Wait long enough to write and the updates are bound to be interesting! I’ve gone through many lives since I last wrote, back in July of 2020, mid-pandemic. Leaving Google for… Computer Algebra? I quit my job at Google at the end of 2021. I’m not sure I ever wrote about starting this job back in 2019. Yes, for about 15 months I was a *Staff Research Engineer *at *Google X, *a dream job on paper! In reality, fairly pedestrian and factory-like. ...
I’ve been reading the lovely Visual Complex Analysis by Tristan Needham, and the visual-style proofs he’s been throwing down have been wonderful and refreshing. I’ll write more about this book and its goals later, but I was inspired this AM to write up a proof of the half angle identities from trigonometry using some of the tools from the book. Here’s the half angle identity for cosine: This is an equation that lets you express the cosine for half of some angle in terms of the cosine of the angle itself. As you can imagine, there are double-angle, triple angle, all sorts of identities that you can sweat out next time you find yourself in a 9th grade classroom. ...
Humans have a strange relationship with reality. We’ve developed a large body of mathematical tools that sometimes seem to let us beat time. We can send spaceships out to take photos of distant planets, and be almost totally sure that they’ll make it. It takes minutes (seconds?) to simulate voyages of thousands of years. We can examine light from stars millions of light years away, and make good guesses about the stars’ ingredients. ...
Memento Mori. In English, this Latin phrase means something like “remember that you must die”, or “Remember Death”. The Stoic philosophers were big pushers of this idea as the core insight of a daily meditation practice. Are you worried that there are things you’re going to regret about your life when you die? What if you died today? It is absolutely certain that you are going to die; you might as well sit down each morning and imagine it. Do any regrets flare up about your day, or your life? ...
I’ve had an odd, intellectual fever dream going for years now; I’d like to learn enough advanced math and physics to make my way through Roger Penrose’s The Road to Reality, and not just understand it, but feel in my bones what it’s like to intuitively get our current best guess about how reality works. (If you haven’t heard of this book, or Roger Penrose, go check out the Amazon reviews, then listen to Penrose’s appearance on “The Portal“ podcast. He allegedly wrote this tour of all modern physics as a popular science book, but Penrose is so mis-calibrated, or optimistic, about non-Penrosian math ability that physics and math professors routinely flame out.) ...
Barry Green’s The Inner Game of Music is a lovely book about music, and practice, and the strange psychological battle that doing anything difficult and creative seems to require. Early in the book he lays out a very simple framework for how to think about why it’s so hard to learn new things and make progress on seemingly clear goals. Imagine two small people living in your head. One is named “Self Two”. Self Two is a cherub, an almost helplessly creative little kid, the source of every “what if” and impulse you’ve had to build and share anything. ...
A 1-act sketch via Apple Pencil, for your viewing pleasure. Happy to link to further references or sketch this out in more detail — let me know in the comments if this is illuminating. Check it out below, or click here for a direct image link to stare at a big version in the browser.
In my ongoing quest to lay a more solid foundation for this new, strange life as a machine learning “researcher”, I’ve been going through various foundational concepts and ideas and trying to build up rock solid intuitions that I can lean on for years. (Why the hell didn’t I do this back in school??) Entropy is my latest obsession - thermodynamic entropy, and information entropy, and the ways in which these two things are similar. ...
Well, here we are, close to 18 months after I left my job at Stripe and put out the call for subscribers to this newsletter. In the future, expect notes on my new, strange identity as an “AI research engineer”, working on machine learning and evolution; notes on information theory, set theory, linear algebra and friends, squeezed through my mind and decorated with as much non-symbolic intuition as I can manage; how to take a run at difficult things outside the usual set of difficult things everyone thinks they want. Today, a note I wrote after a day out working on the RV10 4-seater airplane I’m building in the garage. ...