Working Notes: a commonplace notebook for recording & exploring ideas.
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2024-04-28

This was a long with a lot of overlapping oncalls; I'll be glad to take a break sometime next week.

At the same time, I was able to learn some new things.

Stanford Lecture

The lecture on MoE this week was fascinating, well delivered and cleared up a bunch of misconceptions I had about what MoE meant and how they functioned. Some of the talks' slides have been uploaded at the CS25 website, but there are still several to go.

Things I remember

Transformers

Talked to an old friend after a very long time: he's clearly been doing much more advanced work than I have, and pointed me to several interesting ideas to explore

I have a lot of math and infrastructure to learn. I'm thinking of playing with a simple transformer and seeing if I can get it to encode/decode some patterns like look & say, and if I can use that to build some intuition about QKV. It should be an interesting exercise.

Go

I finally wrote a small program in Go, and so far have been finding the language surprisingly ergonomic and friendly; particularly with Go routines. I'm planning to build several log parsing tools with Go (and possibly TCell).

I'll need to find a good modern book on Go before I shoot myself in the foot with assumptions about the behavior of the language though.

Zookeeper

I also spent a lot of time learning zookeeper semantics: the original paper was excellent and finally made things click. I could solve the problems I wanted by simply relying on watches, which Kazoo makes even easier.

Djikstra's notes

Partially read notes that floated by on Hacker News, this entry is a reminder to go back and read the rest.

Kunal