randomness

shap model (SHapley Additive exPlanations, great acronym btw) - interpreting machine learning model predictions based on game theory, model agnostic/ad hoc approach, shows how much a certain feature pushed the output up or down speculative decoding  - make ai more efficient (algorithmic details here ), calculate tokens autoregressively but in parallel to be more efficient, fast approximative function for decoding i tried to watch this video on sheafification but i didn't understand anything other than the fact that i've basically forgotten everything from topology um really cool article about how scientists are using ai for manipulating the brain, takes the analogy between ai and neuroscience a bit further --> developments in ai can help us improve our understanding of the brain and develop applications like readers to help ppl with dyslexia. i think the interviewee's response to the question about the ethics of having a digital copy of a brain to be very insightful, ...

yes im very late this article argues about how mech interp is not that useful and it raises a lot of good points (i.e. in biology / other complex systems, we don't do the bottom up approach, and a lot of the buzz from mech interp comes from cherrypicked results, the compression involved leads to the loss of edge cases, so much has been invested but not much has come out, this post talks about how google stopped prioritizing SAEs because they weren't performing as well). i think i should definitely keep this in mind as i get more interested in interpretability; i've heard friends make such comments too. meanwhile this article by dario amodei  urges for the importance of mech interp, tho he is from anthropic which may influence his viewpoints. he advocates for the govt to also get involved, citing all the bad disasters that may happen because ai is too "opaque". i get his points too; the race between the development of ai models and our understanding of them is pret...

 hiiii here's an over due post (will maintain daily posts !) on why we need ai safety - specification gaming article by google deepmind  here's a quote that sums up the whole thing - reward function / intent engineering is a big thing How do we faithfully capture the human concept of a given task in a reward function? How do we avoid making mistakes in our implicit assumptions about the domain, or design agents that correct mistaken assumptions instead of gaming them? How do we avoid reward tampering? vanishing gradient problem - occurs potentially when u use sigmoid activation, slower learning in beginning --> use relu sum-free sets  and the beauty of a grad student expanding on other's work, smth about littlewood norm and fourier analysis being powerful reverse computing  -- potential benefits for energy conservation, has been theorized and engineers are trying to make it happen! this feels like a strange but very interesting idea and in the end its sorta a tra...

 5/25/2025 is a pretty date :) okay so i'm getting back into posting half-baked things i guess i discovered curius and was thinking of using that other than this but i'm better at conveying myself on a blog? perhaps i read this quanta article on superdiffusion  and it's super cool how mathematicians are able to formalize the chaoticness of things like rubber ducks floating in a river. i'll include the gif from the article here because it's very aesthetic :O soap bubbles!  also the article emphasized the methods  involved in proving the superdiffusion conjecture, mainly renormalization (which i don't really understand) and homogenization (which the mathematicians emphasize is more important that they showed these techniques are very useful).  quantum field theory in general is pretty interesting because it's like modern physics + math, and some high schoolers are doing research in the math part of it ;D which brings me to the next thing i read which was an ar...

i've officially closed out one chapter of my high school career - ap exams! which means now i have a lot of time on my hands to do things i'm interested in :) last week i read this article  except i didn't understand a lot of it. but topology is cool! and it's pretty sad if you write a whole book on something that is only a few months later proved to not exist a lot of cool quanta articles popped up in my newsletter so i hope i can read them all and update this. in terms of other tech-related news, i heard about alphaevolve, which has been causing a lot of stir on the internet recently! in a later post i hope to dive further into the developments of google deepmind which are very relevant to the intersection of math and cs. i also heard about vibe-coding, a term coined by andrej kaparthy. there are tools like cursor.ai that help with writing code; i hope i can test it out soon and show you the results. i feel like it is still important for us to not be so reliant on ai ...

i currently i am busy with worrying about aps and thus giving myself lots of unproductive dopamine so i haven't had the chance to learn interesting stuff.  i made this mindmap for extra credit in my ap lit class; i analyzed the character Gogol Ganguli from The Namesake . i didn't really like the book but it grew on me as we analyzed it more. i still don't really like the namedropping. i also recently read "Escape from Spiderhead" from  Tenth of December and it explored a lot of themes relevant to love and morality which was... interesting. nothing else really. i've been attempting to think more about my math project with no success, and my ai probes have very low accuracy .-. will be chugging through more work once aps are over here are a few song recommendations though i started a dreamy and sweet kpop playlist  and made the cover image myself with befunky hitgs is a new group and i really love their music! here's their debut single album with "sour...