Personal blog of Sasha Kuznetsov — a software engineer and engineering physicist writing about ML/CV, quantitative finance, physics, robotics, and side projects.
LLM paper summaries are shallow and subtly wrong about the parts that matter. I wanted the opposite, so I built a pipeline that makes them, and pointed it at twenty papers. Machine learning papers are dense on purpose: each spends its pages on one new idea and assumes you can fill in the prerequisites, so you read with a dozen tabs open. The 2026 move is to paste the PDF into a chatbot and ask for…
I kept starting Claude Code on one machine and losing track of it. So a couple of friends and I built a way to run all of them from anywhere, including my phone. On a normal day I have three or four coding agents running across my machines, each stuck on the one where I started it, with no clean way to check on one from my phone or resume it on the laptop. tmux keeps the sessions alive, so the…
Can we reconstruct the world from public photos? Mapping the World The internet provides an abundance of public photos from various sources: Reddit, Youtube, Google Maps photo uploads, and so forth. Public photos available on Google Maps I wondered: is it possible to create a 3D map of the world from all this data? Cameras remove all the 3D information when the photo is taken - but using state of…
Predicting the Future One weekend there was bad economic news, and I was wondering how it would impact the market at open on Monday. I looked into this question, and I learned that while the stock market is closed, futures trading of underlying indices continues, and we can look to the futures market to understand how traders are already reacting to and pricing in new information - like a crystal…
Import animated Sticker.ly packs into Telegram with ease Sticker.ly is a popular sticker pack creation and management app for Android and iPhone devices with over 100 million downloads on the Google Play store alone. It supports importing sticker packs into iMessage, WhatsApp, and Telegram. However, the ability to import animated sticker packs is limited to WhatsApp only. Your browser does not…
Automatically and intelligently optimize any kind of system When you build an machine learning model - or some other kind of algorithmic system - you will have to make choices about the architecture of your system. For example, for a machine learning application, you may need to decide how many neurons to have in a neural network layer, or the rate of gradient descent. Or if you are building a…
The options casino Predicting the movement of stock prices is an alluring challenge with the promise of riches. Unfortunately, predicting future stock prices consistently and reliably is generally considered impossible. However, we can use models to make useful predictions, manage risk, and profit probalistically . Geometric Brownian Motion One such commonly used model is geometric Brownian motion…
What is this special algorithm? Gradient descent is an optimization algorithm for finding the (local) minimum of a function. Why is that useful? Say you have some function \(f(x,y)\). This function may represent a cost to you, and \(x\) and \(y\) are some inputs that vary the cost. Naturally, you are going to try to find the values of \(x\) and \(y\) that minimize the cost. This is a problem of…
It makes sense when you realize video game engines are the best simulators out there. A Clever Solution Lucid Motors went public on Monday , and although I am not going to be buying a Lucid anytime soon, I found myself looking at their vehicle configurator out of curiosity. It is a piece of art. It allows you to observe and interact with the vehicle from almost every direction, inside and out:…
Machine learning allows us to colourise black and white photos with ease, but at what risk? A Different Universe Although colourised photos have technically existed for a century or more ( Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky and Piotr Vedenisov, pioneers of colour photography, traveled around Imperial Russia documenting it in full colour ), the majority of the 20th century was documented in black and white.…
An explanation of arbitrage and a look at an efficient algorithm to find riskless instantaneous arbitrage opportunities. Who doesn’t like to make money? And what if you could turn the problem of making money into the problem of finding the shortest-path? We can do that in at least one particular way: by exploiting arbitrage opportunities. What is arbitrage? Arbitrage is the act of buying or…