Thinking About Kinship & Society

This post began as a stream of consciousness Twitter thread that I've retrofitted into a blog post. As is always the case, both the political left and right see truths about the markets. The left is correct that money and trade reduces interpersonal prosociality (increased in-group "lovin’"). The right is correct that money and trade … Continue reading Thinking About Kinship & Society →

A Roadmap to Intelligence

This post looks at some key ideas for artificial intelligence systems. It acts as a guide to the landmarks on our path to improved computing.

Explaining Explainable AI

Twitter rambles about explanations and AI. Maybe to spruce up at a later date.

Freewill & Determinism

Some more ramblings about free will and determinism.

Intelligence, Representations & Generative Functions

When you work for a long time with artificial neural networks, you begin to see patterns emerge. One of these touches on fundamental aspects of intelligence. As I haven't seen it described very often, I'll set it out here.

Effortless NLP with spaCy

I've loved spaCy for a long time but I've only just got my head around how you can structure a text processing pipeline to take full advantage of its power.

The Neocortex & Power Iteration

A look at how the power iteration method for computing eigenvectors may allow brains to extract variance from the world.

Swift Taylor Approximations

This post continues my explorations of simple intelligence. In this post, we'll consider some elementary sensing cells. We'll then look at whether we can apply local function approximators. Sensors Consider a set of sensing cells, which we'll call "sensors". We have N sensors, where each sensor measures a value over time. This value could be … Continue reading Swift Taylor Approximations →

Invariance, Scale and Prediction

Thinking about how we can represent a cow.

Probability as Humble Knowledge

I often find myself thinking deeply about probability. What *is* it? Let’s start by assuming there is some form of local reality at a point of interest. Let’s then assume that the “true” nature of this local reality is unknowable. This may be due to the limits of our senses or the limits of time … Continue reading Probability as Humble Knowledge →