I was invited to give this plenary talk at the Electronic Imaging Symposium this past February. The recording is now available on YouTube www.youtube.com/watch?v=s59U...

Silicon Valley crosswalk buttons have been hacked to hilarious effect

ruined by tariffs

Most people don't understand that volatility alone can kill your investments start with capital P lose 5% one week: (1-0.05)*P gain 5% the next week: (1+0.05)*(1-0.05)*P. repeat the pattern for 1yr (52 weeks): (1+0.05)^26 *(1-0.05)^26 *P = 0.88P You lost 12% of your money.

bias-variance tradeoff

It's a cruel irony that those who orchestrated this stock market crash are already insulated from its effects. They will be fine. The real tragedy is that it's the ordinary person – the retiree, the small investor, the hardworking individual – who will suffer the most.

"That Mr. Musk has come to hold so many of the same beliefs about social engineering and economic planning as his grandfather is a testament to his profound lack of political imagination, to the tenacity of technocracy and to the hubris of Silicon Valley." www.nytimes.com/2025/04/04/o...

Opinion | The Rise and Fall of Elon Musk (Gift Article)

His belief that liberal democracy has failed and that technologists should lead can be traced to the unusual life of his grandfather.

nytimes.com

Every profession has its personality types. In my experience the most difficult people to work with are cynics - no matter how talented they may be. Healthy skepticism is positive and curious. Cynicism is not - it's judgmental. The difference is under-appreciated. 1/2

Autoregressive models have become more popular recently. Speaking to people, I get the sense most folks are unaware of the history of the topic in signal processing. In particular, AR across scale got a lot of attention in the 90s. There are a lot of great papers on the subject but one stand out…..

A cipher (or cypher) is an algorithm for performing encryption or decryption - the foundation of all of cryptography research and practice. Not widely appreciated is that the word cipher has its direct origin in the arabic word صفر (sifr) meaning zero. Andصفر itself roots to sanskrit शून्य (śūnya)

give this kid a PhD

A man walks into a library and asks whether they have a book on Pavlov’s dog and Schrodinger’s cat. The librarian thinks for a moment and says “it rings a bell, but I’m not sure if it’s in or not”

I posted this thread four months ago. To my knowledge not a single one of these 10 basic features has been implemented on this website. It can’t be that hard.

Peyman Milanfar@docmilanfar.bsky.social · 2y ago

Here’s why this website is not ready - I’ll start a list: 1. Notifications take for ever to load 2. The mobile - in particular tablet - apps are clunky 3. Since number of views of a post are not shown, it’s impossible to gauge level of engagement with a post 4. Can’t save drafts, let alone threads

Model Distillation

In some ways it's harder than ever to land a research job these days - both in academia and in industry. As you prepare for a job talk, consider giving it the following structure - it's hard to give a bad talk that's built like this.: 0/n

The Power of Context: How Multimodality Improves Image Super-Resolution Kangfu Mei, Hossein Talebi, Mojtaba Ardakani, Vishal M. Patel @docmilanfar.bsky.social Mauricio Delbracio tl;dr: condition SR model on RGB+depth+segmentation (which you can predict from RGB)-> PROFIT arxiv.org/abs/2503.14503

Tweedie's formula is super important in diffusion models & is also one of the cornerstones of empirical Bayes methods. Given how easy it is to derive, it's surprising how recently it was discovered ('50s). It was published a while later when Tweedie wrote Stein about it 1/n

Tweedie's formula is super important in diffusion models & is also one of the cornerstones of empirical Bayes methods. Given how easy it is to derive, it's surprising how recently it was discovered ('50s). It was published a while later when Tweedie wrote Stein about it 1/n

Don’t be fooled - SakanaAILabs has very likely already submitted dozens of manuscripts to various conferences to test out its model before productionizing in this sham “experiment”. It’s not an experiment, it’s arbitrage - a core expertise of David Ha from his finance days 1/n

1st one that we know of

really, how can you

The tech industry in Silicon Valley runs on the considerable talents and work ethic of folks who were not born here. Many of these folks were also trained in this country in our Universities. This is our strength. If we mess with this virtuous cycle, it is at our own peril.

In the 50s a sophisticated theory of how to look for things was developed. Rooted in operations research, it was largely motivated by the loss of an H-bomb and a nuclear submarine in the middle of the ocean Closely related to concepts in reinforcement learning 1/2

With today's Turing, it's worth highlighting Barto & Sutton's view of "related work": "In this book, we consider all of the work in optimal control also to be, in a sense, work in reinforcement learning" It's an example of reframing & renaming in CS that's somehow both myopic & maximalist. 1/2

Breaking: Faced with a strong economy, peaceful neighbors, and loyal allies, the United States has tapped into its strategic wacky reserve to boost world mayhem.

Have you said thank you once to Tweedie?

wrecking the economy is going great

Carl Quintanilla@carlquintanilla.bsky.social · last yr.

In the last two weeks: 1. biggest drop in retail sales in nearly two years 2. biggest drop in personal spending since Feb 2021 3. jobless claims, biggest gain in five months 4. ISM Mfg prices paid, highest since June 2022

Einstein’s eulogy of the great Emmy Noether (1882-1935) “In the judgment of the most competent living mathematicians, Fraulein Noether was the most significant creative mathematical genius thus far produced since the higher education of women began”

meet Chris J Li - this titan of thought has single-handedly conquered the fields of machine learning, optimization, statistics, reinforcement learning, and federated learning. he's not the visionary we want, but judging by the current state of affairs, he may be the one we deserve

Reinforcement Learning