Personal blog of Dovydas Joksas
I remember Anthropic releasing Opus 4.8 a couple of months ago and people on Twitter making fun of its inability to tell how many days of the week have the letter d in them. I actually had trouble believing that, thinking these issues would be fixed by now. But no, that was still the case on claude.ai chat: it confidently proclaimed the answer was two—Sunday and Monday! I get how LLMs view words…
Note: This blog post contains LaTeX typography that will not be rendered correctly by RSS readers. To read the blog post with its original formatting, please visit https://dovydas.com/blog/the-typographic-medium/ . The Typographic Medium by Kate Brideau MIT Press, 2021, 304pp Most people have agonized over a font choice at some point—for a PowerPoint presentation, a website’s hero section,…
Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity by David Foster Wallace Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2003, 336pp I bought this book in a second-hand bookshop a few weeks ago. It looked intriguing enough for me to pick up and flip through the pages, probably because of the mental connection to Infinite Jest one naturally makes. And also because I’ve always found Wallace’s non-fiction more…
Over the last few months, we’ve been working hard at Fountain to make the video podcast experience amazing and to show what’s possible with open standards. I break it all down in a blog post: blog.fountain.fm/p/video-podcasts
I lead math workshops for second-year electronic engineering students at UCL , and statistics has always been the most challenging topic to teach. There is far too much misuse of frequentist statistics in academia (including academic publishing), medicine, and law. Instead of making the students follow some ritual for rejecting the null hypothesis, my goal is to make sure they get the fundamentals…
Last Friday, I had a great time on the Podcasting 2.0 show with Adam Curry and Dave Jones ! We discuss RSS Blue (my podcast hosting company), programming languages, open standards for music hosting, monetization, OnlyFans (!), censorship, and the podcast industrial complex with its delusional growth projections and broken ad models. Listen in your browser or using your favorite podcast player !
Adnan Mehonic and I contributed a chapter to a new upcoming edition of a textbook on nonvolatile memories. Our part discusses scalability problems in machine learning and how they may be addressed with emerging memory technologies. I am quite happy with how the chapter turned out. We focused on the fundamentals, which, at least for me, is always the most fun to think and write about. If…
Earlier this month, I visited Vietnam for the first time in my life. It’s the most beautiful country I’ve been to; hopefully, the photos and videos below can convey at least a small part of this beauty. Jump to... Hà Nội Tràng An Tuyet Tinh Coc Tam Coc Thung Nang Hang Mua Hạ Long Bay Hội An Hà Nội Hà Nội—like many cities in Vietnam—is charmingly chaotic. Everyone’s a millionaire…
The following from Gödel, Escher, Bach caught my attention: Unlike any previosuly designed machine, [ Babbage’s Analytical Engine ] was to possess both a “store” (memory) and a “mill” (calculating and decision-making unit) . Babbage had a vision of numbers swirling in and out of the mill under control of a program contained in punched cards . . . What is this if not…
Obviously, Neovim is the best text editor. But in 2023, it mostly doesn’t matter. The power of a text editor is in its plugins, and now that we have Language Server Protocol (LSP) , you should be able to achieve the same functionality everywhere. The old way of doing plugins Suppose you want to write a plugin that indents Rust code in Emacs . Well, you’ll probably need to learn Elisp ,…
I was interviewed by the amazing Sam Sethi for Podnews Weekly Review ! We discuss my podcast hosting company RSS Blue , RSS technology, and the evolution of podcasting standards. Listen in your browser or using your favorite podcast player !
MathML has been integrated into the Chromium engine , which powers browsers like Chrome, Edge, and Brave. It allows to render mathematical formulas in the browser without the use of additional JavaScr*pt libraries. Browsers supporting MathML should display the formula below as a summation on the left-hand side and as a product of an “m” and a second order derivative on the right-hand…
That’s my New Year’s resolution. I think being less cynical is a good goal for anyone to have, but I’m failing to verbalize why without sounding too… cynical. This was triggered by the responses to a Lex Fridman tweet , most of which were like “I read all of these when I was 14, lol”. People being mocked for the books they read (especially, classics) has become…
Angelo Badalamenti, the composer most well known for his work with David Lynch, has passed away a few days ago. This video of him discussing how he wrote Laura Palmer’s theme for Twin Peaks is one of my favorite things on the Internet.
Note: This blog post contains LaTeX typography that will not be rendered correctly by RSS readers. To read the blog post with its original formatting, please visit https://dovydas.com/blog/replicator-dynamics/ . Today, I had the pleasure of attending John Carlos Baez’s very interesting talk at the Queen Mary University of London. He presented how information theory can be used to describe…
This graph is great for demonstrating the danger of inferring causality from time series data alone. Taken from https://www.axios.com/2022/10/15/china-party-congress-2022-xi-jinping-third-term .
Note: This blog post contains LaTeX typography that will not be rendered correctly by RSS readers. To read the blog post with its original formatting, please visit https://dovydas.com/blog/adversarial-attacks-on-linear-models/ . I’ve been reading about adversarial attacks and wanted to implement something very simple. The simplest adversarial attack: attacking a linear model by Pierre Ablin…
Over the weekend, I had an amazing time at Peak District National Park. Not the best time to get caught in a thunderstorm. Lots of sheep. Lots of ferns. Which I love because they always give me ancient forest vibes. I’ve been told there had been even more flowers in August, but this was still breathtaking. Kinder Scout . Kinder Scout. I’m obviously afraid to fall off.
Happy to say that my PhD thesis—“Memristive Crossbars as Hardware Accelerators: Modelling, Design and New Uses”—has been made available online by UCL library services. You can find it (including full-text PDF) here . As previously discussed in some of the blog posts 1 , my research focused on using memristive crossbar arrays to accelerate matrix operations, which are…
At some point when reading The Master and Margarita, I realized “wow, this is so Lynchian!” Of course, due to fundamental nature of time, it’s probably the other way around. Regardless, I’m not the first to make this connection .
A recent leak of a whistleblower complaint by Mudge suggests that Twitter is making a lot of money from Chinese entities and that some Twitter employees have concerns about it: Twitter executives opted to allow Twitter to become more dependent upon revenue coming from Chinese entities even though the Twitter service is blocked in China. After Chinese entities paid money to Twitter, there were…
Originally posted on LinkedIn . I’m considering making a transition from TensorFlow to JAX and, so far, am loving how effectively the latter exposes low-level behavior while still providing useful abstractions. For example, the code snippet 1 below shows how one can perform gradient descent while utilising multiple devices: the gradients are computed on multiple devices they are synced…
A year and a half ago , I split my blog posts into “essays” and “updates”. The former being mostly long-form writing and the latter—my personal updates and other minor stuff. I had a feeling for a long time, but now I’m almost certain—this was a bad idea! Categorization can constrain thinking . And that’s how I’ve been feeling about my blog for…
There are concerns that Moore’s law—the trend of exponential increase in transistor density—no longer holds true. However, a number of new technologies may allow to keep improving computers and even give them new capabilities. We explore this in our perspective article titled “Memristive, Spintronic, and 2D-Materials-Based Devices to Improve and Complement Computing Hardware”,…
Excited to share that I successfully passed my PhD viva two days ago! The process took almost four hours! I believe this is quite long for a UK PhD defense, but we went through the thesis chapter by chapter and explored all the main research questions and ideas, so I’m very happy with how it went. I got minor corrections, which should mostly entail (1) providing additional context in the…
I have tens of LaTeX projects, and I’ve always found it annoying that I have to duplicate bibliographic entries in case I use another machine where specifying absolute path to a master BIB file wouldn’t work. I’ve always wanted to have a remote BIB file that could be automatically retrieved when compiling a LaTeX project. I didn’t realize Biber had this capability out of…
Neural networks consume massive amounts of power, and memristive implementations may offer a solution. But although memristors are much less power-hungry, they are also stochastic and—like most analog devices—less precise. How do we deal with that? We have been collaborating with Imperial to make memristive neural networks adapt to nonidealities consume even less energy be robust to…
I feel like repeating myself when discussing encrypted communication apps but, with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, this does need repeating. As of 26 February, Telegram is the most downloaded social networking app in Ukraine and is incredibly popular in Eastern Europe in general. If you don’t want Russian government to find out who you are communicating with or what the contents of your…
Once you are told about Hikvision, you notice it everywhere in the UK. Cameras made by Chinese state-owned companies are used by most public bodies, including schools, universities, local authorities, and even a significant fraction of police forces. Some cameras have disturbing capabilities, including gender and age detection, and yet suffer from security vulnerabilities. Big Brother Watch has…
Signal recently announced that they will move away from a fully open-source model. To fight spam, a fraction of the server-side code will become closed. Some people became worried—“WHAT ARE THEY HIDING?”—but, honestly, I couldn’t care less if server side is “open source”. It actually made me realize that we are finally living in an age where you can run…
This Veritasium video gives a great overview of how genetic information can be used to solve criminal cases nowadays. The idea is that the criminal’s DNA doesn’t have to be on anyone’s database—genetic information from the relatives (e.g. from genetic testing companies) can be partially matched to the DNA found at the crime scene. This allows to narrow down possible…
Amazon originally started as an online marketplace for books. It has since expanded to all sectors of online retail , internet infrastructure , physical stores and services . Even so, it remains the dominant player in the bookselling business. Not feeling comfortable using Amazon anymore, many people are looking for alternatives. But that’s especially complicated when it comes to books.…
I was decanonifying (is that a word?) my URLs and, as a result, accidentally altered GUIDs of some RSS items. This might have lead some feed readers to misidentify a number of old posts as new ones. Sorry! Should be fixed now.
NHS is planning to store UK patients’ medical histories in a centralized database with access provided to “academic and commercial third parties for research and planning purposes”. The government is justifying the move by claiming that it will save lives and the data 1 of patients will be replaced with unique codes anyway, so there is supposedly no risk of compromising privacy.…
I’ve recently moved to a new place and realized that I need a haircut. So I opened Google Maps on my laptop with the hope of finding a decent barbershop nearby. Being a bit lazy, I just pressed the button that would center the map around my location automatically. A message appeared asking me to change location permissions in the site settings. I’m not enthusiastic about providing even…
In recent years, there have been more and more calls to prioritize statistics in high-school math curricula. The rationale is that unlike, say, calculus, statistics is supposedly much more applicable in everyday life. Sounds nice, but what does that really mean? Computing averages? Hell yeah, that’s useful 1 ! But most of the things that are taught in a typical ( AP , A-level , IB )…
“The Big Short” opens with the following lines: In the late seventies, banking was not a job you went into to make large sums of money. It was a fucking snooze. <…> And if banking was boring then the bond department at a bank was downright comatose. <…> That is, until Lewis Ranieri came on the scene at Solomon Brothers… What Lewis Ranieri did to banking by…
Spotify collects so much behavioral data, yet I’m amazed at how poorly its AI is utilizing them. Each Discover Weekly playlist of mine for the last two years has included at least one German song. I can hide these songs, I can skip them, and yet nothing has an effect on the recommendations. I’ve already lost count of how many times I’ve been recommended a 20-minute song about the…
Note: This blog post contains LaTeX typography that will not be rendered correctly by RSS readers. To read the blog post with its original formatting, please visit https://dovydas.com/blog/the-strangest-thing-about-the-bitcoin-white-paper/ . A few weeks ago, I realized that the net worth of Satoshi Nakamoto, the anonymous creator of Bitcoin, makes him 1 the fifth richest person on planet Earth. I…
I’ve been coding (startup- and PhD-related stuff) almost every day for about half a year now, so this weekend I decided to procrastinate a little bit… by coding non-urgent things. Specifically, I thought my website needed some redesigning. When I first made it last summer, I had had essentially zero experience of web development. I used Hugo website generator which made my life much…
On the 26th of February, I will be giving a talk “Memristive Neural Networks Work Better in Teams” at a research seminar hosted by the Electronic and Electrical Engineering Department of UCL and the Agrate Unit of the Institute for Microelectronics and Microsystems (Italian National Research Council) . You can register here !
I’ve been rewatching Back to the Future trilogy (for the nth time) over the last few days. One thing that stood out to me this time was the Cafe 80’s from Part II. It was an attempt at depicting the 1980s as perceived by people from 2015 (remember, Part II was released in 1989). I was surprised by how accurate that portrayal was. It was really the things many of us tend to think about…
There is a great article on MIT Technology Review about Singapore’s contact tracing fiasco. It is amazing to me how much trust some people put into government apps. This was supposed to happen.
Half a year ago, I explored whether we can be sure if WhatsApp messages are actually end-to-end encrypted. We can’t, but I am more inclined to believe them now than I was back then. Not because I think they are the good guys, but because they are going to extreme lengths to monetize the app in other ways while maintaining that the messages are encrypted. Yesterday, a pop-up message appeared…
A few months ago I discovered an amazing YouTube channel— Baumgartner Restoration . It is maintained by a guy who restores old paintings for a living. I had no idea how many different stages this process usually involves; the level of mastery required makes these videos extremely satisfying to watch. This video is a great example of how many techniques may need to be employed to fix a…
One of the things I find strange about ‘The Sopranos’ is the large number of (often explicit) references to gangster movies. ‘Goodfellas’ is mentioned a few times, despite the fact that 27 actors from that movie star in ‘The Sopranos’ . References to ‘The Godfather’ trilogy are even more abundant , so I figured it would not share any actors with the…
Am I the only one who didn’t know that GitHub Pro is free for students? I had no need for Pro features until now, but still…
As if there isn’t enough work to do, I decided to organize my personal library. Thanks to my OCD, I have zero tolerance for chaos in this world, and yet my (and my family’s) collection of books has been just that. After some rigorous research 1 on how to organize books—with some of the options being “alphabetically”, “chronologically, “by color”…
Note: This blog post contains LaTeX typography that will not be rendered correctly by RSS readers. To read the blog post with its original formatting, please visit https://dovydas.com/blog/why-censuses-should-be-slightly-inaccurate/ . Since the founding of the country, the US government has been conducting a census every 10 years. The results of this survey are used to calculate the number of…