search Insights | Exa
  • But at Exa we've seen in practice that this is an imperfect proxy: performance at small scales doesn't necessarily hold at large scale.
    AI Search Insights | Exa
  • if a true positive was never even shown to the human labelers, it will be labeled as a negative, regardless whether the human labelers would've selected it.
    AI Search Insights | Exa
  • One way to solve this false negative problem is to reduce the corpus size.
    AI Search Insights | Exa
  • It's because you got to start somewhere. You're trying to take say a disordered phase (liquid) and arrange it into an ordered structure (solid). Just like if you're building a house you can't simply toss all your materials and end up with a house.
    Why do phase changes need a nucleation site? : r/askscience
  • DDL does this in a simple way: it retrieves 2 random facts, ‘thinks about them’, and if the result is ‘interesting’, it is promoted to consciousness and possibly added to the store / trained on
    LLM Daydreaming · Gwern.net
  • ty has fine-grained incrementalization: changing a single function would only cause a re-parse on that function itself (and nothing else), and its dependent functions, and so on. Pyrefly, on the other hand, uses module-level incrementation: changing a single function would cause a re-parse on the entire file/module, and its dependent files/modules, etc.
    Pyrefly vs. ty: Comparing Python’s Two New Rust-Based Type Checkers | Edward Li's Blog
  • if your objects all fit into a single square of your chosen grid size (for example, if your objects are treated as being infinitely small points), and are approximately evenly spaced, then a spatial hash is likely to be more appropriate; you won't get much benefit from the tree structure's ability to early-out from tests.
    QuadTree vs Spacial hashing; which to use? : r/gamedev
  • new materials are a victim of the success of material sciences. Companies and researchers have spent more than 100 years systematically working to discover, optimize, and scale new materials. Today’s materials and processes are much harder to surpass than those of the early twentieth century.
    Getting materials out of the lab - Works in Progress
  • At the same time, though, I think the lack of enthusiastic adoption suggests that namedtensors don't really solve that problem; I think people have found it a lot easier to just remember various ad-hoc conventions after getting some experience.
    [D] Modern best coding practices for Pytorch (for research)? : r/MachineLearning
  • Zeeman placed a piece of asbestos soaked in salt water into a Bunsen burner
    Zeeman effect
  • Boltzmann was twenty-five years of age when he came upon James Clerk Maxwell's work on the kinetic theory of gases which hypothesized that temperature was caused by collision of molecules.
    Ludwig Boltzmann
  • Computing and storing the full Hessian matrix takes Θ ( 𝑛 2 ) memory, which is infeasible for high-dimensional functions such as the loss functions of neural nets
    Hessian matrix
  • Batching also lets you take arbitrary diagonals of a tensor easily
    Einsum is easy and useful | Erik Jenner
  • There is no free lunch, though: Tensor Parallelism can be complicated to implement and it generally results in each GPU being used less efficiently
    Tensor Parallelism in Three Levels of Difficulty | Determined AI
  • At test (inference) time, use an LLM to generate a large number of candidate solutions, each of which is either a directly-generated answer grid, or is a generated program (e.g., in Python) that will generate an answer grid.
    Did OpenAI Just Solve Abstract Reasoning?
  • when they are close together we will have to say they have energy equal to −𝐵 − 𝐵 . This makes sense because then we have to supply 𝐵 𝐵 to pull them apart, and then their energy will be −𝐵+𝐵=0
    quantum mechanics - Negative Energy - Physics Stack Exchange
  • the choice to say the energy is zero when far apart was a human choice.
    quantum mechanics - Negative Energy - Physics Stack Exchange
  • Of all the pairwise distances computed, only about 16% will actually be less than or equal to 𝑟 𝑐
    Cell lists
  • this approach has the advantage of being straightforward to implement and very easy to parallelize
    Cell lists
  • The basis functions are whatever you want them to be. There are no constraints on them other than that they actually form a basis for the representation
    quantum mechanics - Basis functions in group theory and wave functions - Physics Stack Exchange
  • one of the primary reasons that research experience is so desirable during the PhD hiring process is not the research itself, but the fact that the student is more likely to know what they’re getting themselves into.
    A Survival Guide to a PhD
  • since there is no 9 9 -dimensional irreducible representation for S U ( 3 ) , 𝑆 𝑈 ( 3 ) , he made the striking prediction that there should be a 10th short-lived baryonic particle with similar properties and masses as the nine other ones, so that they transformed in the 10 10 -dimensional irreducible representations of S U ( 3 ) . 𝑆 𝑈 ( 3 ) . The missing particle was soon found
    Tensor representations of \(SU(N)\)
  • if you define your own container class, it will be considered to be a pytree leaf unless you register it with JAX
    Working with pytrees — JAX documentation
  • if you define your own container class, it will be considered to be a pytree leaf unless you register it with JAX
    Working with pytrees — JAX documentation
  • Sometimes, when the arguments don’t depend on one another, calls to jax.debug.print() may print them in a different order when staged out with a JAX transformation. I
    Introduction to debugging — JAX documentation
  • errain contour matching, or TERCOM, is a navigation system used primarily by cruise missiles. It uses a contour map of the terrain that is compared with measurements made during flight by an on-board radar altimeter.
    TERCOM - Wikipedia
  • Terrain contour matching, or TERCOM, is a navigation system used primarily by cruise missiles. It uses a contour map of the terrain that is compared with measurements made during flight by an on-board radar altimeter.
    TERCOM - Wikipedia
  • the United Kingdom did not accept the tribal passports of the Haudenosaunee Nationals field lacrosse team for travel to the UK for the 2010 World Lacrosse Championship.[7][8] The United States government offered to immediately issue United States passports to the team-members,
    Iroquois passport - Wikipedia
  • let ti be the time to collect the i-th coupon after i − 1 coupons have been collected
    Coupon collector's problem - Wikipedia
  • working full-time at 2 steps/day
    Generative ML in chemistry is bottlenecked by synthesis
  • The demons of PMI, yield, and other phenomena is why the ‘hopscotching around’ in reactions is a problem
    Generative ML in chemistry is bottlenecked by synthesis
  • Admiral Yi commanded his navy using kites. His kites had specific markings directing his fleet to perform various orders
    Kite - Wikipedia
  • "Some of the mass of the original atom has been converted into kinetic and electromagnetic energy" but exactly which part of the atom loses its mass (electron, proton or neutron)
    homework and exercises - In what way is mass converted into energy in nuclear reaction? - Physics Stack Exchange
  • when we measure mass, we are measuring a sum of effects: mass energy of protons, neutrons, electrons, AND potential energies associated with the nuclear and coulomb forces. Those potentials are a net of a negative value, so the mass we measure is less than the individual, unbound masses
    homework and exercises - In what way is mass converted into energy in nuclear reaction? - Physics Stack Exchange
  • import webdataset as wds
    Training Multimodal
  • Object store storage is also cheaper than machine disk storage
    Training Multimodal
  • Analysis of wheels from two tanks (32 road wheels each, 64 road wheels total) yielded an estimate of 270 tanks produced in February 1944, substantially more than had previously been suspected.[5] German records after the war showed production for the month of February 1944 was 276
    German tank problem
  • It was just fascinating listening to him talk because it was really obvious that he was full of passion for what he was doing.
    Have anyone met Vitalik Buterin on campus before he dropped out? : r/uwaterloo
  • Although one typically doesn't use VASP or QE for post-Hartree Fock processes (chemists typically turn to softwares like Gaussian),
    Quantum ESPRESSO vs VASP - Matter Modeling Stack Exchange