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This is my home on the internet. I like math, visual art, Elizabethan theater, organic chemistry, and many other topics.

Featured

• ham11a

  Published: Aug 22, 2024 |  at  11:06 PM

  Part 1 of V.2—Final scene of play; "There's a divinity that shapes our ends, Rough-hew them how we will..."; Hamlet tells Horatio how he escaped ship and death in England.

• InstructGPT and How LLMs are Trained

  Published: Apr 15, 2023 |  at  06:53 PM

  Notes on Ari Seff's January 2023 video on InstructGPT, prompt engineering, and RAG.

• Turing Award Recognizes Bengio, Hinton, and LeCun

  Published: Apr 4, 2019 |  at  02:47 PM

  A brief history of neural networks from 1986-2014.

• Uffizi Day 3–A New Theory for the Tooth Puller

  Published: Apr 7, 2015 |  at  10:22 AM

  More thoughts on Caravaggio.

Recent Posts

• Parsing, Part 1

  Published: Mar 25, 2026 |  at  02:46 PM

  Intro to context-free grammar and parsing

• Algebra 1—Closure to Commutativity

  Published: Mar 10, 2026 |  at  09:00 PM

  Conceptual ladder from magma (closure) to abelian groups (commutativity)

• Finite Automata, Part 4

  Published: Mar 1, 2026 |  at  08:41 PM

  NFA to DFA conversion uses 3 functions during subset construction

• Finite Automata, Part 3

  Published: Feb 22, 2026 |  at  09:19 PM

  Epsilon-closures and E() function