The Calculation

The Calculation

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"No babysitting": Stephen Boyd on the true benefit of convex optimization
In a recent episode of the excellent InControl podcast, Alberto Padoan asked Stephen Boyd about the value of convex optimization.
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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…
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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.
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Calvin McCarter
What exactly has TabPFN learned to do?
TabPFN [Hollmann et al., 2023], a Transformer model pretrained to perform in-context learning on fresh tabular classification problems, was presented at…
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Calvin McCarter
The New Morality, by Paul Elmer More
I make frequent reference to this text in conversations with right-leaning friends.
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Calvin McCarter
On AI, biology, and China's prospects for leading the next techno-scientific revolution
Tanner Greer at Scholar’s Stage has written an informative report describing the Chinese government’s ambition to lead the next techno-scientific…
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Calvin McCarter
The future of AI and personal servers
A fascinating exchange happened on the latest All In podcast: the besties started talking about personal servers as the future architecture of AI…
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Calvin McCarter
Stephen Boyd on the use of theory, in practice
Stephen Boyd, of convex optimization fame, was interviewed by Alberto Padoan in a recent episode of the InControl podcast. What follows is a short…
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Calvin McCarter
Unmasking Trees for Tabular Data
When tabular imputation is the vibe, unmasking is low-key goated
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Calvin McCarter
The demand-driven success of the American tech industry
Part 1: Why America Wins in the World of Bits
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Calvin McCarter
The Newton Schulz iteration for matrix inversion
The Newton Schulz method is well-known, and the proof of convergence is widely available on the internet.
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Calvin McCarter
Thoughts on the future of 3d printing
I'm pretty bullish on 3d printing.
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Calvin McCarter
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