Poor Man's Autograd

Deriving the code for differentiating code. Inspired by microgpt.

Surprise! A derivation of entropy

I explain entropy to myself

How to set up your personal server for projects

How to set up a server for personal web projects.

GenAI and my six degrees of separation from tensor products

My experiences getting up and running with GenAI and views on code interpretability.

AI+Building Energy Modeling: IBPSA SimBuild 2024 Notes

Notes from attending the SimBuild conference, especially sessions on data science and modeling.

Drone physics

Equations governing dynamics and control of a multirotor UAV

Running python on air-gapped systems

How to reproducibly run python code on a system with no internet access.

Helping fix aircraft - from NLP to Bayes Nets

NLP to help aircraft mechanics reason about maintenance actions

ChatGPT x Tennis - a weekend hacking project

Using ChatGPT as my coding assistant to help me play more tennis

Remote SSH into your home desktop

Setting up dynamic DNS and router port forwarding so you can SSH into your home desktop from anywhere, without a static IP.

A Poor Man's Introduction to Reinforcement Learning

A beginner-friendly introduction to reinforcement learning: how agents learn from feedback instead of search or hand-coded rules.

Escaping Echochambers

Using PCA and clustering on Imgur posts to explore how recommendation systems create digital echo chambers, and how to counter them.

Trials and Tribulations of Maintaining a Hugo Blog

Lessons from restructuring a Hugo site's repository layout to cleanly separate source content from rendered HTML output.

Algorithms: Balancing

How balancing the workload across an algorithm's recursive subproblems affects its overall time complexity, with worked examples.

Optimizing static sites with hugo

Cutting page weight on a Hugo static site by trimming JavaScript bloat from third-party libraries like jQuery, code highlighters, and math renderers.

Is cold the new hot?

Why temperatures below absolute zero don't break thermodynamics: a primer on entropy, negative temperature, and what 'hot' really means.

Gravitational Slingshots

An intuitive explanation of gravitational slingshots: how space probes gain speed from a planet's motion without violating energy conservation.

A case study in choosing algorithms

A lesson from parallelizing terabytes of dark matter simulation data: why a dynamic work pool beat a bin-packing pre-partitioning scheme.

Markov Chains – Random Text Generation

How Markov chains generate grammatically plausible random text from a corpus, and how multi-threading speeds up building the prefix-suffix table.

Parsing websites on a budget

How to fetch content from another website client-side using Yahoo Query Language (YQL) as a workaround for the same-origin policy, without a server.