Sometimes when you build software, you shave a yak so deeply that you end up with a surprisingly nice sweater (while the yak, presumably, wonders why it is suddenly rather drafty). For the past while, my team and I have been building a quantum compiler called Catalyst for the quantum …
There is a specific, sharp mist that hangs in the air when you slice into a calamansi. The fruit is small, usually no larger than a marble, with a thin green skin that yields an abrasive, floral acidity — something halfway between a key lime and a sour mandarin 1 . Last …
“ I didn’t cook dinner last night,” my sister mentioned to me the other week. She has a one-year-old and a three-year-old, a combination of ages that practically guarantees a baseline level of perpetual exhaustion. “ Oh!” I replied. “Wait.” I tried to rationalize what that meant. My sister sounded too …
My previous blog post, The anxiety of the perfect loaf: the illusion of culinary precision , has been getting a (minor) amount of attention over on Hackernews and Metafilter , and I wanted to take a moment to go through some of the comments, share my thoughts, and revisit the main thesis …
One of my favorite recipes for challah does not tell you how much flour to use. To a modern amateur baker, this ommision borders on heresy. But it is an honest reflection of how the bread is personally made cooking is a deeply personal experience, and culinary precision is no replacement for intuition.
There is a peculiar theater to the internet’s culinary landscape, and if you spend enough time observing it, you will inevitably stumble into a warzone over authenticity. For example, no action incites internet fury faster than recipes of spaghetti carbonara that includes a splash of cream (or, god forbid …
I enjoy cooking. Not only that, but I enjoy complicated cooking which can sometimes be a bit of a curse. A simple weeknight meal? Not interested. A week-long project to nail the ultimate Xiao Long Bao , Croissants , or homemade ramen ? Sign me up! I become somewhat obsessive, reading cooking blogs …
Earlier this year, I was lucky enough to give a talk on quantum computing and near-term quantum machine learning at PyCon 2021. I ve always loved the PyCon and SciPy conferences; in fact, one of my earliest memories during the first month of my quantum computing job was watching A …
Most autodifferentiation libraries, such as PyTorch , TensorFlow , Autograd — and even PennyLane in the quantum case — allow you to create new functions and register custom gradients that the autodiff framework makes use of during backpropagation. This is useful in several cases; perhaps you have a composite function with a gradient that …