How these notes are made into HTML pages
Like almost every creative endeavour in life, this website was duct-taped together using a combination of unreleased Python packages living in Git repositories and custom Python scripts. The Markdown files are authored in Obsidian.
Credit has to be given where credit is due, so let's try that:
obsidian-lettersmithlettersmith], a very lightweight and very well organized collection of tools to transform text. (Right up the alley of Composable program transforms), except now we're talking about "text transformations".Composable program transforms
JAX's grad function is merely the "gateway drug" to this bigger idea of "composable program transforms". grad is one example of a composable program transform: that is transforming one program into another in a composable fashion. Other transforms include vmap, lax.scan, jit, and more. These all accept Python functions and return Python functions. jit, in particular, can accelerate a program anywhere from 2-100 fold on a CPU, depending on what your reasonable baseline comparison is.
In particular, the latter three of the aformentioned transforms allow for highly performant loop code, written without loops, that can also be composed together. In a differential learning workshop that I have been developing, I provide further details in there, which you can take a look at.
There are other automatic program transformations that are in active development, and one exciting realm I see is in the probabilistic programming world. In PyMC3, for example, an automated transform happens when we take our PyMC3 syntax, which is written in a domain specific language (DSL) implemented in Python, and transform/compile it into a compute graph that gives us a likelihood function. It's as if PyMC3 gives us a likelihood(func) analogy to JAX's grad func. (If you've tried writing probabilistic model likelihoods by hand, you'll know how much of a convenience this is!)
index
This is the landing page for my notes.
This is 100% inspired by Andy Matuschak's famous notes page. I'm not technically skilled enough to replicate the full "Andy Mode", though, so I just did some simple hacks. If you're curious how these notes compiled, check out the summary in How these notes are made into HTML pages.
This is my "notes garden". I tend to it on a daily basis, and it contains some of my less fully-formed thoughts. Nothing here is intended to be cited, as the link structure evolves over time. The notes are best viewed on a desktop/laptop computer, because of the use of hovers for previews.
There's no formal "navigation", or "search" for these pages. To go somewhere, click on any of the "high-level" notes below, and enjoy.