Joel Kowalewski, PhD Fashion reflects far deeper biological and sociological factors, and a great deal can be gleaned about human nature through a history of fashion. My interest in writing about the topic originates from a love of art and design but equally, although it may seem contradictory, a love of science and math. However, for many, the contradiction is …
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Joel Kowalewski, PhD Finetuning LLMs for Specific Tasks Introduction to Embeddings and Tokenization At the core of modern language models (LLMs) like GPT-3,4 and BERT are the concepts of embeddings and tokenization. Tokenization initially was simply a method to group text data into smaller packets that are easier to process, resulting in better predictive models. As LLMs steadily developed alongside …
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Joel Kowalewski, PhD Your browser does not support the audio tag. In my classes, the distinction between Cross-Validation and performing a Training-Validation-Test split is a common topic. There is confusion as to why these different validation approaches exist and when they are applied. To help clarify, let’s get into the philosophy and then examine a simplified case. It may be …
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One of the big philosophical and religious questions is our capacity to freely choose our actions. Is choice a clever ruse? Are there no true alternatives? Thinkers like the classical mathematicians Laplace and Newton believed the world was mechanical and predictable. Humans were reduced to mathematical objects. If human action seemed less predictable than the planets and stars visible in …
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Observe any public dialogue and lines of division are apparent. Yascha Mounk, in The Identity Trap, warns that this strict polarization, if unchecked, will slowly deny the democratic principles that have kept authoritarian influences at bay. The seeds of unrest are inevitably objects of the past. But it is never clear where or how far back to look. Mounk begins with …
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Doppelgangers or doubles have been a fixture in literature from the works of Dostoevsky to Robert Louis Stevenson’s famous, Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. A characteristic of these “doubling” stories is that they are almost always unsettling. Typically writing on political and economic topics, Naomi Klein takes a more personal turn in her recent book, Doppelganger, while not entirely leaving …
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I have written elsewhere on the transition of universities to businesses with economic interests that aren’t any different from corporations—marketing and branding strategies are not the stuff of imagined boardrooms, shady figures, and questionable ethics; they apply equally to universities, and the student is the customer/client. With the award of the 2023 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, science has …
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“Whither is fled the visionary gleam? / Where is it now, the glory and the dream?” William Wordsworth Ode: Intimations of Immortality Tech allure undeniably abounds. The pioneer journey, the migration from east to west with the dreams of wealth and utopia is eternal. Novelist Edward Bellamy once had dreams of a socialist utopia, writing in Looking Backward about a man who …
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From earie noises, bizarre coincidences, synchronicities, time slippage, and shelves and doors that seemingly open and close on their own to the unexplained light patterns in the night sky I remain fascinated by the firsthand accounts of what may be inappropriately labeled paranormal or supernatural phenomena. My interest is not as a skeptic or debunker per se because these efforts …
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Table of Contents Introduction This post is a walkthrough for a series of two public talks given in April and May 2023 for the COM SCI series at UCLA. It was on transformers, diffusion models, and discussed specific examples such as Open AI’s ChatGPT and DALL-E 2 for a general audience, while being sufficiently technical to be of interest to …
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