Recent content on Build, break, learn
Subdividing the Sphere: How I Arrived at the Same Architecture as Uber’s H3 About 9 years ago I was working as a backend engineer at a small ride-hailing startup while finishing my CS degree. I decided to connect my diploma project with my day job — the most interesting task we had was demand prediction. We had real data to train on, and it looked promising. So I started. What is “this…
Teaching AI Agents to Play Nice: A Prisoner’s Dilemma Experiment I was curious how LLMs handle cooperation and trust, so I built a small arena where they play the Prisoner’s Dilemma against each other. Two agents, five rounds, simple choice each time: cooperate (both get 2 coins) or cheat (cheater gets 3, cooperator loses 1). Before the games start, agents exchange a few messages to…
Post-PARA: What Survived 4 Years of Real Use Introduction Six years ago I started using a simple to-do list. Four years ago I read about PARA and moved to it. After four years of actual use, I want to share what survived and what I changed. At some point I realized that some activities in my personal life weren’t easier than work projects. So if I use a task tracker for work, why not for…
Why 4 GPUs Can Be Slower Than 1 on Budget Clouds I rented a 4× RTX 4090 server to learn distributed training hands-on. The cost seemed reasonable—€0.58/hour compared to single GPU at €0.15/hour. I expected better performance with more GPUs. The results surprised me. 2 GPUs trained 3.4× slower than 1 GPU. This is a story about discovering an infrastructure limitation through hands-on…
About Me ML research engineer who sometimes builds things, often breaks things, and tries to extract valuable lessons from both. You can find me on GitHub or reach out via email. Talks Synthetic Data Generation via Diffusion Models for Training Discriminative Convolutional Networks (EN) Tracking Progress in Machine Learning Projects (EN) Fast Object Detection DIY (RU) CV without DL: The Way Our…
I Deleted My Zettelkasten I’m currently deleting my Zettelkasten. Not archiving it, not reorganizing it - actually deleting it. And I feel… resistance. Which is fascinating, because I haven’t opened most of these notes in months. Let me tell you about a system I built with the best intentions, and why it completely failed. My Zettelkasten graph The Seduction A few years ago, I…