The existence claim for the singular value decomposition (SVD) is quite strong: “Every matrix is diagonal, provided one uses the proper bases for the domain and range spaces” (Trefethen & Bau III, 1997) . MIT professor Gilbert Strang has a wonderful lecture on the SVD, and he includes an existence proof for the SVD…
Conway’s Game of Life is one of the most popular and iconic cellular automata. It is so famous that googling it loads up a working simulation right in your browser! The rules for the Game o…
Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have recently become popular for interpretability of machine learning models (although sparse dictionary learning has been around since 1997). Machine learning models and LLMs are becoming more powerful and useful, but they are still black boxes, and we don’t understand how they do the…
Famous Birthdays has been described as a “ Wikipedia for Gen-Z ”. It’s an insight into popularity across the internet of influencers, not just from traditional stage and screen but also social media channels such as TikTok and Instagram.
Very few think the world is making progress. In this article, we look at the history of global living conditions and show that the world has made immense progress in important aspects.
GitButler now supports first class conflicts, which makes rebasing much less annoying. What is "fearless rebasing"?
Fang-Pen Lin's blog about programming
First we discussed the fact that technical issues cause remote meetings to suck. Then, we discussed how even when there are no technical issues, remote meetings still suck. They suck because they e…
The PlayStation community means everything to us, so I felt it was important to update you on a difficult day at our company. We have made the extremely hard decision to announce our plan to commence a reduction of our overall headcount globally by about 8% or about 900 people, subject to local law and […]
The eradication of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is achievable within a decade, and The Ocean Cleanup aims to make it happen faster and more cost effectively.
Software people are always all up in the XY problem: someone asks about how to do X when what they're really trying to solve is Y. I find the YX problem much more frustrating: where software people decide that they want to answer question Y even though what someone asks is question X. I've seen...
Learn how you can use XDP/eBPF to get maximum bandwidth for your applications.
Before the Internet, if we wanted to read up-to-the-minute news or weather, we had Teletext. It is a low-bandwidth text standard that used to be sent via the hidden black border on TV signals.
Using thermal physics, cosmology, and computer science to calculate password vulnerability to the biggest possible brute-force attack.
A few years ago, I read The Toyota Way, driven by my curiosity about the origins of Agile software development. However, I became even more…
R has built-in support for two functional Object Oriented Programming (OOP) systems: S3 and S4, corresponding to the third and fourth version of the S language, respectively. The two systems are largely compatible; however, they are two fundamentally distinct systems, two systems for a user to understand, two systems…
The road to hell is paved via collaboration, consensus, inclusiveness, stability
DHL was guaranteed timely delivery of critical business documents by giving away airplane tickets. That made it was a pioneer in the sharing economy.
Road numbering is a system with clear rules. What happens when the people responsible for numbering roads don't follow them?
Index creation time is a critical database metric. Learn more about how Lantern enables 90x faster index creation times than pgvector, and how Lantern compares to Pinecone.
Google has chosen to send a response to my article to Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Roundtable. Here is my response. (1) On the March 2019 core update claim in the piece: This is baseless speculation. The March 2019 core update was designed to improve the quality of our search
This post will give some example comparisons running Llama 2 uncensored model versus its censored model.
A short explanation of what is preemption and how it works
My founder friends constantly think about growth. They think about how to measure their business growth and how to get to the next order of magnitude scale. If they’re making $1M ARR today, they think about how to get to $10M ARR. If they have 1,000 users today, they think about how to get to 10,000 users.
