Paul Chiusano's blog

Part 1 of this series discussed the difficulties faced by gradient-based approaches to learning:
Learning using gradient-based methods is a lot like trying to find the top of Mount Everest starting from a random point on earth, while blindfolded, by repeatedly sampling only the altitude and slope of the ground you’re standing on, and then using...

I’m reading Superintelligence, a surprisingly dull book given its topic is, well, the possibility of a rampant superintelligent AI destroying civilization and what we might do to prevent that sort of thing. Along the way, the author speculates about...

I received an email recently from a guy, let’s call him Robert Smith (name changed to protect the innocent), whose email display name was "Smith, Robert" <robert.smith@somedomain.com>.
As far as I can tell, the LASTNAME, FIRSTNAME convention is a holdover from the pre-computer days where you needed to have the last name at the start for easy visual scanning when searching some directory (like a phone book) by last name. Now that we...

I worry a bit that people are adopting an overly fatalist perspective on tech adoption. This perspective has become almost a reflex–we can’t possibly know or predict what technology will end up being widely adopted and often the “worse” technology wins...