You could have invented transformers from memory
2026-10-15 Alex Wang About the limits of memory capacity in multi layer perceptrons (MLP) compared to self-attention.
Category Science
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…
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…
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
A Thought on the Lovelace Test
The Lovelace test demands of a computing machine that it not only produce an artifact that is by conventional standards amazing, but it leaves everyone looking at it stupefied as to how it does what it does: including in this…
DEEP DIVE: The Covid “Fudge Factor”
2022-08-30 Maxim Lott Instead of trusting governments to correctly classify and report Covid deaths, take total deaths (all deaths from all causes, not just from Covid) in 2020/2021 and compare that to total death pre-Covid, in 2018 The difference is…
How to Fold a Julia Fractal – A tale of numbers that like to turn
2022-07-23 Steven Wittens See how complex numbers are used to make the Julia fractal with interactive animations of it rotating on top of itself step by step.
New model could explain old cholesterol mystery
2021-02-07 Ingrid Spilde Saturated fats increase cholesterol. And high cholesterol is linked to heart disease. But why are researchers unable to show that saturated fat actually leads to heart disease?
Most surgeries are ineffective
2021-01-21 Paras Chopra surgery is different than medicine. All new pharmaceutical molecules are subjected to rigorous clinical trials where they’re tested against placebo or doing nothing. In many countries, there’s no such procedure for surgical treatments. If there is a…
Things You Should Never Do, Part I
2000-04-06 Joel Spolsky Netscape … [made] the single worst strategic mistake that any software company can make: They decided to rewrite the code from scratch. The reason that they think the old code is a mess is because of a…