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Jack Gindi
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Building a full-stack ML-backed app in 2024

Introduction Today, I want to talk about a recent personal project. In doing the project, I’d say I was probably 60% motivated by learning about new techniques and tools that are out there, and 40%...

A bound on sorting performance

Introduction If you wake any programmer up in the middle of the night and ask them to name an algorithm, a sizable fraction would probably invoke some kind of sorting procedure. Some might name qui...

Existence vs construction

Introduction In everyday life, we show that things exist by producing an example. In order to believe that black sheep exist, I would need someone to show me one. To believe the claim that pigs can...

Unlocking the power of unlabeled data

Introduction Many of the most powerful models you see out there today are built using a two-stage approach: Pre-training: A model learns generally useful representations (e.g., of language or im...

The connection between k-means and Gaussian mixtures

Introduction In the next few posts I want to take you on the learning journey that happened when I tried to wrap my head around this wonderful paper by Brian Kulis and Michael I. Jordan (yes, Micha...

Simulated annealing

Introduction Optimization problems are everywhere! Whether it’s finding the most efficient way to deliver packages to customers, determining the best next move in a game of chess, or figuring out ...

RANSAC for robust data fitting

Introduction In this post I want to introduce a non-standard way of fitting a mathematical model to data that I came across during a course I took this past semester in computer vision. While gradi...

Is addition commutative?

Introduction This will be a quick one. From the very beginning of our mathematical educations, there is a fundamental fact of which we are made aware: If $a$ and $b$ are numbers of any kind (natura...

Faster language model inference

Introduction Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) – most recently ChatGPT – have received lots of (well-deserved) press. Though they have their shortcomings, they are able to compo...

How does OpenAI's DALL-E work?

Introduction Before I say anything else, create an account and take DALL-E 2 out for a spin. It is an example of generative AI, which, as a field, has seen important, exciting, and viral breakthro...