punk.ist - A list of increasing importance Unix - The philosophy of modular programs vi key bindings - Comfortable computing Artificial Life - Life in silico 100 Rabbits - Low-tech maritime artist collective Antifragility - Strength from setbacks Lauryn Hill’s MTV Unplugged - The unknown Queen of Hip-Hop George Watsky’s Live! From the Metro - The concert which made me love live music Justine Tunney - One hell of a programmer| jarbus.net
Everything Matters| jarbus.net
Contents: Introduction, Step away, come back later, Focus, but not too much, Generalization comes after specialization, Don’t bother if you don’t need to, Let Go Introduction I recently read Zen in the Art of Archery, which isn’t a book about archery as much as it is a book about zen. The book describes author’s journey learning archery from a zen master. I highly recommend it, the book is a short read–I finished it in a day. My core takeaway, which fails to properly describe book, ...| Blogs on
I’ve been an author on a few papers before, but I recently published the first research project where I was responsible for most of the work and direction. It’s in the first 2024 issue of the journal Artificial Life, which you can find here (I’ll post camera-ready paper here later this year, but for now, you can view the pre-print on arxiv. Below, I tell the chronology of the project and summarize our findings. We explore the conditions under which trade can emerge between four deep rei...| Blogs on
How great would it be if the solution to most errors you face were in the first place you looked? That’s what the Arch Wiki has been for me: a massive wealth of information and troubleshooting resources to help me navigate the various configuration and installation issues I’ve encountered. Some people claim Arch Linux is too difficult for new users, but for me it’s been the only distribution I’ve been able to get consistently working, and it’s all thanks to the detailed documentatio...| Blogs on
Excerpts I found interesting from Alan Watt’s The Way of Zen, grouped by vibes: DefinitionConventionFeelGrowingSpontaneityPointingEgoInterferencePresentNegationLiberationZa-zenWidespreadArt Definition Zen Buddhism is a way and a view of life which does not belong to any of the formal categories of modern Western thought. As will soon be obvious, a way of liberation can have no positive definition. It has to be suggested by saying what it is not, somewhat as a sculptor reveals an image by th...| Blogs on
Flash attention, a recent implementation of attention which makes less calls to high-bandwidth memory, uses a version of the softmax function which is numerically stable. In this post, I’ll briefly showcase how this is done and an example of an unstable softmax. The softmax function is used in machine learning to convert a vector of real numbers to a vector of probabilities which sum to 1, and is defined as: softmax(x) = [exp(x[i]) / sum([exp(xj) for xj in x]) for xi in x] where x is a vect...| Blogs on
Kittyplot is a program designed to plot experiment data in the kitty terminal using the kitty graphics protocol, primarily for use on HPC clusters. Plots are rendered using matplotlib, and users can zoom into different regions of the plots by setting x and y limits using their editor. I use prompt_toolkit to accept regexp input and I override the tab-completion to instead display a list of all metrics that are matched by the current regexp. This will not be a well-maintained repo for the fors...| Blogs on
Make a fucking website already, Owen. You’ve been playing around with the idea of making a blog for like two years, but you’ve been dragging your feet. Maybe you can’t decide what framework to use, or where to host it, or blah blah blah. If you want excuses not to make a site, I’m sure you’ll find them. But it literally just takes a few hours, less if you don’t set up a domain name or theme to start. You can do all that later. The important thing is getting it online, the rest is ...| Blogs on
Matthew Carlson’s blog post “Fighting Distraction With Unit Tests” inspired me to share some extra benefits of writing test code I’ve discovered during my PhD program. I’m working on a weird project that’s constantly changing as I try new things, and naturally, debugging and ensuring correctness was a nightmare. So I started writing tests, cursing myself for needing to write so much code I’ll likely throw away soon. But as it turns out, testing can be pretty helpful in a few oth...| Blogs on
I don’t know anybody in real life who blogs regularly, and I think that kills my motivation to write blog posts myself. I actually started writing this post before realizing that a friend of mine has a blog, but in my defense he’s only posted twice in the past 2 years. I suppose that makes my title a lie, but I like the title, and the point still stands. I want to build a writing habit, but it feels hard to get the motivation to do it from within myself. I’m a programmer, and while I’...| Blogs on
I love the look of LaTeX but hate the experience of writing in LaTeX, at least compared to Markdown. Luckily, Pandoc can convert Markdown files to PDFs using a LaTeX engine as the renderer, and includes a custom Markdown specification that can fill almost all my LaTeX needs. First, let’s talk about where Pandoc Markdown falls short: No custom LaTeX style guides (although citation style files are supported) No Section Numbering There is, thanks to naruhodo on Hacker News for the correction R...| Blogs on
An ever-expanding list of concepts in the field of AI to give myself and others an easy reference. Each item in the list contains a short, rudimentary definition I’ve written, as well as a link to a resource that can explain it better. Ablation Study: Removing some parts of a machine learning model to measure impact on performance Advantage Function: The difference between a Q-value for a state-action pair and a value for the state. Useful to determine how good an action is relative to its ...| Blogs on
There is a great tool known as pandoc that can convert documents from one filetype to another. For example, you can convert a Microsoft Word document to a PDF, without even needing to own a copy of Microsoft Word! However, we care about Pandoc’s ability to convert a Markdown document to a slideshow presentation using LaTeX Beamer as a rendering engine. There is a great writeup about this basic feature here. TL;DR: With Pandoc installed and markdown file Demo.md, executing pandoc -t beamer D...| Blogs on
Is it better to have no facts about a topic and thus no opinion, or have access to a few “out of context” facts and thus a misinformed opinion? TL;DR: Either start learning about issues you care about, or stop caring about them so much. It’s more honest, less mental effort, and is less likely to ruin Thanksgiving. You can’t be well-informed on every topic; It’s just not possible. That’s why world leaders have advisers. Yet somehow, if you look at anyone’s Facebook account, you d...| Blogs on
Not all rules are made equal. Some rules, like the speed limit, are broken by everyone and their mother, and are enforced (mostly) when people are breaking them to a dangerous point. Other rules, like “don’t murder people”, are enforced far more. Why is that? Different Rules, Different Tools Some rules are in place to assign blame to someone with bad judgement. There’s nothing morally wrong with jaywalking when there are no cars coming, but you are at fault if you walk into oncoming t...| Blogs on
The more I learn about the world, the less certain I become about it. There are so many conflicting views and information taken out of context that it’s hard to discern fact from truth. Below are some notes I keep to help navigate the sea of information that is modern society. TL;DR: Don’t get fooled by facts if they have no context, don’t discount an opinion because it’s biased, and hear out crazy ideas. Be skeptical: Fact != Truth There are facts available for virtually anything you...| Blogs on
Here’s the problem with advertising AI-based technology that doesn’t exist: You cannot promise anything about your product. We’ve all seen AI advertised to the masses that doesn’t work as advertised, just look at any voice-to-text system. When I got my Apple Watch, I hoped to use it to respond to messages without getting distracted by my phone. I quickly realized that wasn’t a viable solution: I had to repeat my message multiple times per text in order to get the correct dictation. ...| Blogs on
Jeff stepped over a beer can, then over a water bottle and onto a mat, whose faded lettering vaguely resembled the phrase “Welcome!” He opened his front door and walked inside. Looking to his right, Jeff noticed his old hooded friend where he left him; on his living-room rocking chair. The cold metal scythe still in his lap, the skeleton hadn’t moved an inch from where he left him earlier that morning. “What’s cooking, big guy?” Jeff said as he walked to the kitchen to grab his la...| Blogs on
Some thoughts on Happiness: Happiness doesn’t come from wealth. Otherwise, therapists and anti-depressants would have to be much cheaper. If happiness came from consumption of goods and services, it would therefore follow that once those goods and services are reduced or cut off, one would no longer be as happy. If you can cut off happiness, it’s more akin to a drug than an emotion. “Close relationships, more than money or fame, are what keep people happy throughout their lives.” Whil...| Blogs on
Introduction In this essay we will give a brief history of crytocurrency leading up to Bitcoin, give an overview of the Bitcoin protocol by summarizing key sections of the whitepaper, and briefly discuss Bitcoin’s use of cryptographical proof and computational security instead of trusted third parties within the protocol. History Bitcoin is far from original. Digital currencies date back as far as 1982, where David Chaum released a paper called "Blind Signatures", which formed the basis of ...| Blogs on
What happened to “Don’t give out your name on the internet?” Within the past 15 years, the desire for online anonymity has vanished – as “normal people” joined the digital world, the number of “creepy people” worth hiding your identity from seems to have dropped in comparison. Despite the perceived safety of the online world, remaining anonymous still has its merits. Anonymity addresses ideas In an ideal world, political debate occurs detached from the people debating the topi...| Blogs on
Forgiveness has a negative connotation these days. We see forgiving each other as weak — as not standing by one’s values, as giving up one’s pride. This view is incredibly counter-productive and, in my opinion, the cause of many problems in today’s society. Here is the actual definition of forgiveness: forgive (verb) to cease to feel resentment against (an offender) Source: Merriam Webster This definition is all that forgiveness has to be — not pardoning or excusing someone for...| Blogs on
I installed linux on a OnePlus6T. Setup took less than an hour, technical issues included. Why $90 for 8GB RAM, 128GB storage, 2.8GHz 8-core CPU Linux on the OnePlus 6T is well documented Low power consumption Tiny footprint No additional cables Built-in battery backup WiFi, bluetooth, speaker, screen, etc Negligible environmental impact sans shipping I wanted to play with Linux on ARM I don’t need a dedicated cable to power or connect it.| jarbus.net