Personal and technical writings from Alex Strick van Linschoten
I’ve been thinking about what it actually means to create something “with AI” versus creating something “yourself.” The usual framing treats this as binary: either you wrote it, or the machine did. Tools like Pangram try to detect AI-generated text. People unfollow accounts that seem to be posting slop. The implicit question is always: was this made by a human or not? I don’t think that’s the…
I previously learned how to crochet. I never made anything too fancy or intricate but it was an easy way to make beautiful presents for special occasions or individuals. This past christmas we decided that presents could only be exchanged if they were handmade. Cue: hours of double crochet to make a jumper , a snood and some embroidery of Ramallah tatreez patterns . Along the way I discovered…
A colleague at work asked me for some tips on learning German and her situation and goals were fairly common so I thought I’d write up some notes here. For the specific scenario under consideration, and to ground what follows: my colleague’s mother tongue is not English, but she wants to learn German since she now lives there. She’s interested in all the skills and wants to be able to read complex…
My niece reached out to me a few days back asking about tips for studying at school. She was specifically interested in any ideas I had about how to excel in her maths studies. I wrote up my thoughts for her and it occurred to me yesterday that there might be some benefit from putting these notes online as well. Without further ado, therefore… Study Skills Advice As I understand it, your question…
I love blogging and I’ve benefitted a lot from what it’s done for me ever since I started my first Geocities page in the mid 1990s. I maintain a technical blog at mlops.systems and a somewhat less technical blog at alexstrick.com/blog, though hope at some point to merge these together. In the past I would have been content with ensuring that my blog published an RSS feed and known that anyone…
[caption id=“” align=“alignnone” width=“768”] Not by Vermeer. This generated by my friend Stable Diffusion. [/caption] I visited the bumper Vermeer exhibition today in Amsterdam. I had previously seen many of the works separately in different galleries in the USA and here in the Netherlands, but there’s certainly a raw power to bringing them all together in the same space. Above all, it was the…
I read 75 books this year (over 22,000 pages), and a few days still remain. Looking back over the full list, I’m both surprised at how many were only of middling reward. I think the key is to take one’s sweet time on the true gems and speed through the should-have-been-a-blog-post dross. Out of the gems, the following stand out: Sabine Hossenfelder’s Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray .…
A common criticism of deep learning models is that they are ‘black boxes’. You put data in one end as your inputs, the argument goes, and you get some predictions or results out the other end, but you have no idea why the model gave your those predictions. Ways of interpreting learning in computer vision models - credit https://thedatascientist.com/what-deep-learning-is-and-isnt/ This has…
[These are mainly notes for myself, based off Jeremy Howard’s ‘Lesson 0’ video that was recently posted. It doesn’t capture the entirety of what was said during the course, but it includes pieces that I felt are relevant to me now and that might be relevant to me in the future.] decide when you’re studying be precise about how much time you’re going to spend think about how it’s going to fit into…
[This is part of a series on getting out of a language-learning plateau at the intermediate-advanced level. Check out the other parts here.] Seasoned language learners are familiar with the concept of the ‘language plateau’. If you’re learning a second language for the first time, you will inevitably reach a point in your studies where your progress seems to flatten. You will find this place and…
The use of neural networks / architectures is a powerful pattern, but it’s worth remembering that this pattern is part of the broader category of machine learning. (You can think of ‘deep learning’ as a rebranding of neural networks or what was once more commonly referred to as connectionism). In a classic essay published in 1962, an IBM researcher called Arthur Samuel proposed a way to have…
One of the main ways that using neural networks to train models is different from traditional (imperative) programming can be illustrated with a specific task: let’s say you want to use a computer to tell you whether any particular photo you give it is a cat or a dog. An imperative approach might be to make a mega list of certain kinds of features that cats and dogs have, and try to encode the…
Deep Learning is an incredibly powerful technology and there are a number of (focused / specific) areas where it already surpasses human-level abilities. Here are some examples: Translation: If you haven’t been watching closely, the quality of Google Translate translations has really been improved in recent years. This 2016 story is a little dated, but it explains how they made a big push a few…
The field of deep learning seems to have had a rough journey into public consciousness and adoption. In particular, two theoretical misunderstandings lead to funding being pulled and energy and attention moving away from the field: Minsky/Papert’s book Perceptrons showed how a neural network using only one layer was unable to learn some critical functions like XOR . Later in the same book, they…
Parallel Distributed Processing: Explorations in the Microstructure of Cognition , a multi-volume publication by David Rumelhart, James McClelland and the PDP Research Group, was released in 1968 and is recognised as one of the most important works relating to neural networks. PDP (1968 They lay out eight features necessary to perform what they called ‘parallel distributed processing’ (which I…
I’ve been re-reading Jeremy Howard & Sylvain Gugger’s Deep Learning for Coders with Fastai and PyTorch and I really appreciate the reminder that a lot of barriers to entry into the Deep Learning space can be productively put to one side. Gatekeepers make four big claims: You need lots of maths to use Deep Learning to solve problems You need lots of data (think prodigious, Google-sized quantities)…
I’ve now read a little about Rosenblatt’s Perceptron in two different places: in the Howard/Gugger Deep Learning book , and also in Cade Metz’ Genius Makers . The Mark I Perceptron Built in 1958, it is usually described as the first machine which was based on the principle of the artificial neutron. It used a single layer in this initial configuration, and even in that simple way you could already…
Graphics Processing Units or GPUs are what your computer uses to quickly display your screen. Most computers (desktop or laptop) have one of these, and they are used to good effect to keep the screen refreshed and display everything in effectively realtime speed. The world of gaming is also, perhaps unsurprisingly, quite dependent on fast GPU performance, with Nvidia as the lead provider of these…
Handlebars is a simple templating language that you can use with your JavaScript code. It came somewhat late to the game; Python and Ruby and others had their own templating options for a while. The problem it is trying to solve is the case where you have a lot of HTML code that you need to create in your JavaScript files, but you don’t want to leave your .js files completely bursting to the seams…
jQuery and Handlebars are both external to the core functionality of JavaScript. Both are libraries that we can use and include when making websites. Doing so is very simple. We include <script> s in the head of our HTML file, as in the following example: <html> <head> <script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/handlebars@latest/dist/handlebars.js"></script> <script…