dovydas.com blog

I remember Anthropic releasing Opus 4.8 a couple of months ago and people on Twitter making fun of its inability to tell how many days of the week have the letter d in them.

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Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity by David Foster Wallace Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2003, 336pp I bought this book in a second-hand bookshop a few weeks ago.

Over the last few months, we’ve been working hard at Fountain to make the video podcast experience amazing and to show what’s possible with open standards.

I lead math workshops for second-year electronic engineering students at UCL, and statistics has always been the most challenging topic to teach.

Last Friday, I had a great time on the Podcasting 2.0 show with Adam Curry and Dave Jones!

Adnan Mehonic and I contributed a chapter to a new upcoming edition of a textbook on nonvolatile memories.

Earlier this month, I visited Vietnam for the first time in my life.

The following from Gödel, Escher, Bach caught my attention: Unlike any previosuly designed machine, [Babbage’s Analytical Engine] was to possess both a “store” (memory) and a “mill” (calculating and decision-making unit).

Obviously, Neovim is the best text editor.

I was interviewed by the amazing Sam Sethi for Podnews Weekly Review!

MathML has been integrated into the Chromium engine, which powers browsers like Chrome, Edge, and Brave.

That’s my New Year’s resolution.

Angelo Badalamenti, the composer most well known for his work with David Lynch, has passed away a few days ago.

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This graph is great for demonstrating the danger of inferring causality from time series data alone.

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Over the weekend, I had an amazing time at Peak District National Park.

Happy to say that my PhD thesis—“Memristive Crossbars as Hardware Accelerators: Modelling, Design and New Uses”—has been made available online by UCL library services.

At some point when reading The Master and Margarita, I realized “wow, this is so Lynchian!”

A recent leak of a whistleblower complaint by Mudge suggests that Twitter is making a lot of money from Chinese entities and that some Twitter employees have concerns about it: Twitter executives opted to allow Twitter to become more dependent upon revenue

Originally posted on LinkedIn.

A year and a half ago, I split my blog posts into “essays” and “updates”.

There are concerns that Moore’s law—the trend of exponential increase in transistor density—no longer holds true.

Excited to share that I successfully passed my PhD viva two days ago!

I have tens of LaTeX projects, and I’ve always found it annoying that I have to duplicate bibliographic entries in case I use another machine where specifying absolute path to a master BIB file wouldn’t work.

Neural networks consume massive amounts of power, and memristive implementations may offer a solution.

I feel like repeating myself when discussing encrypted communication apps but, with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, this does need repeating.

Once you are told about Hikvision, you notice it everywhere in the UK.

Signal recently announced that they will move away from a fully open-source model.

This Veritasium video gives a great overview of how genetic information can be used to solve criminal cases nowadays.

Amazon originally started as an online marketplace for books.

I was decanonifying (is that a word?)

NHS is planning to store UK patients’ medical histories in a centralized database with access provided to “academic and commercial third parties for research and planning purposes”.

I’ve recently moved to a new place and realized that I need a haircut.

In recent years, there have been more and more calls to prioritize statistics in high-school math curricula.

“The Big Short” opens with the following lines: In the late seventies, banking was not a job you went into to make large sums of money.

Spotify collects so much behavioral data, yet I’m amazed at how poorly its AI is utilizing them.

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I’ve been coding (startup- and PhD-related stuff) almost every day for about half a year now, so this weekend I decided to procrastinate a little bit… by coding non-urgent things.

On the 26th of February, I will be giving a talk “Memristive Neural Networks Work Better in Teams” at a research seminar hosted by the Electronic and Electrical Engineering Department of UCL and the Agrate Unit of the Institute for Microelectronics and Mi…

I’ve been rewatching Back to the Future trilogy (for the nth time) over the last few days.

There is a great article on MIT Technology Review about Singapore’s contact tracing fiasco.

Half a year ago, I explored whether we can be sure if WhatsApp messages are actually end-to-end encrypted.

A few months ago I discovered an amazing YouTube channel—Baumgartner Restoration.

One of the things I find strange about ‘The Sopranos’ is the large number of (often explicit) references to gangster movies.

Am I the only one who didn’t know that GitHub Pro is free for students?

As if there isn’t enough work to do, I decided to organize my personal library.

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