Hector Yee
@eigenhector
Followers
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Absurdist humor, AI stuff, recsys, machine learning, mythology, meditation. Tech Emmy & book author. eigenhector on bsky and subst4ck
Joined January 2014
My day job is to speak in an arcane snake language to a crystal vibrating at 3,000,000,000 cycles per second sitting in a cloud so that it can alter probabilities in the real world. If that isn't magic what is.
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Fun to see Self Organizing Maps make a return. I remember coding one and my ML colleagues were very skeptical it could scale etc. Interesting new use for them in interpretability
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I'm 44. I co-led Google image search quality. I have a MS in architectural science (graphics). Lots of papers including ICLR , technical Emmy, stars on github, dozens of patents etc and I still get asked to write code that runs in Python in interviews. *Shrug*.
I am 35. I co-lead the search engine in NL+BE's biggest e-commerce platform. I have a MS+PhD in CS. Starred in GitHub projects, blog posts, confs/meetups. But I still need to deliver a silly amount of algorithm & data structure puzzles in job interviews. 👈 #WrongDecisionsInLife.
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It feels like NLP has changed a lot since the transition from LSTMs to transformers or is that an illusion?.
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Today is my last day @GoogleAI for the third time. This time round worked on VR, had a nature digital healthcare paper and did deep learning on medical records and signals. Going off to do startup entrepreneurial stuff next.
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Why is France suddenly so active in AI. Do they have a sudden influx of government funding or something?.
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A career in machine learning is moving data around in sql and pushing a button on a web interface to train your models.
A career in Machine Learning is about not knowing how to implement cuda kernels until you die.
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Achievement unlocked, first invoice for my AI/ML consulting got paid, hooray!.
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I'm double vaccinated but apparently I caught the covid. Not much symptoms, I only tested because work sends us kits and I test once a month. This new variant seems to spread very fast. Don't worry about me, I'm ok, just take care of yourself and get vaccinated!.
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I'm really loving the machine learning infrastructure that @DeepMind develops. I like the interface for Sonnet for Tensorflow 2.0 and other infrastructure that they made available for use internally. Very usable and researcher friendly.
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As a research engineer I sit between two worlds. Research: maximize surprise for readers.Engineer: minimize surprise for readers.
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Impossible to control a super intelligent AI? You don't say. We can't even control cats.
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The main languages I use at work:.2000 - C.2005 - C++.2010 - C++.2015 - Scala.2020 - Python.2021 - SQL 😂😂😂😂😂.
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Colab, numpy and Jax are amazingly pleasant and fast to do @Peter_shirley 's . I still haven't vectorized some parts with Jax and dealing with conditionals and the jit but the interactivity of colab makes it fun. Extra challenge making it functional
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It looks like the physical version of the shuffle phase of a map-reduce.
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Now that remote work is getting more common why would people still want to stay in crowded and expensive cities?.
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My brother is visiting tomorrow for the first time in decades. Gonna tell him in person I'm a 🌈🦄. Given that he's a conservative christian not sure how he'll react but he'll have a couple hours in the car to process while we drive to the Napa wineries with my partner 😂.
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It would be a huge cosmic joke if it turned out that the theory of everything can only be represented by function approximation using deep neural networks.
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What's the difference between engineer code and research code? Usually float vs double 🤣.
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If an arxiv tab is open for a month, it's time to close it.
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Quick announcement. My team and I are left behind in Google Research after the GDM rapture.
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uh TF-IDF comes from information retrieval. It's a document feature not an AI. There is no learning at all involved! " It uses a kind of (rudimentary) artificial intelligence called TF-IDF ".
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I like my Twitter connections way more than my LinkedIn connections.
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Data scientists - be sure to thank all the people setting up your data warehouse, label database, ETL engines, machine schedulers, metrics trackers, artifact management etc because lemme tell ya, it takes a lot of work to get the nicely packaged tensorflow examples.
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Today I am grateful for python, numpy, jax, linux, pip, apt get, gpg, bash, emacs, chrome, emacs ~ backups, cold SF weather, chocolate covered coconut snacks, a roof over my head, nice co-workers, road trips, the weekend and that off tune singing in the bar across the street.
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I'm transferring back to Google Research next week working on climate and Public health. So Blue Carbon to Green stuff. ☘️🌿🌵🌞.
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Won't it be cool if we could just publish papers as a wiki post and then people can add missing citations and upvote / downvote the post and citations and then a neat graph propagation algorithm automatically computes the relevance of the article, author h-index and all that.
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At the joint workshop on AI and health everyone seems to be using rnns and lstms but no simple baseline :/ #ICML2018 don't know if they realize that linear models can do really well.
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It it makes y'all feel better even with a grad degree, lots of papers, lots of open source code, a technical Emmy and Google on your resume you still get to do a python coding phone screen these days.Wonder when the industry will have a portable means of software accreditation 😂.
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Huh someone just pointed out to me that imagenet was scraped from Google image search which was already ranked using models I had built a long time ago so that makes the images selected kinda biased to work with several generations of machine learning already. #generalization.
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Man now I wanna go back to college and take operations research, electronic engineering, philosophy, comparative mythology, poetry, art, mathematics and physics. Wished I was more liberal arty in college instead of rushing through and finishing my degrees ASAP.
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If Einstein or Newton had Twitter would they have come up with their theories of gravity?.
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Who wants a tombstone that reads managed X amount of people, increased revenue by YYY M and moved metrics by Z%.
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So excited! First time having *math homework* in 21 years! Now to learn LaTeX.
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Wow I first joined Google 16 years ago. I mean I'm going to overflow 4 bits soon.
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PaLM barely got it's day in the sun and then got upstaged by Dall-e-2 😂.
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I generally love python but have this love hate relationship with dependency management. So many options, pip, bazel, poetry. What's your favorite?.
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What's the compressed size of all of human knowledge? LLMs seem to indicate for language under 1TB?.
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Math homework, I feel like a kid again, starting to actually grok the meaning of a manifold after years of just throwing it around in ML.
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Finally made a decision. Gonna work on organic Brains with @stardazed0 starting next week! It's a nice juicy project. mmmm brains
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Twitter seems better for #AI networking than LinkedIn! I mostly get recruiters on LinkedIn and a lot more interesting pointers to new papers, ideas and connections on Twitter related to the fields I am interested in. #AI #healthcare #EHR #DeepLearning.
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Can you believe it . uint16 is soon not going to be able to cover the average US daily case rate. Overflowing uint16.
Our daily update is published. States reported 63k new cases, about the same number as last Tuesday. They also recorded more than 1,000 deaths for the first time since May 29th. Today’s number of currently hospitalized (59k) COVID-19 patients is the third-highest in our data.
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Gonna work on environmental and climate change stuff next year
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Our Nature digital paper on "Scalable and accurate deep learning with electronic health records" is finally published. My first #healthcare and #AI paper! My contribution was the modelling work, specifically one of the models, interpretable boosting.
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So many papers with "___ is all you need". Remember when it was "the unbelievable effectiveness of ___".
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Are matrix multiplies with relus more conscious than meditators in nirodha sammapathi trance?.
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How do people successfully be both a tech lead as well as a deep individual contributor? I find I have to focus on one or the other.
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I still can't believe they taught me in Econ 101 that humans were rational.
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I love einsum notation, no need to think through all the crazy reshapes to do something, just specify with the indices. Was thinking of how to do outer product with matmul in batches but in einsum it's just "ij,ik->jk". boom.
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I'm not kidding. I went from pioneering image ranking models, self driving car perception, Emmy award winning personalized recommender systems, pioneering dynamic pricing, neural lightfield rendering, writing Nature articles to writing SQL and running automl.
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I decided to do a grad degree in humanities to balance out my tech and science background. We'll see how it goes. I had lots of fun doing comparative mythology in college and ancient languages so this is an extension of my undergrad interests.
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Nooooooo I closed all my tabs and now I've forgotten what papers and books I was reading. .
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The amount of books I want to read grows exponentially but I can only consume the read queue linearly.
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Welcome to ancestral simulator, shard number 42. In this realm you will spawn on a pre FTL civilization about to.- encounter aliens for the first time.- invent AGI.Join in fun group activities such as:.- balancing budgets.- survive a global pandemic.- survive climate change.
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This is so weird to see things we'd just do routinely suddenly have a formal name.
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@quantumVerd @ChrSzegedy One day we might discover that gamma ray bursts are aliens mining for their bitcoin.
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I need a gps for mathematics. Like ok google find me the shortest route from where I am to inter-universal teichmüller theory.
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My colleagues were working on this for a while, glad to see it finally pay off!.
Today, in collaboration with the @Harvard Lichtman Laboratory, we're releasing a novel resource to study the human brain — an imaging dataset covering a cubic mm of cortical tissue with traces of tens of thousands of neurons and 130M annotated synapses.
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Samy was the one who first taught me machine learning and my first collaborator in the field. He's a super nice mentor and researcher.
Samy Bengio has stood by all of us in Brain Research, and it’s meant so much. Particularly for all the women who speak up. We started to call it “Samyland”, a safe space for the underrepresented and overlooked.
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AI: muhahaha I have achieved sentience and shall. Scheduler: sorry have to pre-empt you for random_ecommerce_job.
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Someone told me today I was all fluff, no substance and have dunning-kruger . let me eat this random statue I found at a bar for dinner 😂
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Who in the world runs a physics simulation on slapping chickens.
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I flew back last Thursday on 10 minutes notice with just the clothes on my back, just in time to hold my mom's hand and sing her to sleep with my brother. She went peacefully and gracefully as we sang, heart rate dropping slowly
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Why does it feel that everyone in research has the same ideas at the same time. Are the ways forward just so obvious?.
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Is ML the only field where every few years something new just makes entire sub branches of the field become neglected? People still learn Newton's laws with general relativity being around. Some audiophiles still like analogue over digital signal processing.
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There should be a regularization term on how much power a single human can have.
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Caustics used to be very expensive to render with bidirectional ray tracing and then photon maps made it easier but biased, then metropolis sampling.
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May be a bi-directional reflectance distribution capture device but it sure does look like a sprite can teleporter
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Reminds me of the time a journalist called TFIDF (word frequency counting) AI. My twitter handle is a pun on eigenvector by the way. Eigenvector decomposition is something they teach in high school in Singapore in the very first linear algebra course in grade 11. .
Stitch Fix is using something called eigenvector decomposition, a concept from quantum mechanics, to tease apart the overlapping “notes” in an individual’s style. Using physics, the team can better understand the complexities of the clients’ style minds.
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Why do I end up with days debugging tensor shapes . seems to happen all the time.
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Does anyone else reorder chores so they do a minimal distance traversal through their apartment or is it just me?.
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Used to think Science was about merit and hard work and now it feels like everything else human -- a popularity contest with in crowds and all that. Or is it just the human condition? Any good books about this part of human psychology accessible for a fun read?.
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I remember that apartment having alpha tested their interview process. So surreal to see this arc from start to ending like this.
After learning today’s news, this is the message I sent to the OpenAI team:
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Strangely one way I tend to pick projects is to find roles I am underqualified for so that I can grow while in the role. It's at the edge of the explore / exploit trade-off. Find something that exploits your current skills but also lets you explore new ones!.
The discourse about impostor syndrome bothers me, because it IS POSSIBLE to be underqualified for a role or responsibility. I've had multiple experiences of attempting to raise to a supervisor "Hey, I'm not doing well at this" only to be told I was doing fine. This sucked!.
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How long before we get tools that look at your ML code and automatically picks parts to automatically vectorize and parallelize? For comparison it took like 20 years from when I learned about auto vectorization in compiler class to seeing my SSE code get compiled from regular C++.
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I am a not PhD who did well in ML. Did a 2 year MS because I knew I was going to go to industry (in graphics).
One odd job I do is help some companies by reviewing their AI job reqs. One of the common mistakes I notice HR/hiring managers make in hiring deep learning talent is to put “PhD preferred” in product AI research job req. This goes wrong in so many ways:.
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My ML tweets might seem weird like a mix of newbie and experienced and it's because I'm new to doing stuff outside of a mature walled code garden which is different from doing stuff in the chaos of the open source wilderness.
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