Viewing profile — rors

The Barbican is not a typical brutalist construction. The term brutalist refers to béton brut, which means raw concrete. I.e. you can see the shape of the wooden slats used as a ca…

I was big fan of Scala a decade ago. The idea of a “scalable language” where DSLs could be built within the type system seemed super powerful. I lost my enthusiasm when the communi…

A bit of a tangent but the same byproduct effect is seen in the production of sherry casks for finishing Scotch. A lot of sherry bodegas only really exist to churn out barrels for …

There has also been a big change in the UK’s tax regime that discourages hiring new workers https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/oct/30/bosses-reeve...

The first pension was put in place by Bismark as a way to "steal the clothes of the socialists whilst they were bathing". It was seen as the cheapest social benefit because life ex…

People are odd in terms of what they will tolerate. I prefer having a 15 mins stroll to pick up my coffee or food, for others it’s deal breaking. The time argument is also weird. I…

I remember attending ACL one year, where the conference organisers ran an experiment to test the effectiveness of double blind reviews. They asked reviewers to identify the institu…

I have a PhD from one of the best universities in the world in Machine Translation, I was training feed forward networks in 2014, built models in TensorFlow in 2016, founded a gene…

My girlfriend is an Orthopaedic Surgeon. Great when I've got a broken arm, or need shelves putting up. I wouldn't let her anywhere near my heart or brain. Medicine is super special…

This seems to be a characteristic of many high functioning people, especially successful engineers. There is a "correct" way of living your life, conducting your business, using yo…

My statement did not imply zero sum thinking. The pie can get bigger and the bigger slices can get disproportionately bigger. As an analogy, economies can increase their GDP and in…

The value of content creators on YouTube will follow a power law distribution. There will be a very small number of hugely profitable creators and a vast sea of people who do ok. T…

I wonder if the homogeneity has come from gentrification and high property prices. NYC might have been a crime-ridden dump in the 60s, but it was cheap enough that Andy Warhol coul…

I feel like a lot of these debates boil down dealing with discomfort. We seem to be creating a society where everyone feels they have the right to not feeling stressed and uncomfor…

I was diagnosed with dyslexia in my 40s. It's helped me understand why I struggle with certain tasks. Overall having a label has been a net positive. I'm hesitant to share my diagn…

To reinforce your argument, in the linked article GFS claim that they weren't responsible for the tax avoidance. The recruitment companies they subcontracted out came up with this …

The UK government doesn't mandate units for reporting your own weight. The examples listed are required by law.

It seems obvious to me that LLMs wouldn't be able to find examples of every single problem posed to them in training data. There wouldn't be enough examples for the factual look up…

Your analogy is a little biased in that most professional basketball players careers are over by the time they hit their mid-thirties. If they want to go pro then they need to be p…

David Bowie said it better “If you feel safe in the area you’re working in, you’re not working in the right area. Always go a little further into the water than you feel you’re cap…

Eric Hobsbawm's tetralogy on the long 19th century: Age of Revolution, Age of Capital, Age of Empire, and Age of Extremes. A truly epic date-driven summary of how the industrial an…

Perplexity is term from information theory. It's one measure of the quality of an LM. I.e. how perplexed is my model? To an experienced researcher it's a unit of measurement like m…

You've managed to move on from a situation where you were deprived of security, both with respect to love and money, to a new situation where you are secure at a relatively young a…

My partner is a surgeon in the UK. She's planning on leaving the profession at the end of the year. We talk a lot about what is wrong with the medical profession. One issue is the …

Over the last few months I've been experimenting with Buddhist meditation, which leans heavily into this metaphor. They phrase the metaphor differently, with a focus on flattening …