The Calculation

Home
Archive
About
Mapping between two Gaussians using optimal transport and the KL-divergence
Suppose you have two multivariate Gaussian distributions \( S\) and \(T\), parameterized as \( N(\mu_S, \Sigma_S)\) and \( N(\mu_T, \Sigma_T)\). How do…
 • 
Calvin McCarter
Computing the product of Gaussian distributions
Suppose you have \(K\) multivariate Gaussian distributions, each of dimensionality \(N\). It turns out that the product of these distributions, after…
 • 
Calvin McCarter
A visual exploration of the softmax function
The softmax function \(\sigma(\mathbf{z})\) maps vectors to the probability simplex, making it a useful and ubiquitous function in machine learning…
 • 
Calvin McCarter
Most Popular
View all
A visual exploration of the softmax function
 • Calvin McCarter
The demand-driven success of the American tech industry
 • Calvin McCarter
The future of AI and personal servers
 • Calvin McCarter
The Newton Schulz iteration for matrix inversion
 • Calvin McCarter
Two cheers for the file system
 • Calvin McCarter
New
Top
The greatest hope is memory
The educated man, as some still think, is one whose existence is not isolated in the present, whose intellectual and emotional life is consciously…
 • 
Calvin McCarter
Thoughts on the future of 3d printing
I'm pretty bullish on 3d printing. This bullishness seems to be spreading, with recent articles in the Wall Street Journal and The Guardian proclaiming…
 • 
Calvin McCarter
Bailouts without the moral hazard
Nathan Tankus recently wrote about the quandary faced by central banks and regulators. The essential problem is that when the government saves the…
 • 
Calvin McCarter
Leonard Cohen's Avalanche is a song about Earth
The mysterious, haunting lyrics to Avalanche by Leonard Cohen have received a variety of interpretations. The speaker of the song is said to be a…
 • 
Calvin McCarter
Peer review worsens precision but improves recall
I think Adam Mastroianni has done a fine job critiquing peer review as a barrier to entry and as a service to paper-readers, but that's not how it…
 • 
Calvin McCarter
Gradient approximations in derivative-free optimization
Most of modern ML is heavily reliant on gradient descent and its variants. We have some loss function we want to minimize; if the loss function we…
 • 
Calvin McCarter
Should power go to the people who want it?
In a philosophical moment after Twitterers voted for his ouster, Elon Musk tweeted, “Those who want power are the ones who least deserve it.” Musk’s…
 • 
Calvin McCarter
The Calculation
The Calculation
I write about AI, CS, and a lot of other topics that interest me.
Recommendations
Aryeh Kontorovich
Aryeh Kontorovich
Aryeh Kontorovich
Radical Contributions
Radical Contributions
Conrad Bastable
e
entirelyuseless’s Newsletter
entirelyuseless
jonstokes.com
jonstokes.com
Jon Stokes
elsewhere
Twitter
Website

The Calculation

AboutArchiveRecommendations
© 2023 Calvin McCarter
Privacy ∙ Terms ∙ Collection notice
Start WritingGet the app
Substack is the home for great writing