We’ve evolutionarily adapted to a certain state of reality. If something does not fit into that model, it goes into the unknown box, and the outcome is anyone’s guess. But if something is a simulacra - a simulated version of something real - you can be sure it will throw off the natural balance. It’s pretending to be something it’s not. Fruit candy will trick you into consuming it, but provide …

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If 2% of things “succeed” in a field, imagination matters at least as much as prediction. What do I mean by this? The key is to understand accuracy, precision and recall - concepts from machine learning / statistics / whatever you wanna call it. I never remember the formulae so here’s how I understand them. If something happens 2% of the time, such as startup …

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This post assumes familiarity with linear algebra at the level of my post on low rank matrices. Introduction I recently read a wonderful paper by Netflix on linear autoencoders (LAEs), and how to avoid them overfitting towards the identity1. The paper also discusses how LAEs perform low rank approximation of a matrix, and relate to previous matrix factorisation (MF) techniques. Here’s …

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Introduction I thought it would be fun to go over some matrix basics since they’re used everywhere. In particular, embeddings in machine learning are just lists of numbers. I’ve been investigating those of late, and it’s useful to be fluent with matrices when playing around with them. I’ll start with very simple questions then move on to some slightly more advanced …

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In an age of disinformation and deepfakes, how will we know the authenticity of things we see on the web? Disinformation is a key civilisational risk that could threaten stability, peace, and democracy amongst other things. The problem I see something on the web, and I want to know whether certain parties I trust attest to its authenticity. This could be the party that originated the information, …

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If AI and robots can produce lots of goods and services at low cost, it’ll be like the deflationary wave of globalisation. In a world of abundance, things are cheap. Or in other words, there’s lots of purchasing power to go around. How we distribute that purchasing power is another question. But there should be a lot more to distribute. Some argue that despite automation there will still be lots …

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When I was in university I strolled into a maths class on topology. It was extremely abstract, with definition after definition, and theorem after theorem presented without motivation. Sometimes in maths one doesn’t need a motivation; one is just playing around. And that’s wonderful. And some folks seem totally fine doing that without talking about it. But I personally prefer being clear about …

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Our understanding of Darwinian evolution is that the environment favours certain individuals of a species each generation. These individuals end up passing on their genes more than others. If two individuals have offspring together, there is random crossover between their DNA as it’s passed on. Furthermore, some random mutations are introduced which could lead to a change in fitness with respect …

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Ironically, I think one of the biggest successes of decentralised technologies like Ethereum and IPFS will be to centralise API design across organisations. Currently, when an organisation wants to expose its services as an API, it decides on a medium. Often, this is HTTP. If we’re lucky, an SDK in different programming languages is provided; if not, those need to be written, and maintained. …

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Increasingly, it seems as though the idea of multiculturalism is losing its place as the dominant paradigm of the world, even in the West. Putin claims liberalism has “become obsolete”1, while Merkel has said that multiculturalism has “utterly failed”2. For brevity, we can take multiculturalism and liberalism to mean relatively open borders and immigration policies, on a …

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