Blog.AlexAlemi.com

I recently took the time to turn an old lecture of mine into a booklet.

In 1960, Freeman Dyson wrote a single page "little joke"1 about how an advanced civilization undergoing exponential energy growth would quickly exeeds the capacity of their planet and would have to start harvesting a reasonable fraction of the energy of t…

I'm a big fan of the new generation of reactive notebooks that don't have internal state, projects like clerk1 for clojure, marimo for python, pluto.jl for julia and observable notebook kit2 for javascript.

When I was at Google, I had a problem.

Sliderules rule.

Let's tour some fun ways to do mental math to various precisions.

With the upcoming election, I found myself thinking about the old NYTimes Needle and, more generally, about how to best represent and communicate probabilities.1 Note: if you want to see how this looks in the context of the 2024 Presidential election, see…

Going overboard to prove the local newspaper wrong.

Modern machine learning is a sea of initialisms: VAE, VIB, VDM, BBB, VB, etc.

Performing Bayesian inference requires a full joint distribution over both our data and parameters $p(D,\theta)$.

$ \newcommand{\coo}{\mathrm{CO_2}} $ We recently bought an Airthings so I have been geeking out looking at plots of our air quality.

Let's see if we can very quickly prove the Jarzynski Equality and related non-equilibrium statistical mechanics results.

Diffusion models have made quite a splash, especially after the open-source release of Stable Diffusion.

Years ago I decided that I didn't know how to tie any knots and needed to remedy the situation.

Benford's Law is the observation that in a list of "naturally occuring numbers", the plurality of numbers will begin with a 1.

We all stand on the shoulders of giants.

The Kullback-Liebler divergence, or KL divergence, or relative entropy, or relative information, or information gain, or expected weight of evidence, or information divergence (it goes by a lot of different names) is unique among the ways to measure the d…