Welcome to my personal notes!

can now extract colors of each sticker

this is basically where i got with python version

need to figure out better way to normalize colors so they are just one of six

May 18, 2024

re: cube solver

web version can now find center of each sticker

should be relatively straightforward to adapt the python code from here

might be a challenge when i have to eventually create a representation of the entire cube, not just a single face

time will tell

May 16, 2024

ok finally have object detection working in js

next step is to use opencvjs to extract colors

theoretically this should be simple because the api for js is similar to python, but getting the detection to work took me like 5 days so


never mind the detection works weird when the cube is near the edge of the screen

May 12, 2024

converting pytorch to tensorflow(so i can use tf.js) through onnx has been the worst experience of my life

ok i finally have the equivalent tfjs model for locating the cube(i think), but parsing the output is torture

i cant tell if the model is wrong or if i am parsing it wrong

probably both

May 10, 2024

once i get home i’ll finish the js refactor for rubiks cube

then im going fully indie dev

not interning anywhere => b2c saas

i hate to say it, but b2c saas is good way to get better at applied AI stuff

i barely even know what a KV cache is, i need to become an inference demon


I have fallen victim to the lies of webdev frameworks

reject modernity(nextjs) embrace tradition(jquery)

like i straight up have no idea what react does behind the scenes

May 7, 2024


can now extract colors of stickers and put them in the correct order, except sometimes my grid is flipped from how it should be

which seems to happen when cube is rotated

will fix tomorrow

can now extract the colors in the correct orientation

that took way to long

now, need to turn average sticker color into something like "red" or "blue"


ok that is done now too

next it to save each face and construct the full cube, but am gonna leave that until i convert it to web (in python rn)

converting should be relatively straightforward since opencv has a js library

May 6, 2024

getting center of each sticker is 90% perfect

sometimes a single frame will miss a sticker

sometimes a frame will put a point not even on the cube

definitely looking good though


ok getting bounds/center of individual stickers is done

now, need to get color of sticker and assign it to distinct color ("red","green",etc.)

May 5, 2024

for cube solver, i can get bounds of individual stickers, but only if cube is directly facing camera

which is probably fine, it is just a little less cool


looking pretty good right now, can ~fairly reliably get center of each sticker

definitely need to work on it a bit though, still looks a little glitchy

May 4, 2024

i should do some computer vision stuff

have been wanting to make a rubiks cube solver

its been done tons of times, but would be fun regardless


re: cube solver

  • can finetune YOLO on cube in someone's hand
  • with bounding box of cube, then can extract colors (???)
  • not sure how to do part 2 yet, will cross that bridge later

  • currently annotating data, is there a standard annotation tool people use?

    rn i am using cvat.ai, but seems like there should be a local alternative (having to upload images to website seems unnecessary)


    should i become a vim goblin

    https://vim-adventures.com/

    ok i have realtime cube detection from the webcam working

    next step: time will tell

    May 2, 2024

    ok school is over, time to start actually doing things

    April 25, 2024

    https://dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html

    April 17, 2024

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfbndRTlsg4

    April 7, 2024

    may dabble in some crypto trading this summer

    seems fun

    April 5, 2024

    Feynman’s lectures came in🙏

    soon I will know whether I should do pure math or physics major


    https://archive.harpers.org/1996/04/pdf/HarpersMagazine-1996-04-0007955.pdf?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAJUM7PFZHQ4PMJ4LA&Expires=1524535179&Signature=ahDC5czIWIzLbqcu9jouGMvwZqE%3D

    April 4, 2024

    every time i try to write an essay for my website or substack, i just get to a point where i think every point i make is so obvious that there is no point of writing the essay at all

    and i have no idea if that is actually true or if it is just a result of me thinking about a specific subject for a while

    April 2, 2024


    listening to most recent dwarkesh pod, interpretability is so interesting

    i did not realize that there was this much progress, i feel like i only ever hear about papers about novel architectures


    strong ideas loosely held

    April 1, 2024

    dwarkesh liked my tweet🥲

    March 31, 2024

    i am going to start posting on substack, writing the first essay rn

    March 30, 2024

    https://meltingasphalt.com/crony-beliefs/

    March 28, 2024

    it should not be the case that i can learn an entire exam's worth of content in ~4 hours

    need to find good stats and physics textbooks for this summer

    March 27, 2024


    gonna make a lil project to talk in french back and forth with model

    openai's tts sounds really good, it's just expensive

    March 26, 2024

    https://www.applieddivinitystudies.com/2020/09/28/polymath/

    language learning apps are so bad

    i could easily build a better one


    finally finished the steve jobs bio

    re: nonfiction, im gonna try to go broader in scope

    i feel like most of the nonfiction i read is business/tech/startups, which is fine, but i feel like im missing out

    israel book is a good start


    maybe ill work through a physics textbook this summer

    college classes are just wrappers on textbooks

    March 24, 2024

    roon liked my tweet🥲

    March 21, 2024

    im just gonna use random forest, im desperate


    ok im at 70% validation accuracy with random forests


    its finished

    4am, bracket is not even bad

    lgtm

    March 20, 2024

    i have spent all day, nothing is working

    anytime loss goes down, test loss goes up

    maybe ill ditch the player stats, and just use team-wide stats instead


    ok i've given up on player level stats

    March 19, 2024

    model not training :(

    one day a model of mine will start learning first try


    new pg essay


    model is over fitting like crazy

    might need different architecture

    tomorrow is the deadline, i need to lock in

    March 18, 2024


    rate limited on the stats website :(

    there may be a python package

    why did i not look for that before

    rate limited on that too :(

    wondering if it would be illegal to host/publish the ncaa data, since it seems like most places make it hard to access en masse


    ok found some data

    first attempt is just getting average stats for top 10 players with most minutes played for each team

    will feed two teams into basic model with mse error

    there are probably some cool architectures I could use, but will save those for later

    March 17, 2024

    i wonder if there is a big collection of college basketball stats

    could be fun to do some visualizations for march madness


  • download as many stats as possible for every ncaa game of last ~10 years
  • train big model to predict winner
  • after general game predictor, fine tune on just tournament games
  • profit

  • tonight am gonna get average stats of every team in past ~20 years

    March 16, 2024

    mootr is pretty much finished

    mootr is pretty much finished

    thank god

    March 15, 2024

    finishing mootr this weekend

    i should have more time now to work on projects

    March 14, 2024

    https://youtu.be/8Bk0kkRPmjE

    March 11, 2024

    i need to watch more Bresson

    ranking movies is becoming too difficult

    maybe i should just sort alphabetically

    ranking them feels contradictory somehow


    energy models are lowkey confusing

    how are you gonna tell me you have gradient descent during sampling

    doesn't that require crazy compute during training

    would be really fun to try to implement, although algorithm at the end of the paper is really scary looking


    great lecture:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpulMklVmRU&ab_channel=cwkx

    March 10, 2024

    https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.02486

    March 9, 2024

    https://www.that.se/Q-star

    well i guess oai implemented it first

    this was posted by some anon with like 200 followers though, so idk how reliable it is

    jimmy_apples follows it🤷‍♂️


    guess i should learn what an energy based model is

    March 8, 2024

    i should read hpmor


    what lecun talks about in the latest lex pod is exactly what i said about an architecture where models think before they speak

    pretty cool


    maybe i should stop dismissing my ideas for ml as dumb

    what he says at 1:18:00 is almost what i said verbatim


    the “thought” would just be a single vector of some fixed length, and the model slowly optimizes that vector, instead of adding a single token each step

    then, after n iterations, you have a refined thought, which can be translated into English

    as you write out a paragraph, the “thought”, updates too, just like how our brains work


    i guess you’d have to decide between these two options:

  • a single thought is generated, which is then translated (analogy is a single sentence is thought of, then written)
  • once a “thought” is optimized for n steps, the next thought is optimized, and the next. Then, translate all thoughts at once into a single, refined paragraph
  • the first one is probably easier to implement, would be fun to try it

    I really ought to do some work on the music generation though

    and I REALLY ought to finish mootr


    here's how i think it could work:

  • basically a latent diffusion model where output is the "thought"
  • this "thought" is then used for cross attention in traditional decoder
  • diffusion model input/output is sentence/representation of sentence
  • for diffusion model, need some kind of encoder/decoder to go from list of tokens into latent vector
  • this vector is where the diffusion happens
  • the prompt would have to be summarized and turned into latent vector as well so that it could be used during diffusion
  • March 4, 2024

    I like the idea of some architecture allowing models to “think”, where they aren’t just spitting out the next token based on everything before, but spit out some ideas or excepts, then translate that into English

    then during the first step you can do some search to generate the ideas, and do unmasked attention on that to do the “translation”

    February 22, 2024

    https://t.co/JcHel1otxbhttps://arxiv.org/abs/2212.09748https://arxiv.org/pdf/1908.09257.pdf

    February 19, 2024

    https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bSwdbhMP9oAWzeqsG/openai-s-sora-is-an-agent

    hopefully sora paper comes out soon

    February 16, 2024


    lord if you're up there let these gradients flow

    i am sick and tired of writing this vqvae

    let my codebook learn😭😭

    would be fun little project to make spanishdict for french, using llms

    February 15, 2024

    i need to take bigger bets on contrarian opinions i have

    robotics is probably the best field to go into right now; i don't know anything about it

    i dont know anything about hardware

    i barely even know how electricity works


    i need to maximize time spent learning important things, minimize everything else

    i am assuming i know what is valuable (i have been generally correct in the past—at least in the context of school)

    February 13, 2024

    https://terrytao.wordpress.com/

    February 8, 2024

    😭 why won't my gradients flow

    ok nevermind they were just scaled weird

    nevermind again these gradients are not flowing


    there are too many notes on this page, it is starting to act weird

    need to limit to something like 250, and then maybe have a "next page" button at the bottom

    just cutting off after the 1000 most recent for now though

    February 5, 2024

    ok finally understand what a VQGAN does

    am going to implement it, then add it to my normal diffusion model

    also for the toy autoencoder i made, i forgot to add activation and norm blocks for some reason


    need to finish the jobs biography so i can start atlas shrugged

    this vq encoder/decoder buggin

    February 2, 2024


    it works ok, not sure if it is just because of small dimensions or i need a bigger model

    should be pretty simply to implement into the actual model though

    my autoencoder is just a bunch of conv layers and then conv tranposed layers, with simlpe mse

    gonna see what actual paper used now

    this is the paper im referencing

    https://arxiv.org/pdf/2112.10752.pdf

    best thing about gpt4 is when you explain something to it so you can see if you're right or not


    https://arxiv.org/pdf/1711.00937v2.pdf

    February 1, 2024

    going to build latent diffusion model before i do actual music model

    because it seems like my images (512x1001) are way to big to do normal diffusion on

    should be fairly straightforward, goal is to have it trained by sunday

    might just grind it out tonight though

    haven't done that in a while

    caffeine pills haven't come in yet, so might have to hit a cheeky redbull run


    first step: VAE

    before i look up actual implementations, just gonna cook up what i think they will be