Kian Ghodoussi's Personal Website
Santa Barbara is having it’s first ever coffee week this week. I’m pretty late to this. It started last Thurday. I don’t drink coffee so I don’t really care. However, my readers have been clambering for a coffee week post so here you go. This is the post. This is the article: https://www.independent.com/2026/03/18/here-comes-santa-barbara-coffee-week/
There’s been a lot of money spent on AI. I think AI is a mechanical turk . I think there are a few better uses of the investment. Some boring things are investing in urban density, universal health care, green infrastructure. But I want to talk about clams. And also mussels. They are filter feeders: they actively clean the water and improve the ecosystem in which they live. They ingest CO2 and are…
There was a ~7 year old child watching a video in front of me at full volume. Big iPad screen. It was some kind of AI generated kids program. An odd mix of shapes and colors rapidly changing fast enough to give me a headache. The child could not look away. I was on a plane from Memphis to Dallas. I craned my head to look for the parent to ask (I got the vibe that this kid’s parents would get…
I like making good cheap food. This is a fast recipe. Chicken Ramen ~$2.50 per serving Throw a pack of chicken drumsticks in a pot. Add water and salt. Turn on stove. Let it cook for 2-3 hours. Add mushroom if you like (I do). Take out the chicken and pluck the meat at some point Cook some kind of pasta or noodle in the stock. I buy dry Udon noodles from a local Japanese market (it’s about $0.50…
This is the set of restaurants for which I am the most personally excited about during Santa Barbara burger week . This list factors in variety, convenience, and excitement. I may update this list as I eat. I may even get crazy and visit a place not on my top picks. I will keep you posted. Kian’s Picks Restaurant Description Hours Location Vibe Excitement Poké House Spicy tuna slider: sushi rice…
So this problem turned out to be easier than we even thought. We initially needed more labels (150 per class) because the input data was log normalized - we assumed that it was float because of sampling. Our model is a Hierarchical Pitman-Yor Process thatdirectly models power-laws. The log-normalization essential broke our model statistics. After rectifying that preprocessing error, we were able…
Not much more to it than that Websites and blogs were already shoehorn images into content as if they are a requirement to publish on the internet. TV ads and music increased their volume because 20 years ago a study came out that said more volume, more better. Some study showed more image more better. Maybe that is true. These AI images are taking it to an extreme, and are no longer even lightly…
I experimented with LLM coding for a bit but quickly scaled back my usage to only niche use cases. I started by using it for data visualization and it one-shot converted my descriptions to the exact visuals in my mind. I then was dealing with a chunking edge case and it also solved it perfectly. Only two days in and I found myself pulled towards a prompt every time I needed to think through a…
So I got blocked by Reddit at a network level. Every so often I search for “SOME_PRODUCT reviews reddit”. Despite all the astroturfing it’s a hard habit to break. Fortunately for me Reddit wanted to point me in a better direction. My phone with my primary browser are now blocked. I really don’t do anything too weird on my phone. I look up things every so often. I use safari with DuckDuckGo and…
Cream cheese is great on a bagel; it’s a pretty sorry replacement for caulk. They both fill holes in your wall just fine, but over time caulk hardens and cream cheese decays. The hidden cost of LLMs is that their best applications displace the process that build the institutional knowledge necessary to keep companies afloat. Two Examples End to end customer support automation. Let’s assume LLMs…
One of my favorite parts of my job is that I am able to spend 1 day per week focusing on applying our hierarchical mixture modeling technology to genomic applications. I’ve been working closely with the Ramiz Somjee on applying our technology to scRNA sequencing data. TLDR: Why I’m Excited Current scRNA pipelines rely on a heuristic driven 2-step process. First some form of…
AI companies really make 180 degree shifts overnight. Oct. 2024 post goes into extended detail aobut how much work it is to build a RAG system, the competetive advantage in AI is not the LLM but being incredbly smart about what you feed into the context window. Oct. 2025 proclaims RAG is dead: just pass everything into the 2M token context window, let agents decide what to pass in. Source :…
This is the set of restaurants for which I am the most personally excited about during Santa Barbara burrito week . This list factors in variety, convenience, and excitement. I will update this list as I eat. I may even get crazy and visit a place not on this list. I will keep you posted. Kian’s Picks Restaurant Description Excitement Hours Bikeable Vibe Poke House poke burrito 10 11am-9pm Y 7.5…
This is the set of restaurants for which I am the most personally excited about during Santa Barbara sandwich week . This list factors in variety, convenience, and excitement. I will update this list as I eat. I may even get crazy and visit a place not on this list. I will keep you posted. Kian’s Itinerary Restaurant Description Excitement Hours Bikeable Blackbird Fried Chickem 9.5 Tue-Sat 5pm- y…
SB Burger Week Tiers Tags Legend * V: upscale vibe * C: chilled vibe * +: Easy bike from oak park Tier 1 Restaruant Tags Hours Notes Intermezza V+ Tu-Sa: 5-9 La Paloma V+ We-Su: 11:30-2:30, 5-630 wagyu SBFC C M-Sa: 1-7 guac, 8 Blackbird V+ Tu-Sa: 5-10 Gala V+ Tu-Sa: 4-9 fried tomatos SBFM C 10-7 tuna 6 & salmon 8.5 Tier 1.5 Restaruant Tags Hours Notes Brewhouse C+ M 4-9, 11-9 maybe only on monday?…
A single pixel can break neural image models. The same technology is being used to make value judgements. The scale of investment for the current generation of language models is stunning. The next generation is an order of magnitude larger. Money is being burned (literally, they are re-opening coal plants) with the goal of automating white-collar labor. It will not work. LLMs are a great fit for…