My $500M Mars Rover Mistake: A Failure Story
2023-11-27 Chris Lewicki “The very best news is bad news delivered early enough to fix it.” — Lindy Elkins-Tanton, Principal Investigator of the Psyche mission
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These bubbles kill cancer
2023-10-06 Jim Lynch The process [of histotripsy] uses a transducer—which converts electricity into sound—to deliver ultrasound waves to a malignant mass at a precise location. When the waves hit gasses inside cancerous cells, they generate clouds of tiny bubbles through…
A small language model made from matchboxes
2023-09-23 David Corney … build a text-generating model that is as transparent as possible, with nowhere for sentience to hide.
What Are Dreams For?
2023-08-31 Amanda Gefter In a series of papers, Blumberg articulated his theory that the brain uses REM sleep to “learn” the body. You wouldn’t think that the body is something a brain needs to learn, but we aren’t born with…
Rules of Thumb for Software Development Estimations
2023-05-01 Vadim Kravcenko But it is important to capture how long something could take if things go poorly.
Neural Networks, Manifolds, and Topology
Visualizations of low dimension artificial neural networks transforming the input into a representation that can be separated by a line with the different classes of data on each side. Neural Networks, Manifolds, and Topology 2014-04-06 Christopher Olah
One common behavior seen in “mature” software engineers
2023-02-06 Steven Luu “mature” engineers … go beyond “just” patching these problems. They take the extra step to make sure the next person won’t have to spend the same level of energy fixing the same issue, or eliminate the problem…
Password advice
There have been news stories about how the Office of Inspector General, U.S. Department of the Interior found weak passwords in the Department of Interior’s Active Directory accounts: Passwords Are Terrible (Surprising No One) A fifth of passwords used by…
Geoffrey Hinton’s Forward-Forward Algorithm Charts a New Path for Neural Networks
2022-12-08 by Synced there is increasing interest in whether the biological brain follows backpropagation or, as Hinton asks, whether it has some other way of getting the gradients needed to adjust the weights on its connections. In this regard, Hinton…
Ryan Reynolds reveals the No. 1 skill that’s helped him succeed: ‘It really changed my life’
2022-10-13 Morgan Smith “We live in a world that’s increasingly gamified, and I think we have an instinct to win, crush and kill,” he said. “But if you can disengage or disarm that instinct for a second and replace it…